Part 3 of my series on finding your optimal workflow focuses on Market Analysis. How do you see through the market and create clarity?

In parts one and two we looked at the importance of volume balanced by quality.

But this isn’t enough. Market analysis ensures that you put your efforts in the right direction. Your investment must be profitable!

The reality is, that stock photography agencies give out very little information on how the market evolves and reacts. As a stock photographer you do not have many tools at your disposal, no hard data.

Observe the Market, Be Ahead of Your Competition

I personally do not spend much time viewing images at stock agencies. Instead I look out at pictures I see in magazines, commercials, TV and designs. Visual trends are set by fashion, commercials and celebrities. The images appearing on stock agencies usually trail these trends.

Have you heard of Zara? The spanish clothing company? They were the first ones to be able to spot a fashion trend and within 30 days have such clothes in their shops. They were so fast in covering demand that they became hugely successful worldwide and are one of the leading retail companies today.

You too want to be ahead of the competition! Keep an eye for visual trends, visual languages, the next hot thing and shape that into a stock image, mixed with your own creativity, and you have a winning formula. This will guarantee your images are fresh and satisfy new market demands.

Analyse Your Data Regularly

Just as interesting and necessary is observing your own data. If you have a mid- to large size portfolio (500 images or more), with the right tools you should be able to identify how your images react to market changes and trends.

That data is fundamental!

Once you understand how your images perform, you will know what your strong points are and you must focus on them. So let me use my portfolio and show you how to do it. The question I want to answer is whether it is worth photographing glamour images.

Case Study (Part 1): Comparing my Glamour with my Commercial Images
My portfolio has over 1000 images composed of glamour images and commercial images. I have 212 glamour images and 915 commercial stock images. My data tools tell me the following:

In this first pie chart you can see that my glamour images compose 19% of my portfolio

The next pie chart displays how much income those glamour images have generated since I started shooting. The message here is quite strong: 19% of my images produced 40% of my income!

But most interesting is that in the current year, 2010, my glamour pictures have produced 45% of all my income!

What does this tell me? It is obvious that my glamour pictures are the most successful segment of my portfolio. They generate twice as much money and that trend is growing.

Case Study (Part 2): Comparing the Life Cycle of Images
The second part of my analysis focuses on the life cycle of an image. When does an image produce the maximum amount of money? Is there a difference between my glamour images and my commercial images?

I used my tools to look at the life cycle of my top 5 glamour pictures and my top 5 commercial pictures. Here are my results (I removed all dollar values):


Top 5 Glamour Pictures



Top 5 Commercial Pictures



At first glance it is obvious that my glamour pictures have a very different life cycle than my commercial pictures!

My glamour images all start very strong and make most of their income in the first 6 to 10 months. Afterwards they loose their earning power. Commercial images on the other hand are much more constant. They earn money throughout their whole life.

Case Study: Conclusions
By analysing my data in depth, my tools have been able to show that my glamour pictures are strong earners. However, the market gets tired very quickly of glamour pictures. Once a glamour picture is out of fashion it does not get purchased. My commercial pictures have a longer earning power despite generating less money.

What this market analysis teaches me is that in order to make maximum money I should focus on my glamour images and ensure I generate fresh ones every 6 months.

Your Workflow: Volume, Quality and Market Analysis

We reached the end of the worflow series. Please go through all three articles again and think about all aspects of your workflow which can be optimized to ensure you maximize your profit and efficiency. I have been following these methods with success and hope I could help you too!

How do you analyse your market? How do you identify your strengths and weaknesses to make decisions and maximize your profits?

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Recently a fellow reader contacted me and asked me a few questions regarding models. I found his questions to be very interesting and wanted to share them with you. I have reformulated his questions for simplicity.

Question: I provide models with a 800*600 watermarked image because I am worried that people might steal the images from the model’s website instead of buying them from my stock agency. Do you provide images to models?

Answer: I provide my models (in fact everybody in the production team) all final pictures in full resolution and in top quality without watermarks. Of course, they know, they can only use them to promote themselves, not resell the images.

Why do I do this? Because I believe my professional relationship with models and production team is very important. Models get annoyed when you provide small images or watermarked images and cannot use them properly. Everybody in your team must have a positive feeling when working with you, they constitute your most important business partnership. You must treat them very well!

You should not be worried that stolen images will reduce your sales. People who steal images will probably always steal images. If they do not steal yours, they will steal someone else’s. Chances are very low that they would buy your images anyways if they could not steal them.

So there is no point in risking your very important relationship with your production team, including models, simply to avoid something which you cannot avoid and which doesn’t really harm you.

Question: I do not hire models from agencies because they are expensive and I do not always get a good return on investment on those pictures. What is your opinion?

Answer: Working with professional models is nice. However, model agencies are really expensive when offering you models for stock photography. I do not work with model agencies. It is not justifyable in business terms.

If you have an idea, a nice location, good make up and clothes, then you can make your model look great and produce a very profitable image. Stick to productions which are profitable and invest your money efficiently to produce best results.

What answers would you have given this reader? Let us know!

The second part in my series focuses on quality. As we saw in the previous blog post, increasing volume is important in a market in which comptetitors produce large amounts of imagery every day. However, increasing volume usually comes at the price of decreasing quality. How do you find a healthy balance? What changes in workflow can improve quality?

It’s important we coin the definition of quality. What is quality in the stock imagery market?

Definition of Quality: a high quality image, is an image which makes a buyer happy and motivates them to buy more from you.

I believe this to be very true, but it is perhaps too generic. High quality is broken down into the following:

• – Technical Quality
• – Production Quality
• – Creative Quality
• – Description Quality

Technical Quality:
Images get rejected when they do not meet the agency’s standards. You do not want to simply meet the technical standards. You want to surpass them. Your technical quality depends on your equipment and on your photography and photoshop skills. The only situation where you can compromise technical quality is if it adds creative value. But see if you can convince your inspector

Production Quality
Each production involves more than just yourself. Good quality make up, good models, stylish clothes and beautiful locations. You have an influence on these aspects and they contribute to your quality.

Creative Quality:
A creative image conveys a message in an original way. Good stock imagery must always convey a message or a feeling. Creative quality is difficult to judge. Most microstock agencies do not judge your creativity when inspecting files, they will focus on technical aspects. The person who ends up deciding whether the image contains creative value is the buyer and they are prepared to pay a premium for creativity (that’s why many agencies put creative images in higher priced collections).

Description Quality:
Every image on a microstock agency is described and keyworded by you. A high quality description is a description which explains exactly what you see in the image and informs the buyer of the content. For example, if you took a photo of a South African penguin, then write it! Ensure you add the latin name of the species and where it was photographed. If you photographed a human of a certain ethnicity, then write it too. Don’t just write Asian, write Japanese, Korean or Thai.

Improving Your Workflow

So you see, quality is a big topic and covers many aspects of your workflow. But if you start making small changes now, soon your quality will improve without affecting your volume.

These are my tips which will help you with little effort:

Technical Quality
- Purchase or rent excellent equipment for all your photoshootings
- Use prime lenses whenever possible

Production Quality
- Work with the best people you can get
- Every now and then bring in someone new to your team and keep them if they are good. Your team should improve with you.
- Occasionally you should do a test photoshooting to try out new tricks and learn.

Creative Quality
- Think out of the box
- Each picture must convey a feeling or a message. Make this your goal when preparing your production
- Communicating your idea to your team is fundamental. Misunderstandings amongst your team will put at risk the execution of your idea. Meet your team before the shoot and talk about your idea and it’s implementation
- If you cannot meet them then skype with them, or write a detailed email explaining the photoshooting
- Carry an idea book always with you, everyday. For iPhone users I recommend Evernote

Description
- Carry around a note book (digital or paper) and take notes which will help you improve the description of your pictures
- Use your notes to write your keywords
- Pay attention to define relevant and accurate keywords. Use tools like Yuri’s keywording tool

While writing this blog post I realized I could write a complete post for each aspect of quality. Maybe that’s an idea for future articles. But for now, I hope the definitions and the tips will allow you to review your workflow and find improvement potential!

How do you manage and improve your quality? What aspects are important for you? I’d be very interested in knowing.

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Being successful at stock photography has to do with

• - Volume
• - Quality
• - Market analysis

Some photographers pay more attention to volume, others to quality. How often do photographers pay attention to market analysis? You can’t ignore any of these three aspects.

The art is to define your workflow to take into account each item.

In the next series of blog articles, I want to look at these items and discuss the tips and tricks to achieve your optimal workflow. Today we start with Volume.

Volume

The stock industry is a volume game. This is nothing new. With about 34,000 iStockphoto contributors and many more on other agencies, it is very easy to get buried in the masses of new images appearing every week. You can’t ignore this and have to include volume into your production workflow. What can you do to increase volume and remain competitive?

Get the most out of each shooting
Each time you plan a photo production, don’t just think of the different themes you can shoot. Also consider the different variations on each theme. Shoot a portrait, a close-up, a full-body, shoot different expressions, work on different poses.

Try not to block on a few particular angles or settings. 400 similar pictures won’t get you far. If however, you have close-ups of the hands, of the face, full-bodies, different face expressions and other variants, then you are going to have 400 very interesting pictures increasing your competitive output.

Here you have a small example set taken from my shoot with Mandy. Thanks to variation this series recovered the production investment very fast. It has two Vetta files and various pictures with more than 100 downloads.

Shoot often
This is easier said than done. Depending on your time and resources you will have to find the right balance for you. But not all your shootings have to be perfectly planned in advance.

How about having your camera often with you? Get yourself a small Canon 550D and don’t miss out on a good photo. These sushi pictures I took average $293 a year and keep selling after 4 years. Not bad for spontaneous shots!

Increasing volume brings the risk of lowering your quality. You can’t just shoot everything and upload it for sale. This is where finding the right balance is key. In the next article we will look at quality and how you can combine it with your increased volume production.

How do you deal with volume? This is a much debated subject. What is your point of view?

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