When photography is used as a source of income, certain matters assume a new importance.
While the majority of camera users may never need this information, the line between professional photographers and amateurs who earn money from their images is becoming increasingly blurred. Stock photography, in particular, is by no means the exclusive preserve of full-time professionals.
Stock photography
Stock photographs are existing photographs, which may have been taken on an assignment or for pleasure, that are available for hire. (Show Photo) There is a highly developed stock picture industry in which stock libraries offer images to potential clients such as book publishers, advertising agencies and any company needing photographs that are immediately available. Stock photography competes with commissioned photography; its biggest advantage being the client's ability to see the images before they are bought, without delay and usually for less than it would cost to employ a photographer to take them. The disadvantages are non-exclusivity and that even the best image may only approximate what the client had in mind.
All photographers have a potential stock library, made up from accumulated work produced for various reasons, commercial and personal. By no means do all photographers organize these pictures so that they can be leased. The great success of stock libraries, which tends to increase during recessions, reflects the enormous gap that exists between clients in need of all kinds of image, and the millions of transparencies and prints lying idle in photographer's filing cabinets. Almost every photograph ever wanted by an art director, however obscure the subject matter, probably exists already.
For the photographer, stock is cumulative. As time goes by and the photographer continues to shoot new material, the library of images increases. Also, a picture that has sold once is likely to continue selling, for the simple reason of inertia. A great deal of picture research is conducted on the basis of having actually seen an image already published. Stock libraries exploit this by publishing illustrated catalogs of selected images; this usually provides a significant boost to the sales of the published images.
Some photographers handle their own stock libraries, thereby retaining the full fee for each sale, but this naturally involves a considerable amount of work. The number of potential clients for stock images is so high that a large part of a stock library's costs lie in reaching them.
Fees
Given that most professional photographers are independent, photography is very much an open market. Companies who use photography regularly, such as weekly or monthly magazines, often have a fee structure for normally commissioned work, and some photographers' organizations have also published guides to fees. Ultimately, however, guidelines like these are no more than a starting point. For a particular assignment, one professional photographer may be able to offer some quality of facility that commands a higher price than normal; on the other hand, a certain client may be unwilling to pay the recommended rate and would be looking for a photographer willing to work for relatively little.
One method of working out a fee is on the basis of the time it takes, expressed as a day rate. Even if a single fee is agreed for the entire job, it may be arrived at by calculating how many days it is likely to take. Day rates vary according to the type of work and the standing of the photographer. Editorial day rates are normally less than advertising day rates and within broad categories there is a range.
In magazine publishing, another fee basis is the size and number of pictures used, calculated on a page rate or space rate. Again, page rates vary according to the size and revenue of the magazine. It is also common on an assignment to link the day rate to the page rate, so that the photographer may be paid by the day (up to an agreed limit of the number of days to be spent) but, if the pictures used add up to more on the space rate, the difference would be added to the fee. Alternatively, a magazine may simply guarantee a certain amount of money, based on either day or space rates, and this would be the minimum.
Expenses are usually paid in addition to the fee, but this must be carefully established at the start. There is likely to be a limit on the expenses, and it is normal for the photographer to submit an estimate for the client to agree beforehand. There are differences in what is allowable as expenses; payment for an assistant, for example, or for the rental of the photographer's own studio space, is acceptable to some clients but not to others.
Agents
An agent sells a photographer's work for a commission. There are essentially two kinds of agents: those who represent and acquire work for the photographer, and those who sell reproduction rights to the photographer's existing body of pictures. In the first case, the agent and photographer have a fairly close business relationship and the commission tends to be in the region of 25 percent. In the second case, the agent functions as a stock library, and the commission is likely to be between 40 percent and 50 percent. Such stock agents may do no more than make the photographer's images available to anyone who asks for them, along with work of many other photographers, or the agent may sell more actively, such as syndicating picture stories to magazines in various countries.
The degree of service that the agent offers varies considerably. There may be very little contact between a stock agent and the photographer, but an agent actively seeking advertising work is likely to represent a small stable of carefully chosen photographers who rely on this for their entire schedule of work. An agent of this type will negotiate fees and terms, and undertake a large part of the photographer's own business.
Reproduction
The aim for most professional photographers is to have their work published, and most photographs that earn money end up on the printed page. Reproduction methods vary, as does quality. The several stages of printed reproduction all have an effect on the final image: making the color separations (in which the original photograph is converted into separate pieces of film each of which carries just one color component), choosing the paper weight, quality and coating; proofing and corrections; printing; and any subsequent processes, such as spot varnish. Separation houses are accustomed to working with color transparencies rather than prints, and it is for this reason that most professional photographers shoot transparency film.
A photographic image has a continuous range of tones, but in order to reproduce this with printing ink, it must be converted into a pattern of dots. This pattern, when seen at a normal viewing distance, resembles the continuous tone of the original, but makes it possible for each of the solid process colors, normally yellow, magenta, cyan and black, to be deposited on the paper without running and blurring.
This is done by means of a halftone screen, used at the stage of making the color separations. Halftone screens are of different degrees of fineness or coarseness to suit the porosity and smoothness of the paper. The key measurement is the distance between dot centers, referred to as the frequency per centimeter or inch. Screens are available from 20 lines per cm (50 lines per in); the coarser screens are used with newsprint, which absorbs ink easily, while the finest screens need very smooth, coated art paper. The finer the screen, the higher the reproduction quality.
There are three normal printing processes used: letterpress, gravure and offset-litho. In letterpress printing, the dots, which vary in size to give the range of tones, are raised above the surface of the plate, (which may be zinc, magnesium, copper or plastic). The ink is carried on these raised dots. In gravure printing, by contrast, the ink is held in depressions in the plate. Gravure printing surfaces usually have a thin copper skin electroplated onto a steel cylinder, and because of the cost of cylinder-making, this process is usually reserved for long print runs. In offset-litho printing, instead of the image being carried in relief, the process makes use of the principle that grease on the image areas attracts the ink, while water on the non-image areas repels it. Because the plate is delicate, it transfers the inked image to a rubber "blanket" cylinder, which, in turn, comes into contact with the paper.
