Can You Find Your Photos?





         Note: Need the answer to a stock photography question? At our website (www.photosource.com/board) you'll find our Bulletin Board, called "The Kracker Barrel." Check it out. Our staff answers marketing questions; fellow photographers and our columnists offer their input and
 
experience. The following is a typical exchange:

         Once you produce your images, the most important next step is to be able to locate specific photos when a buyer calls.

         Chapter 13 of my book, Sell & ReSell Your Photos, covers the importance of knowing where everything is. The stock photo industry is currently in a transition period when it comes to the cataloging and delivery of stock photos. There are a number of options that can accomplish these two critical tasks, and which you choose, of course, is up to you.

DON'T FEEL LEFT OUT
         Just as most photobuyers have not arrived at digital nirvana in their working methods -- most independent stock photographers haven't either. Many photographers are still skirting around the edges of the digital world, doing their homework, getting ready to make the plunge. When they gain a storehouse of knowledge, and most importantly, if the price is right, they decide to move into the digital world.

         Now that technology has brought photography to the threshold of this new electronic world, organizing your images doesn't have to be the big problem that it was in the past, when we had to physically handle, store, select, send off, and re-file our images. But learning the new technology is not easy.

         In the meantime, it's business as usual. In other words, most photographers are using the systems they initially started with, and have not made any substantial changes, even though the new tools and software exist. By the way, this is following the pattern that happens in industry when any beneficial innovation comes on the scene that appears to save time and money. The old guard is hesitant or not willing to take the risk of change. It usually takes a generation (25 years) for the complete change-over to be made.

         For established photographers reading this, the transition to digital storage and cataloging of your pictures can be a gradual thing. For example, there's no need to digitize everything immediately. Some photographers accomplish the process on a step-by-step basis. When they get an order for a photo, it then becomes cost-effective to process the order through the digital method(s) they have chosen to work in. (Consult our Home Page BookStore section for some instructional books in this area... www.photosourcefolio.com).

         If you are just starting out in your photo marketing, that's a good position to be in! You have nothing to unlearn or re-do.

         Whether you decide to catalog your photos by a traditional hands-on method, or digitize everything and put your originals away in a vault, the earliest decision you need to make is a marketing one, not an administrative one. You will want to decide whether you are going to shoot pictures all across the board (have a "general" file), or whether you are going to specialize in a handful of specific categories. The former is the path most newcomers follow, only to learn that when their photo collection expands, the degree of difficulty in processing, storing and locating a photo increases in proportion to the size of their collection.

         For photographers who plan to market their pictures to specialized audiences and shoot for that audience, focusing on five or six interest
areas is a better way to start out. Any extraneous photos (those shot on the fly) would then go into a general category. Computer programs can easily aid in locating these when need be.

         The advantage of breaking down your collection into segments is that you physically have that category of images all in one place. (Medicine, dogs, rodeos, education...etc.) If you were, say, to do a book on dogs, and the art director at the publishing house wanted to see everything you had in the category of dogs, you would be able to deliver that section, or any part of it, to your publisher immediately.

         Use Chapter 13 of Sell & ReSell Your Photos to give you ideas on how to break down and identify your personal collection of photos into the categories you plan to focus on.

         Should you categorize your images by date? Probably not. It might seem convenient to you, but it is a marketing disadvantage to you when you send "dated" images to a buyer. 1998 now seems like a last century photo! You can always "code" your images to remind you of what year a photo was taken. Computer programs can help you escape from the necessity of putting dates on your images.

Thanks to computer systems like fotoBiz, newly-minted stock photographers can start off with a state-of-the-art system for their photo marketing efforts. For information on this program, use the search section on our Home Page (http://www.photosource.com. Just type fotoBiz in the "Search entire site" slot. )

Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes. Pine Lake Farm, 1910 35th Road, Osceola, WI 54020 USA Email: info@photosource.com Fax: 1 715 248 7394 Web site: www.photosource.com


           


           

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