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 Coffee in the Boardroom, South Africa - 2005 |
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... and is there a market?
Stock Photography is used in magazines, websites, packaging, posters, advertising, etc, etc, etc... wherever there is an image required, there is most probably a stock image used.
Traditionally, a company that required an image of a brunette holding a coffee cup would:
- Hire a photographer
- Hire a model
- Set up a shoot
- Hire a Studio
- Shoot the project
- Post Process
This ussually cost a lot, and took time. Designers had to wait, projects took longer to complete, etc, etc, etc...
Some bright photographers soon figured out, though, that they could "pre-shoot" some work and build up libraries, that they could publish in books from where designers could just choose what they required. This worked great, and really reduced the time it took to get the end result, and what's more, the designers could have virtually hundreds of potential images to choose from.
However, even though it was much faster, and cost quite a bit less then the alternative, it was still expensive to shoot and store Stock Images. This excluded many smaller businesses from using stock, and rather used their own imaging that was rather inferior in quality.
...enter MicroStock!
As the digital era dawned, it became quite a bit cheaper to:
- produce high quality stock (thanks to new sensor technologies)
- present the images (thanks to the internet)
- search for images (yep... internet again)
- and store the images (servers and harddrives, instead of fireproof, supercooled safes for negative sleeves and slides)
No more need for 10-12 copies of the same transparency (in case the client/scanner destroys your copy), no more scanning costs, no need to print volumes of stock journals (search online) no more courier costs (FTP is your new friend) and although the cost of Stock Images did come down, it still stayed out of reach for many smaller clients...
Microstock came along and targeted all the clients the Big Boys at the Traditional Stock Agencies ignored, selling images at $0.20 to $2 per image the result is that virtually millions of new clients were born overnight! Stock images became affordable to the guy in the street and now Joe Soap can get the images for his wife's home bakery, as well as an image or two for his powerpoint presentation at work.
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