For publications and designers in need of travel images, these should be glorious days. With a camera in every pocket, a photogenic scene around every exotic corner, and social media sites offering a platform for anyone who snaps a shot of the Eiffel Tower or a Venice canal, there really should be no shortage of images for businesses to use. In practice, it hasn’t turned out that way. Despite the omnipresence of cameras in distant locations, businesses and media companies are still struggling to find the travel images they need.
The problem come in three forms.
The first is permissions. Photos uploaded to Instagram or shared on Facebook are owned by the people who took them. That challenge should be easy to overcome.
Shoot the photographer a quick message and ask for permission to use the picture, and most amateur photographers will be flattered enough to accept. If they’re not professional, they’re also unlikely to know the market rate, making it easy for a business to land a bargain or even a usage delivered for nothing more than credit.
News sites are forever asking people on Twitter who have uploaded shots of crashes and accidents and crime scenes for permission to use their pictures.
But that’s for editorial use. Images used for commerce—for marketing and publicity—also require the permission of anyone in that image who could be recognizable. Those pictures need model releases, which are usually only available with images shot by professionals and made with the prospect of a commercial sale in mind.
So while more than 360 million images on Instagram have been tagged with a #travel hashtag, a business looking for a picture of the Taj Mahal or a Beijing hutong to illustrate a marketing campaign or to pitch a vacation package can already exclude any picture with a person in it.
That will already cut the choice significantly. The next challenge though will cut the choice even more. The image also needs to be professional quality.
Most Travel Images Shared Online Are Poor
Today’s DSLRs and the cameras on iPhones and top-end Androids are capable of producing highly detailed images, improved by built-in filters. But equipment can only do so much. A good, commercial image still requires a good photographer—someone who understands light, framing, exposure, and post-production. For every professional-quality travel image, there are many more unusable vacation snaps.
It’s hard to say how many of the 360 million travel photos on Instagram have a quality that could even be considered close to usable, but it’s unlikely to be more than a few thousand.
And of those few thousand, barely a handful will be relevant. The chance that some random traveler will have happened to have shot the scene that a business needs in the quality they want is vanishingly small. 500px, a website for photography enthusiasts, used to have a licensing section that offered thousands of travel images to businesses. In July 2018, the section was swallowed up by Getty which took only a small portion of the images available.
Social media sites and the ubiquity of imagery might have made exotic views familiar but they have done little to reduce the challenges for businesses looking for good commercial photos.
The Failure of Stock
So while image buyers might include sites like Instagram and 500px during their search for photos they certainly don’t rely on them.
But stock sites filled with images shot by professionals and aimed at professional users, are little better. The rise of microstock in the early years of the millennium was supposed to have solved many of the problems of image acquisition. By allowing almost anyone to submit images and by offering cut-price licenses, microstock should have enabled buyers to find most of the photos they need for little cost.
In practice though, those low prices led to images that were mass-produced and of minimal-quality. Photographers learned to copy the most successful submissions, driving down revenues per image. Consumers have become used to seeing the same kind of compositions, and often the same models in similar poses, on website after website. Nothing dates a publication, a commercial, or a website faster than the use of a microstock image.
The problems that have plagued microstock have been reflected too in traditional stock. For years buyers have told surveys that the images in stock libraries are unoriginal and uninteresting—even as they continued to buy them.
“Art buyers are frustrated by stock agencies because of the time it takes to find ‘high quality’ content,” one digital firm said back in 2015, though they could have said it in any year. “They believe stock is too ‘stocky,’ and many believe that pricing is still too high. Buyers want content that is fresh, easy to find, and authentic.”
They might find that authenticity in stock libraries, but when it comes to travel imagery in particular, the photographers supplying the images are caught between two competing demands. On the one hand, buyers say they want uniqueness, originality, and high quality. On the other hand, the more authentic and unique they make their images, the harder that image is to sell to multiple buyers, the only way that a stock photographer can make a photo profitable.
Search for “Paris” on Getty, for example, and of the first 60 images returned, 21 will include the Eiffel Tower. None show the banlieues where much of the city lives or the supermarkets in which they shop. The images available on Getty give an idea of the destination; they don’t give a particular visitor’s impression of that destination because that kind of subjectivity is too hard to sell to multiple buyers.
Send a Photographer Abroad
If sourcing travel images from social media is usually too restrictive, and stock imagery too hackneyed for companies and media outlets, there is still an alternative: commission a photographer.
The company can get exactly the kind of image it wants, from the destination it needs, and with all the permissions and license they need to have. It will be professional quality and the buyer will be in charge of the commission.
For the photographer too, the sale is ideal. In the best case scenario, the buyer will fly them and their gear to an exotic location, pay for their expenses, and expect them to return with a complete shot list.
That was how Jeremy Mason McGraw built his career.
Jeremy took up photography in high school in 1993 but his first jobs were in the entertainment industry where he designed theatrical scenery and lighting, skills that still influence his shoots. His move into travel photography came four years later when he took a job with a production company on a cruise trip. Although he wasn’t hired as a photographer, he continued shooting for fun and used his trips to look for commercial outlets for his photography. With some careful marketing, he found them.
“I turned my seafaring life into an opportunity to sell my photos and was able to get prints of my work consigned to gift shops in the ports that the ship docked,” Jeremy explained. “I also sold them to the tour excursion companies that the ship used. Selling that work was my first experience as a travel photographer.”
Jeremy was still working in the entertainment industry but he was now hooked on a life of travel. After working in Australia, he returned to Branson, Montana, bought his first DSLR and some used strobes, and quit his production job to become a full-time photographer.
“I did a lot of publicity shots for the local shows in Branson at first. I was not making a lot of money so I set up a number of trades with local businesses for things that I needed to reduce my cost of living. I took every chance to get my work out into the world.”
Contacts he’d made on the ship led to jobs in Vegas and Sydney, and at the end of 2002, a friend who would later become Jeremy’s business partner, helped him to win a contract shooting photos for the Kohala Coast Resort Association, a chain of luxury hotels in Hawaii. That job in turn led to new contacts, and Jeremy’s partner acted as his sales person, targeting clients and selling them packages.
Today, he is the CEO and Creative Director of Global Image Creation, a company that creates imagery and communications for the luxury travel industry.
For travel companies that need pictures of their resorts and the locations around those resorts, hiring an experienced photographer like Jeremy is one way to obtain a professional result.
But that process is now unusual. Companies that might once have been willing to fly photographers, their gear, and their teams halfway around the world to shoot pictures know that it’s now possible to find good photographers already in place—wherever that place may be.
Hire a Local Photographer
Raphael Olivier started his photography career when he moved from France to Vietnam to take up a communications job for a fashion company. Although he was in charge of communicating with magazines, not taking pictures, he had a personal portfolio and the person he was replacing had built a small studio. After six months of on-the-job photography training he started taking product shots. Twice each year, he also organized shoots for fashion photographer Boris Zuliani who would fly in to photograph the collection. Working with an established, professional photographer was a valuable learning experience.
“He was making 6,000 euros a day for those shoots,” recalled Olivier. “I was making 2,000 euros a month. He gave me a lot of insight.”
When Zuliani moved to Hanoi permanently, the two became friends. After Zuliani set up his own agency, Noi Pictures, Olivier quit his job to become one of the agency’s first photographers.
Olivier found the work easy. He would shoot a few jobs each month, often events, and earn a few hundred bucks each time—enough for someone young and single to live on in Hanoi. But the market was competitive and the work was unchallenging, so after spending several months staying with a friend in Shanghai, Olivier decided to start again, working as Noi’s photographer in China’s most dynamic city.
The choice looked good on paper. Despite falling growth rates over the last few years, Shanghai’s economy was still growing by nearly 8 percent when Olivier arrived. That growth was largely powered by the development of the service sector which was expanding by nearly 10 percent a year. Altogether, the city hosts more than 300 regional headquarters of multinationals and a similar number of foreign research and development centers. Foreign companies have invested nearly $180 billion in the city, much of it in engineering and other projects that need photographing for shareholders and marketing firms. There’s plenty of work for a photographer—and the foreign companies that hire them often prefer to work with ex-pat photographers who match their work methods.
“They know we’ll show up and not someone else. They know we’ll show up on time, with equipment and work in a European way,” says Olivier. “The client needs not just a result but reassurance during the process.”
Now based in Bangkok with an office in Singapore and much of his client base in Hong Kong, Olivier travels throughout Asia for shooting assignments and personal projects.
Hiring a local photographer, especially an experienced European or US photographer, is going to cost a large sum will get a buyer exactly the pictures they need. In fact, because the best photographers often have a better grasp of the possibility in imagery then their clients, it’s likely to get them the images they didn’t know they needed. The clients will end up with an entire folder of photos that they can use in future communications material.
But the cost will certainly be higher than asking an amateur for permission to use a picture that they posted on Instagram. It will be even higher than buying an exclusive license for a photo posted to a reputable stock library. But in the end, that’s how the photography business works. Despite the massive growth in the availability of images and the ubiquity of cameras, one aspect of sourcing imagery has remained true.
When it comes to the commercial use of photography buyers still get exactly what they pay for.
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