Freelancers and Microstock are killing "real" photographers...
I am a little behind on posting here lately. I was hoping to get into the habit of posting weekly or at the least, once per month. That isn't happening and I have been beating myself up over it. Then I read a friends comments one day and the lack of posting stopped bothering me. He said, and I can't remember his exact words, but they were along the lines of "if I have enough time to blog often, I must not be a very good or a very busy professional photographer. That or I am wasting precious time I could be practicing my craft."
As a freelance photographer, that is still working a full-time job to collect a pay check, while trying to work into a full-time photography career this is something I hear all too often from the elitist "pro" photographers. Either my freelance prices are too low or the fact that I upload to a microstock web site, I am some how taking food off of their plate.
What I often hear is either "you're devaluing photography for the rest of us" or "you're taking from my livelihood". I say hog wash! You need to either get with the (economic) times or work harder to get what you want. Just because I don't work at this full-time yet and I haven't "mastered" the craft (will we really anyway? There is always something new to learn!) doesn't mean I don't work hard and provide a value to the clients I serve.
Let's start with freelancing, I don't give my work away, but I also can't expect to go out there with my minimal portfolio and expect to charge one thousand dollars for a shoot either. I seriously doubt if someone is worried about me stealing "their" clients, from the client list and the budgets I am currently shooting, that you are the pro you think you are any way. We all start somewhere and we all increase our prices over time. So if my shooting local youth baseball leagues, the occasional family portrait session or business headshot worries you, maybe it's you that needs to take a good hard look in the mirror to see what you can do to work harder or continue moving up the rungs of the ladder. Don't blame me for keeping you honest.
Let's move on to Microstock, because in reality this is the one that bothers me. When I hear someone that is charging a day rate of $600, $1,000 or more, what do they really care about someone shooting microstock. Yes, it means a lot of clients can find a photograph, vector image, sound or video clip cheaper than they used to be able to. I still doubt that large clients will be turning to places like iStockphoto to purchase the images for their unique ads.
What microstock has done is opened up new avenues for the "free" magazines you find at a local grocery store, small businesses, churches and hobby clubs to purchase our photos instead of using Google and stealing them from our web site or Flickr accounts.
A good example of this is the company where I hold my full-time position. They are a small business and they don't have a large marketing budget. They know I am a photographer and they could pay me to set up shots that they need, but they prefer I work on projects for an actual client. Not to mention they only thing they are using photos for are proposals and corporate promo pieces... with no marketing budget, especially in the current economy, I can guarantee they aren't going to be spending $50 or more for one stock photo, let alone more.
An even better example of this is Overflow. Overflow is one of the small, local "free" magazines I mentioned earlier. I found out about Overflow last week when my wife picked up a copy leaving our local Publix grocery store. I picked it up from the counter and started reading it and it is a well done magazine. For a better description of the magazine, I took this comment from their web site "Overflow is Tampa Bay's FREE monthly Christian magazine that offers hope and shares the goodness of God through Jesus Christ."
What caught my eye next was some of the photos within the magazine. I had seen them before, I just couldn't place them. I looked for information on the photos and not surprisingly, photos in this issue had been purchased from twelve different iStock photographers. I contacted the staff of Overflow, first to thank them for using iStockphoto... you didn't think I would bash them did you?, I contribute to iStock. I also wanted to ask them a question I had already guessed the answer to... would it be possible to put this magazine together without the ability to buy photos from a microstock site.
I have been considering writing this blog post for a while, but had been putting it off because it is one we hear too often these days. Now I had a little more fuel and a lot more reasoning behind it.
freelance, iStockphoto, microstock, photography 
