Backup online - Photoshelter archive

Try as I might, I fail to come up with a backup strategy for my images which I can trust. The problem of tracking multiple backups to hard disks and my inability to then get hard disks out of my home always worries me. As does my daughter who has twice come close to burning down the house...

So I have succumbed to joining Photoshelter Archive, accessible from my Photoshelter Collection account (that's the edited online stock photo library) but otherwise quite independent of it. I have 10Gb of space at $9.99 per month and that will be enough to keep me going for a while.

As I write this all the images that I have so far prepared and submitted to the Photoshelter Collection are uploading in the background. These were chosen in the main as being my better more interesting stock photos (or at least the first ones that came to hand!) - fortunately I kept these images stored on my hard disk after preparation so now I can bulk upload to the Photoshelter Archive.

Curiously I'm uploading ALL the images again because I cannot transfer from Photoshelter Collection to Photoshelter Archive - but I can send images the other way. So in future I will upload to the Archive and then across to sell on the Collection. If they are not rejected by the editors, that is.....

Some of these stock photos being uploaded were rejected for the Collection. But I can now put them on sale through the Archive where the commission is only 10% - an alternative way of completing sales requests off photoconnect....

I'm fascinated by some of the other options on the Photoshelter Archive - including setting up a 'virtual agency' which allows for me and other photographers to share a separately branded sales platform - it could for example sit within photoconnect. Or anywhere - to compete with Photoshelter Collection using the same engine (more or less). But what a waste of time without a huge marketing budget, which Photoshelter Collection allegedly has.

The Photoshelter Archive is about more than storing and selling stock photos. It allows me to store:

• crucial client photos from assignments
• images from my portfolio and
• personal images that I do not want lost

It's also an alternative to email for securely transferring images to a client.

Images can be kept private, put on sale, shown in public portfolios or shared with individual clients.

Because I'm being reasonably fussy about what I store, and I am storing prepared high quality .jpgs only (not RAWs) the storage should go a long way - 2000 images maybe. This is good because the next level up in terms of membership is $29.99 per month - an interesting option if I wanted to showcase stock images on the Light Touch site - although why I should do this I'm not sure when I have photoconnect!

Christmas party event photography....

A prosperous City firm in London hired me to do a full scale shoot at their Christmas Party on Friday night at the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel, a swanky 5 star venue in the West End of London.

Now I've not done anything on this scale before. This is EVENT PHOTOGRAPHY - 340 people to handle - and with Son, my regular assistant, in Korea, I had to pull in alternative help. I chose to go with my daughter and her boyfriend, not an obvious choice, but they know how to deal with computers, both work Saturday's in coffee bars so know how to handle people and cash, and they could be trusted with the latter.

How did it go?

In the bar, with a low ceiling, I was able to get some really pleasing shots using bounce flash off the ceiling and often the soft glow of the lights behind the bar as a background. I got some good shots of performers in action using no flash and pretty good ones of the company's CEO delivering his speech (the length of which was of great benefit to me but I suspect everyone else in the hall wished it was a lot shorter!).

Unfortunately, over dinner, in the high ceilinged main hall, I had no option but to use direct flash. I also had no option but to use .jpg to record the images because they speedily had to be processed by my two assistants onto proof sheets so that the guests could purchase the images. These images I almost universally hate. And it would be no surprise if the subjects feel that way too! The variable ambient lighting (floodlights sweeping the hall) played havoc with the colour balance on many of the images and this really could not be fixed after the event because each one would have to be individually adjusted.

Also the Pentax P-TTL flash seemed to give quite variable results. I was carefully checking the screen as I toured the hall snapping away but what looks good on a preview screen does not necessarily look good on a computer screen.

And then there was the hazard of the waiters! They seemed to follow me wherever I went in their hordes and it's a wonder that a soup course did not finish up splatter over me or my gear. Often it was a case of nipping in and out of this ceaseless traffic to quickly grab shots from the narrow spaces between the tables. Near the entrance to the kitchen it became almost impossible....

The light was no good, making focusing a nightmare. I used my large f2.8 Sigma 24-70mm zoom to make it as easy as possible but it was still not bright enough. I used autofocus for a while but this took a while to register correct focus to the irritation of the guests. So then I switched to manual focus for the rest of the night but still quite a few images had to be binned. I read of other photographers having the same problems with their Canons and Nikons so I know I'm not alone in the frustration of getting focus right in these conditions but I'm also beginning to wonder if my eye is up to it!

And financially?

Well I'm not going to make any money doing this! My nature is to not interrupt people's conversations until the moment appears right. I felt like a predator in search of prey, while myself avoiding my own predators (those waiters!). So I finished up taking rather fewer photos than I might have expected (although I must have sailed past 500). Deleting all those that were a bit out of focus, or the expressions were wrong / embarrassing must have got rid of half of the images.

And people did not really start buying until after 11pm. We had originally planned to pack up at 12pm but went on until 12.45pm, leaving the hotel half an hour later. So sales on the might paid for my assistants' help but not much more. Fortunately I have received a separate fee for doing the job, but not remotely enough reward for all the effort. Will Internet sales rescue the situation? Very unlikely!

Still it was fun.

Acclaim Images

Acclaim was at one time one of Photoconnect's direct competitors in that it it took in images from other photographers and garnered business by doing well in Google searches. Now it too has put up the signs regarding not taking in new photos - or photographers presumably.

After I stopped taking in new photographers here and Photoconnect became essentially just me, I felt fine about trying to sell my own images through Acclaim and uploaded about 80 images. Of these I only fed about 30 through to go live on the site because although my images carried IPTC data, it was still an unexpected slog getting them onto the site proper.

Athough on the outside Acclaim seemed a slick operation, on the inside things were a little different and the clarity of purpose seen in Fred Voetsch's postings on the StockPhoto group etc was replaced by a variety of messages giving the impression of a folksy setup trying to mix it with the big boys. In particular the obscure and/or lengthy image requests were coming thick and fast, a little like MyLoupe (another failure for me) and I was getting the impression that I had signed up for OnRequest images, not a stock photo site.

I looked at the sales page (for the whole site - they are quite open with this information) a couple of days ago and while I would be very happy to see something similar at photoconnect in terms of the number of images sold, there was no way that I could see this level of sales supporting Acclaim and its staff. That has been borne out by today's news of 3 staff being laid off. Since 2 are family members it must all be a bit emotional right now.

So it seems that Acclaim, like photoconnect, will sit there high in the searches and continue running. It seems that there will be a purge of images (there was a pointed post on StockPhoto a couple of weeks ago re similars).

Now where for photoconnect?

Just how well is Alamy doing?

If you look at photoconnect.net then you will see that I sell images through Alamy and some of the images on photoconnect carry a link straight through to Alamy where buyers can download images and pay.

I am not sure if I've ever sold an image through this route because there is no way of tracking. However I have been looking at my overall sales through Alamy to see how things are progressing there. The only sensible way of doing this is not to look month on month (because monthly figures fluctuate so much) but to measure over a period - in my case I look at a rolling 6 month sales pattern and compare these sales with the number of images estimated to be online at the end of the six month period. I then translate that figure into $ invoiced sales per year (gross).

Before June 2004 with fewer images online it's difficult to pick up anything useful but since then this is what I see:

6/2004 800 images $3.16 per image per year
9/2004 900 images $2.83 per image per year
12/2004 1000 images $2.44 per image per year
3/2005 1100 images $3.16 per image per year5
6/2005 1200 images $2.99 per image per year
9/2005 1300 images $3.76 per image per year
12/2005 1400 images $4.87 per image per year
3/2006 1600 images $4.60 per image per year
6/2006 1800 images $5.81 per image per year
9/2006 2000 images $5.58 per image per year

The important thing is that there is a growing trend, which makes me feel happy because I appear to be good at getting the right sort of images to Alamy and, importantly, am getting better at doing so.

It's worth looking at this to this point because of the change in the way the Alamy search engine works. I always used to be in the bottom of the 3 tiers of photographers results as shown up in searches. Now I am gratified to find my images near the top, even for my 'specialist' collections where I have hundreds of images online.

When my images were at the back of the search results they did not get to be seen often but when they did I guess that they generated above average views and sales. Hopefully now they will be seen more often with an impact on my sales per image per year. We will see.