> All good points. But I think fewer people in the general stock biz are thriving.
> As for costs...that's all true. The cost of film and processing adds up. If you
> made it big with digital photos a decade ago, then good for you. If you were
> shooting stock with a Nikon d100 for example, I think those images are pretty
> useless unless you have some shots of a very special subject. Regrettably I
> wasn't making big money with digital or film back then. But I wince at the
> technical quality of old digital images. However some 35mm, most medium format,
> and all large format still holds up favorably. If you did have a library of great
> film photos from back then you could still use them. I only hold some of the
> older digital photos for personal reasons.
Michael:
While we may wince a bit, those images still sell. Indeed, stock photography is
about images that are useful - those seven and eight year old images are still
useful to somebody.
As for a legacy film collection today, you have several choices, you could scan them
yourself - very time consuming, or you could farm them out at a typical price of
about twenty dollars a scan. So, a three-thousand medium and large format image
collection could be scanned for as little as fifty thousand dollars. That hardly
qualifies as useful.
I just plain can't see a way that film or film archives represent a viable business
model for stock photographers today. Scanning is no more free than film and
processing and high-end scanners are becoming tougher and tougher to find.
The rest of us have big questions to contend with: how do we catch up? What is the
most efficient use of our time and resources? And what are buyers looking for now
and how can we get it in front of them?
Brian Yarvin
Author, Educator, Photographer
http://www.brianyarvin.com
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