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Going digital - stock photos

My final posting on this digital photography subject is about stock photography. Most photographers recognize the need to be on the internet in some way to make our work visible to potential buyers. Most of the larger stock photo sites now even allow buyers to directly download files that are suitable for layout and presentation purposes, and many of these stock houses have large enough scans to go directly to print. Those photographers who have their work represented by these stock houses will select some of their best images, clean them up to a very high standard with large file sizes, let the stock photo site market the work, and wait for the royalty checks.

Other photographers will market their work themselves through their own websites and fill requests on demand. There are different ways to get to the buying public through various networking, affiliations, and portal sites but in general there is limited number of actual garden photos on-line. This is changing rapidly as the number of individual gardeners, writers, and photographers with digital cameras (whether professional or not) can publish their special collections on-line. They may not be top quality but for some markets that is not critical.

This is another reason I want to go digital - so I can more easily post images on-line. If you have been following my other postings you know I am not yet shooting anything digital but am trying to keep pace with what clients need. I have been scanning my own images for years to send previews to clients and do have a nice selection to view on my website but it is tedious and certainly not comprehensive. If I shot digitally it would be easier; but even if I did, how do I get my other 250,000 film images online ?

I have finally come to realize, not that I don't need to post every vertical/horizontal, close/wide, artsy/straight image I have, but that no researcher is going to wade through hundreds of images on any given subject to find just one. We are soon going to have a glut of images on line and what I really am selling is garden information not just garden images. I don't want all my images on-line, I want my information on-line. Sure I want people to think of me as a photographer but I really am a gardener communicator too, my information is key and vital to my editors.

I value my gardening clients far above any other and know just the right image for any given subject is not the first one found but the one that communicates some precise information. Since garden information can be quite complex and I would rather supply an esoteric image than a generic one, I am going the route of putting my text database on-line instead of an image database. Few garden publishers look for simply "rose" they are looking for a specific one, say Color Magic, which I have lots of pictures but only a couple scanned. I would like to think that if a garden publisher knows I have an image (by finding it on my site by a text search) they will be willing to wait an extra day or two to see it. I will offer to scan an image for a client if they find the text description in my database.

I am beta testing my new PhotoBotanic site (which also has thousands of images) and would ask any of you to please check it out
http://www.sasict.com/photobotanic/
and give me feedback on the database. There are still unfinished pages and some work to be done on the e-mail reporting feature but I would appreciate some feedback (off list please !).

This service may only appeal to that very small segment of the stock photo market that wants precise garden images, but hey, thats us. What do you think ?

onward - Saxon Holt
Gardens and Ornamental Horticulture
www.saxonholt.com
415.898.8880

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