The story of one stolen image here is pretty crazy.  It’s both disturbing, interesting, amazing, scary and infuriating all at the same time.  This type of story always plucks my heart strings, because I can relate to the way he’s feeling.  It just shows the power of the internet in this media age we are living in.  Any image you post online can end up anywhere… period.  Case closed.  I don’t care what you shot it with, how you designed it, digitized it, where you posted it, or what it is.  High res, medium res, or low res.  If the image is something of value to another person, or another person sees the potential value in it, it will be used.  It’s only a matter of time before it ends up all around the world.  Beware of how you share your work online.

Noam seems torn.  One one hand he is thrilled to see his art being embraced by so many people in so many places.  But, at the same time, he seems to get a pit in his stomach when he sees other people dishonestly making profits from his artwork.  When we license stock images, we sometimes get a kick out of where they end up.  Sometimes my head gets on billboards anywhere from Taiwan to Chicago.  Just yesterday an image of ours was featured on the Yahoo homepage.  It’s a really cool feeling.  These are images I know I have sold online, however.  In Noam’s case, the warm fuzzy feeling is short lived by feelings that are not so great.

In the stock photo industry, image theft has been a huge problem.  Newer technologies are helping to combat it, but it will still probably always be around to some degree or another. This is especially the case in illustration.  If you are a vector illustrator, you need to make sure you aren’t tracing photos that you didn’t produce on your own.  Otherwise, you are just as bad as the right clickers that steal images off of image sharing websites like flickr or deviantart.  Don’t think it won’t come back to bite you in the behind; because it will.

Ironically, when Noam thought he might try licensing the image himself through stock agencies, they rejected the image.  I got a chuckle out of this, because it honestly shows how ridiculously high the technical standards are in the business.  This screaming image was used hundreds, maybe even thousands of times all around the world – but no, the agency Noam submitted to didn’t feel it had any commercial value.  Hmm. Take a look at the top 100 on http://sxc.hu and you’ll notice that probably 50-75% of them would not even pass microstock standards… but they’re being downloaded and used all over the world, just like Noam’s screaming images.  It’s just something to think about, which is pretty ironic.  High quality standards are great.  I have them myself for my own stock photo website, as well as the others I submit to.  In this instance, it’s just ironic that poor Noam goes and tries to sell HIS OWN artwork and gets shot down, while hundreds or thousands of others are already using his photo all over.

Watermarked or not, images are still sometimes stolen.  Even still, it’s better than nothing.  Watermarking is the minimum precaution you can take to protect the images you do have online.  Not sharing them on the higher traffic websites like Flickr, is also a pretty good idea.  Be careful out there, because before you realize it your photos could be all over the place.

This stuff isn’t made up.  It’s real, and it happens.  This is just one story.  One person, who thankfully was informed about where his artwork ended up.  Is it his fault all of this happened?  What do you think about this story?  Has something like this ever happened to you?  Feel free to chime in with a comment below.

Learn more about Noam’s story: http://www.thestolenscream.com/ Check out his blog, and the products he’s got in his zazzle store.  Let’s support him – please.  He deserves it.  Helping him promote his story is the least I can do, as a fellow photographer.  You can follow Noam on twitter and facebook.

(video via FStoppers as also posted on the Chase Jarvis blog)

Being a photo enthusiast since a very early age, Carlos took a course in professional photography between 1994 and 1997. Today, he works as a freelance graphic designer and photographer and is a contributor of stock imagery to several online image banks. The royalty free stock photos that he creates can be bought and downloaded by designers that use them in various marketing and advertising products, books, blogs, or editorial pieces.

Carlos Caetano is a “Pentaxian” and actually uses a Pentax K10D DSLR, several Pentax and Sigma lenses and Manfrotto tripods. When not outdoors shooting landscapes, he is at home, busy with tabletop shoots of objects in his improvised studio: the dining-room table next to a big, luminous window, and a piece of white paper or styrofoam to bounce light into the shadows. This is all he needs as studio gear, allied with his Photoshop skills.  His images can be found for sale on stock photography sites such as Shutterstock.com,  istockphoto.com,  dreamstime.com,  fotolia.com,  bigstockphoto.com,  and several others. He is available for photographic assignments, photo post-processing and manipulation.

To contact Carlos or to view more of his work, check out:
ccaetano.com
picsweep.blogspot.com
facebook.com/ccaetano

Would you like your work to be featured on the Arena Creative blog?  Whether you are a photographer or a graphic designer, if you have something creative to share we would love to feature your work!  Contact us if you are interested.

Be Specific

Let’s face it, there is a sea of images out there for royalty free licensing.  You can sometimes search for “cat” and get “dog”.  Unfortunately, image keywords are prone to mistakes, spamming, and more.  You don’t want to have to dig through a sea of crap before finding the types of images you’re looking for.  How can you avoid this?  By being specific.  If you’re looking for a photo of a cat, go as far as describing what breed, color, and even what pose.  You just might be pleasantly surprised in your results.  Don’t be so specific that your search string is more than 5 words long, as you might miss a lot of pretty good results.  But, at the same time you don’t want to use simple one word searches and have to sift through hundreds of pages of images.  An exception to this, of course, would be if you were searching something very rare or a rarely covered subject.

Narrow Results With Additional Secret Words

These words aren’t anything super top-secret, but many image buyers might not be aware of them.  They are widely used by stock photographers.  Try them in your upcoming searches and be blown away by how this trims down your results to a more reasonable size.

isolated: A cut-out image or person object with a solid color background.  These types of images make it easy to pop into solid colored backgrounds or layouts, even easily add or remove negative space.  Be sure to include whichever color you would want it isolated over; ie: black, white, red, etc. Other variation: cutout, cut out

clipping path: sick of making selections to isolate images?  Search for this phrase and find images that have a preset clipping path already embedded in the jpeg.

copy space: Use this when you want images with negative space, or a little bit of room to breath.  Every good designer knows what negative space is, but not many remember to search with the term copy space. Other variations: copyspace or copy-space

seamless: If you’re looking for a texture that tiles seamlessly as a pattern in any direction, include this one.  Also don’t forget about: seamlessly, tiling, tiles

studio: If you’re looking specifically for photos captured in a studio environment, try this word.

vector: If you want just vectors, use the word.  The word illustration also works, but unless you want a lot of jpeg graphic results included, use vector.

Employ the Special Modifiers

There usually are different modifiers you can check off on each website.  These usually are site specific, but are incredibly helpful.  For instance, let’s say you don’t want to see anything but vector illustrations.  Usually you will have the option to choose only vectors, and this will allow you to avoid having to use the word vector in your keyword search string.  Maybe they opposite is true, and all you want to see are photos – not illustrations.  Then you would do the opposite and tick off the “photos only” box.  Some agencies go even further.  If you searched for the word girl on istockphoto.com, for instance, you could then check off whether you meant: Women (Female), Teenage Girls (Female), Little Girls (Female), or Baby Girls (Female). Many of my personal friends say they don’t even bother with doing that, and they simple keep on scrolling through pages upon pages of stuff before they find what they need.  Why would you want to make it harder on yourself?  Make sure you employ these additional features created to help you out.

Restrict Certain Words

Certain stock agencies (the better search engines) will also allow you to restrict certain words from coming up in the image results.  That has helped me tremendously in the past.  For example, you might want a photo of two brothers playing outdoors.  For this search you could start with the keywords boys and brothers.  If that yields too many results, you could also try adding the word two.  You probably might find a bunch of images that have boys or brothers in them, but also have other children or girls in them.  You will probably also get a bunch of family portraits.  This is when you would restrict words like mother, father, girl, etc to narrow down what you need.

Search For Specific Artists

On most stock photography websites you will also see the artist’s name beside every image with a hyperlink.  Yeah, that’s right – you can click it and see all of that artists specific images.  If you like what you see, or are maybe looking for more images from a similar shoot, many times you can search within that person’s portfolio.  Maybe you like one specific shoot theme that artist has done, but only found a few results from the main site’s search engine.  A lot of times you can find similar shots with different angles or with other different variations by searching through that photographer or artist’s personal portfolio.  You can also search from scratch for a certain artist.  For example, if you search username “arenacreative” you might just find my stuff (shameless self promotion, sorry…)

Change the Search Type

By default, most websites employ results by the newest or most downloaded.  Don’t forget, however, that you are able to easily change that search method.  You can usually sort the results by most views, download, popularity (usually that is a mix of views and download), newest, oldest, or random (if you feel like living dangerously).

Spend Less by Shopping Around

Shop around – don’t just stick to one agency just because it’s the same one you’ve been using for 5 years.  It takes only a minute to register an account on a different agency.  Some websites require a minimum credit package purchase, while others are a better deal by getting a monthly subscription (especially if you need a bulk number of images).  If you’re spending company dollars, you boss will probably appreciate how much you’ve saved for the company by purchase (many times the same) images somewhere else for up to 25-50% less.  Prices and selection vary from agency to agency.  Guess what – most microstock contributors sell their work under the same user name.  If you find an image at Pricier Site A try looking that photographer up at Cheaper Site B and you might just be pleasantly surprised to find it there at a much lower cost.  You might even be able to score an XXL high resolution version for the same price as the medium size price at Pricier Site A.

If at First You Don’t Succeed…

…keep on trying different keyword combinations.  You will find what you’re looking for!  Be persistent and enjoy your “hunt”   There’s nothing like the feeling of finding an incredible image that fulfills the exact idea you had in your head.

I was definitely taken by surprise with this statistic.  I only wish each one of those images sold for $30 each instead of 30 cents – Haha! I don’t even know what the total size of my portfolio is right now, so that’s the next thing I’ll have to figure out.

Want to know how many images I’ve found in use?  Ha, probably only around 100.

Alright; you got me.  Let me be totally honest with you.  As of today, I’ve only sold 149,110 images.  But close enough… I know I must have missed a bunch somewhere, on some random site I’m forgetting to record.  In another week or so it should be there It’s fun running business related stats once in a while, and you’re going to be surprised with the results, almost always.  Give it a shot with your own accounts, if you sell stock.  I think you just might be pleasantly surprised!

Aaron Goodman is the man. I’m blown away by his stuff. He knows his gear, his lighting, and (even more importantly) his Photoshop; and he’s not afraid to use all of these skills in unison. His concepts are mind blowingly creative – enough to knock your socks off. Some of them are so simple, yet effective, that you think to yourself, “gee why didn’t I think of that?”.  The SAT’s with the pencil girl is one of my favorites. I want to try and think of more of these types of conceptual images, to add to my stock photography portfolio; as long as I can afford to spend the amount of time on them that they will obviously need. In the past I’ve spent hours and hours on images that have a very low return, so obviously when it comes to selling images like these through microstock outlets, you have to use your own good judgement and planning.

Read more in this excellent article by AfterCapture magazine here.  All images Copyright © Aaron Goodman.

I was in NYC walking down Canal street (Chinatown) back when I was about 20 years old, with a bunch of my friends one afternoon. My friend Paul is a crazy guy, and I told him, “Quick – Go and chase that pigeon over there!” When he took off running, I snapped the shot with my Vivitar point and shoot, and this was the result

Sometimes you get a conceptual image by accident…this one could portray escape, stress, fear, moving away, luncacy – you be the judge!  A little bit of photoshop, a little zoom blur and color isolation, and this was the final result.  An abstract motion blur of a guy running away while flailing his arms around.  You just have to be ready for unplanned action.  Keep that camera around your neck, at your side, or in your hand with a hand strap if you can.  Don’t carry it around in your bag all the time.  Anticipate capturing the next random thing even before it occurs.  It only takes a second or two to move your camera from your side to your face.

Feel free to share your own “accidental conceptual” images here – just post a comment below with a link.

Many of the industry’s best have posted their viewpoints.  Here is how I personally feel…

It’s a proven fact that when products or services are priced higher, some buyers think they are getting something “better” or of “higher quality”. Many times this isn’t even the case. A generic product could even be identical, only in different packaging. Is Tylenol going out of business, just because CVS sells the same thing in a generic form? It doesn’t seem like they are. The product could probably even be manufactured in the same plant. Many times, manufacturers only want you to think you’re getting less when you purchase the same product for a lesser price. In actuality, many are identical – even if the product is packaged or marketed in a different way. Paul Mitchell hair care products come to mind. The CEO gets on TV and in commercials he testifies that it isn’t genuine Paul Mitchell, if you find the product being sold in a grocery store. In fact, it is – and I know many professional hairdressers that will attest to that. Want to know the difference? About $10-20 per bottle, depending on what salon is selling it.

If a buyer wants to be choosy and shop around, they will. If they are willing to spend extra money on photos from agencies that offer better guarantees, or a different user experience, then let them. I don’t see anything unethical about that. Product pricing is the same in all markets, it’s just all about the brand label many times that determines the pricing. Even if it’s the same exact product. Designer clothes are sold at outrageous prices, and sometimes the quality is even lower than that of the cheaper department stores’ clothing lines.