This is quite weird, if you have signed up with Room the Agency of late, you'd realize that they have added a new terms and condition clause which is totally unexpected.

Hi benard

You have been a RooM member for a while now and as a small collection of serious shooters we pride ourselves on our collective spirit. We have excellent exposure at Getty, with their 1 million clients, in over 100 countries:




Without every RooM member getting involved and supplying the right content, that sells, everyone suffers, because it affects our exposure on the Getty and iStock sites and therefore reduces our sales potential.

As one of the last few guys who have yet to upload content to RooM we have now put your account on temporary review.

This means that if you do not upload a minimum of 5 images, at least 1 of which must be a model released people image, before 10th April, that are all, or mostly all, accepted – review may take place after this date – your account will be deleted soon after.

Only the best, mostly people, shooters are invited to join RooM, you are one of the few that has a treasured account - this is your last chance to save it.

If your account is closed you will only be able open a new account by invite, as we are changing our sign up rules. With over $1 billion in annual sales, that’s half the World’s stock photography market, going through our channel, you might regret letting your account lapse into closure.

So please allow me to reply to Room the Agency in an open letter.

Dear Room Creative Team

Forgive me but you didn't leave a personalised signature so I have no idea if you are male, female or just a mail-bot programmed to send out email threats to photographers in your network.

From the tone of your email, I gather that you are quite exasperated by the lack of images in which you wish to sell online at the cheapest possible rate. Now the reason why I have not responded is this, I downloaded your Room the Agency iPhone app to see if I could submit photos on my iPod Touch, apparently I could but the value of such works don't seem to be much.




I have joined up as a lite-contributor thus I would only enjoy a 35 percent commission for every sale. Your Elite contributors enjoy up to 40 percent, which is just 5 percent more than what I am getting. Thank you but I think you can keep you 5 percent as I am sure it will contribute immensely to your pantry budget.

Secondly, I do not understand why you want a model released picture to be included in any of my submissions when your own rights managed pricing guideline is as ambiguous as the NSA's stand on personal privacy. You have implied that if I do not submit ONE model released picture, then you are going to close my account.

I have two issues with this. First being that a model would designate a person who is willing to sign a paper as a release and since I don't own a gun to make anyone sign a piece of paper I would have either pay them in cash or in kind if you so wish me to grant them sexual favors. You see, signing away your rights as a model would imply that the person is knowing indulging your passion for want of money. And even if you live in a third world country, a fat and aging prostitute would demand money from you even if you took a picture with her clothes on. 

The second thing about this issue is that all model released photos should be rights managed so to speak. With that, I am afraid that I have no idea what you are talking about when you say things like:-

Rights Managed (RM) PricingPrices are often higher than RF, but far fewer sales are made. Rights Managed (RM) pricing is based on how the image is used. There are many variables with RM pricing: editorial v advertising; length of usage; number of territories; and much more – the wider the use of an image the more it costs the client - but some usage, such as inside textbooks, is much cheaper than others and can be quite low.
We only sell the largest file size we have on file to clients and cost is strictly controlled by what they use it for.

If you can put it out in plain English, like maybe a 50% commission from the total deal, then I would probably be much happier with instead of twisting the words around like a serpent in heat.

For the record, regardless of how much you sign for or price the photos, there is a commission structure which you can share with photographers remains the same regardless of the number of licenses you sold to a buyer. What's more, your license type from RF to RM is rather rigid for the buyer and it tanks out at 500,000 copies, the irony is that you use an honor system and take no interest in making sure that the print run is not exceeded. So will you bill them more if you found out they fibbed a little by understating the print run? Do you have the means to police the issue? 

Lastly, based on the offering, and also with your own admission, there is no way to expect more sales from a photo that is Rights Managed. So even if I paid a model to pose for me, obtain the model release and send it to you, there is only a slim chance of making a few hundred dollars. How many hundreds I might make remains a mystery for me as your chart to photo buyers failed to illustrate how much they have to spend to buy a photo from you. 

I am sure you make millions from the 1 billion sale turnover you like to brag about. For photographers, they might be real lucky to earn some regular beer money for all their work. So let's have a beer when you have the time to drop by for a talk, I just hope you're buying. 

WTF? No one told me I would appear in a Playboy ad!

This is a post of something I wrote on my other photography blog which is intended for a mobile audience. For those of you who have heard, there are some individuals who shoot stock and earn over US$100,000 a year. If you want to get to that bracket, then you gotta know what sells and what doesn't sell on stock image libraries.

Stuff that Sells

For the most part, the demand comes from the corporate sector where they had enough of paying for rights managed photos, a royalty free option is preferred and yes, you need models in the picture and we are not talking toy airplanes here.

The Hot Stuff that every Stock Agency is looking for are:-

Model Released people doing things. So, rather than just standing there, we want people out walking (not a dot on the landscape), shopping, using technology, celebrating, engaging, all the everyday activities we enjoy, in fact.

Story Telling Themes that Sell:-

Concepts, with and without people. Such as – Adventure, Balance, Connection, Discovery, Escapism, Fragility, Growth, Hope, Idyllic, Journey, Loyalty, Motion, New Life, Persistence, Real People, Sharing, Teamwork and Young at Heart.

There are caveats to this list and besides the property and model releases you are expected to furnish, you also need to avoid the following in all your pictures:-


Trademarks and Logos
Before you submit photos for consideration, make sure you whip out your trusty desktop or notebook computer and fire up Adobe Photoshop. Stock Agencies do not want to see any trademarks or logos in your picture. Combing through your image for offending logos and trademarks is easy. See that logo on the jacket that says Hugo Boss, well take that out and that Coke Bottle in the background? Just erase the logo and word Coke from the bottle.

Art Installations
Don't submit photos with famous arts of works in the background. Waste of time really as all that is already copyrighted. So for example you want to pose a model next to Rodin's Thinker, well think again dude. It's not going to fly with the Agencies. Public monuments are fine, like the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge and Statue of Liberty but it has to be in a context of something.

Events and Concerts
If you had to buy a ticket for a sporting event or performance, you cannot shoot any fucking thing intended for commercial use there. It can be for editorial use and that restricts your market by about half. The paying customers are always the corporates who are looking for royalty free exceptions. If you can produce a picture they want, they will skip paying for a rights manage photo and go for yours. Will this make you any richer? I seriously doubt it.

What me? Royalty Free? Are you kidding?

If you had sports pictures from a curling event in Sochi Russia, well you can't sell that as commercial stuff unless you fucking hire the damn team to pose for you in a make believe set. That too must be sans Olympic attire and logos in the background. And you can't sell it as an Olympic image either, just Curling.

The same applies for concerts. You can't shoot in a U2 Rock Event and sell that as a commercial image. Bono will clearly tell you it is a no-no.

Stock Image Agencies would Puke if you Tried Submitting...

There is a list here too. Don't bother looking too deep into it as I am sure you have all tried to make your first million in stock photography by venturing out to your own back yard.

1. Squirrels, Ducks, Geese, Swans, Pigeons and all the birds and animals you find in your garden or local park
2. Seascapes, Shorelines and Lakes - especially the one's with long shutter speeds
3. Sunsets over water
4. Sunsets behind Trees
5. Trees
6. Generic landscapes with no distinctive geographical, iconic or stylistic features
7. Snapshots of dogs and cats
8. Nature abstracts submitted as "backgrounds"
9. Insects – unless they are fantastic
10. Objects on a white background – especially Food and Still Life images.
11. Animals in captivity, where it's obvious they are in a Zoo or Safari Park
12. Individual Flowers and Plants outdoors, especially close-up without any context or visible sky

This list isn't as extensive as I would like but it is a start. For the record, there are tonnes of these types of photos on Flickr which people are already giving away for free. So what makes you think that picture you took in your back yard is going to make you any money?

How to Make Your First Million in Stock Photography

Invest in those freelance models. Remember what your Mom said about bringing strangers home? Well it's going to make lots of money if they can sign a model release and do you bidding. Pose them with props, such as your TV remote, Playstation 4 controller or in your bathtub taking a bubble bath. Activities like these sell like hotcakes as Royalty Free Imagery.

Use expensive props as accessories. Remember the guy who lives down the street who has an exotic vintage Ferrari, well you can find out when he's not home and get your models to pose next to it. Just remember to blank out the number plate for good measure or else he might want a cut from your earnings. Props are extremely important in stock photography. You don't need to feature a logo of the prop in any shoot as long as you pose the model right.

Travel to Places People won't Venture to. If you go to Iceland, you could hire someone to don a space suit eating a hamburger and that will sell in droves. The landscape is nothing like what you will find anywhere in the world. You could even fake a moon landing there. Take along a scale model kit and drop that in your shoot.  Forget the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty, those have been done to death. Humor sells and if you can use that to good effect, you'll sell millions.

Set up an Indoor Studio to Stage photo shoots. This is probably the least expected but makes the most money. You can for a start have you own studio set up within the confines of your home and shoot models in various poses. All you need are just three type of backgrounds, black, white and grey. You don't even need to have a background element as this can be further added on in Photoshop by whoever buys your photos.

Invest in Photoshop. Yes, you can make a million pictures by compositing various subjects and elements to make a picture. If your photoshop skills are up to mark, you can do almost anything. Add flying pigs into your sunset pictures, make your dog laugh out loud while watching TV.

And if you noticed I didn't say it won't cost you a dime to stage any of this. All of the above cost time, effort and money because that's what the majority of photographers are not interested in investing. Anything which cost them next to nothing to do has been done to death. Taking pictures of garden vegetables, strangers molesting your pet dog or hamster, backyard insects or even those beautiful sunsets at the park might seem lovely to you but no one is going to buy them. The key is to be unique and that calls for models. So if you don't know anyone who will pose for you, time to fire up Facebook and connect with your friend's friends. Who knows, you might get lucky?

Royalty Free is a Hit and Run Business

I bet no one told you this but Royalty Free is just another name for an open retail store that works on a honor system. You take the goods, drop in the money and move along. They do not look after your rights should your image be used by various other people who did not buy your photo. Let's for a moment assume that someone did buy your photo for use in a website. Well guess what? A web surfer will steal that photo and post it on his website and so on. Guess who is going after them for royalties? Well it certainly not the stock image agency. How about the dude who turns your photo into a viral Instagram meme? Do you think you can sue him?

Stock agencies do not as a rule furnish you with the name and address of the purchaser. This is not their beef. You can have your photos submitted as a rights managed photo but that doesn't mean the stock agency will look after your photo either. They only take notice when it is sold as exclusive rights managed for a fixed duration usage. Those pay big bucks. But once you go that way, the chances of you getting a photo sold diminishes as buyers often opt for royalty free if a similar picture is available.

In the corporate world, you need staff to stay responsible to rights managed photo use. Often such responsibilities fall under the guise of the marketing communications department. Smaller companies won't even bother with this and lets the advertising agencies deal with the details. Would they care if the usage rights have lapsed? What do you seriously think they would do if you didn't pay up?

The competition for that corporate dollar is rife. And stock agencies expect you to follow their lead by racing to the bottom is terms of pricing of any photo. They don't care how much you spent staging and capturing that photo. It's not their business to care. They want to sell everything for a dollar if they could.

In the near future, you'd shoot a model and composite various elements to make it new. That's why Photoshop is such a game changer in digital photography. You can make new photos out of old ones. Think for a moment, need a model to wear a new attire? Just change the colors of the clothes she's wearing! Want to have an interesting background? Drop in a bokeh blurred background in Photoshop and you'll have a new picture.

So don't give up your day job for a career in stock photography if you don't have a dime to invest in it from the beginning. It takes more than just back yard pictures to bring home the bacon if you want to carve out your own turf in the stock photo business.

I love Leica lenses. Having owned one, you'll find that there is something really exquisite about the imaging quality. The color, contrast, and clarity is superb. So Leica is celebrating 100 years in photography. Wow. That's a long time. Looking back, one can't help but realize how much photography has changed since then. 

Today, the average digital photo is pretty much worthless. To buy one for use on your website, you pay a dollar for royalty free rights. The only people who seem to be making money from it all are the stock photo agencies who charge you that dollar to download an image. 

Leica has moved away from film to digital. Good for you. Look at the spiffy new Leica 100th D-Lux 6 with 5,000 of these will be sold world wide. That said, it will be a collectors item. I don't want to go into the pricing. You can't do that with a Leica. It has a great lens and that should cost you in the ballpark of a full frame DSLR alone. 

To pay that much for a camera speaks volumes of Leica photographers. Rich, affluent and probably a point and shoot enthusiast. You are not going to be the next Alfred Eisenstaedt or Robert Capa. 

Instead, we find Leica indulging their fans with Street Photography and offering courses and exhibitions for would be street photographers. This genre of photography was made famous by HCB, who in his free time spent hours upon hours on the streets of Paris. But Leica, haven't you noticed that the people who buy your cameras do not necessary venture out to the street? 

The typical Leica user would probably avoid spending too many hours on the street as his Leica gear would cost more than his left kidney on the black market. You can go to a cafe and the moment you put down your camera bag or gear, you'd be assured it'll be gone within a few minutes of you taking your eyes off it. A Leica camera is like magnet for thieves and robbers. Unless you venture out with a shotgun in tow, chances are people everywhere will try to rip you off. 

Lastly, why Street Photography? As a career pursuit, it won't be as financially rewarding as Paparazzi Photography. Even wedding photography makes more money on a regular basis than any street photographer. You should be aware that the constabulary of every Western country has an axe to grind with people who point cameras in the street. Post 911 they say. It's a sign of a would e terrorist. 

Then there is the privacy issue. In Hungary, it is illegal to take photos of people on the street without their consent. In the age of the NSA with eyes on your Facebook profile, you'd be happy that your face doesn't appear in a picture on Flickr captured in a embargoed country. 

What's more street photos are often made up of people, with recognisable faces. This means that if you ever tried to sell a street photo as a royalty free stock image, you'd be asked to supply a model release. You can of course take photos when there is no one around. For this, all you have to do is wait till the eerie hours of the night to do so. But I understand that Leica cameras don't handle well in low light, so are you saying that this is a myth?

Regardless, I think you are doing well financially as a camera manufacturer. Those limited edition cameras are genuine rip offs but hey, let's keep that a secret between the both of us. I still think you make fabulous lenses and I am addicted to them. Saves me hours behind the desktop trying to enhance those digital images on Adobe Lightroom. For this, let me wish you a very Happy Birthday, and let the good times roll. 

Was the product rushed? What about the light leak issue? Was the promised firmware update released to address more issues with the camera?

I can't help but feel that the product was rushed to market without proper testing. I know Sony well, having worked with them in the past on several cameras, they seem to like to gloss over some of their weaknesses time and again. Their chief problem is that they want to catch the buying wave of consumers.

The A7 series is no different. A full frame interchangeable camera that is not entirely a DSLR, and yet, gives the impression of having a full frame quality imaging is probably the best snake oil they have sold to the masses so far.

I did a little research on the dynamic range capability of the camera. This is measured by dpreview.com and all you have to do is select the suitable camera for comparison so I don't use any crafty methods to debunk any myths.

If you look at the above chart, the A7r performs very poorly in dynamic range charts. Compare that with the Nikon D600 in auto mode, you can see the difference. I have also taken the liberty to compare two other popular cameras, the OMD-EM5 from Olympus and the Fujifilm Xpro1. The Xpro1 doesn't have a auto mode so I have selected a ISO 200 setting. Dollar for dollar, you can't beat the Olympus OMD EM5 in dynamic range capability.


What Dynamic Range doesn't offer you

Dynamic range charts tell the sensitivity of the sensor in capturing light in both the highlights and shadow areas withint a picture, it does not tell the deal with issues such as  noise reduction algorithms or color accuracy.

I care much for high ISO as I rarely ever shoot above ISO1600, having ISO 6400 is useful if you are a professional but I don't have such a requirement on my day to day shooting.

Even in low light, I prefer to use a tripod for the camera and shoot at a slower ISO. I don't shoot dance or music concerts very often, and for that I have no need for a high ISO and even higher shutter speed to stop motion.

The dynamic range chart tells a clear picture that the Sony A7r is not a good camera to use in high contrast scenes even in DRO mode, and you probably have to use HDR capture to get more out of your images, meaning...you need to carry a tripod for a three frame capture.

Do you need another camera?

I am of the opinion that you should have two different cameras to cater to all your shooting needs. The casual shooter only needs an iPhone to get good results in daylight, and the second camera should address the weaknesses of the iPhone in everyday use, like poor dynamic range, poor shutter speed response and poor noise handling, and poor low light response.

Say you have a good iPhone/Nokia Lumia 1020 for your everyday use and want something more. Then your best choice is to consider your shooting requirement, ask yourself this:-

How often do you shoot in low light?
Do you shoot action subjects?

These are the only two question that is pertinent. Fast AF and shutter speed is probably the key to your action requirement, while in low light, you need to handle  such shooting with a combination of low light capability and high ISO capture.

What does Sony Needs to Do?

Address their weak points, namely poor high ISO handling and dynamic range. Their noise reduction algorithm stinks, and DRO was something they were bragging about when I worked with them on the A700 Resource Portal. It sounded very futuristic then but today, as you can see form the poor dyanmic range results, it has taken a severe beating.

Sony cannot rely on their mass market brand name alone to sell cameras. I still do believe they are able to come out with innovative products but the performance issues often associated with it leaves a very bad aftertaste on the consumers who have bought into them.

A product must be sold on its strengths and not price points alone. A full frame camera like the A7r looks tempting at that price but the performance of the camera is less than desirable. The rush to put more pixels into megapixels must stop. Consumers will get tired of the same sales pitch and turn to their smartphone cameras instead, when this happens, Sony Alpha Cameras are doomed.