Tuesday 9 June 2009

Meet & Greet @ BAPLA

The dawn chorus was a mere whisper, my body required coffee and the sun was somewhere over a greyish blurred horizon. A great time of day to be about with a camera, unfortunately I was on the early train to London, however it was running on time and there was a buffet car. That's got to be a good omen. That was the extent of my joy at 5.30am pre caffeine.  

Joining the first commuters of the day is a reminder that self employment has its benefits and working alongside a great bunch of creatives is a refreshing and inspiring place to be in a world of tired grey suits. They were heading of to the office for another 8-5 day but fortunately for me I was heading for the Business Design Centre for the annual BAPLA ( British Association of Picture Libraries and Agents) Spring Fair. This claims to be the biggest gathering of picture libraries and picture buyers on the planet and who am I to argue the toss. This is where art buyers meet art licensors face to face and where libraries such as Trigger can meet new distributors.

Arriving at 7.30 am I headed straight for a caffeine top up with a freshly baked croissant followed by so called breakfast meetings with numerous European distributors and even the occasional photographer who had sneaked in past security. Crumbling croissants and conversation with European colleagues is not an ideal mix so early. Encouragingly we made ourselves understood and all the distributors showed interest in marketing Trigger to their specific clientele expressing that the market for stock images is looking for stimulating, creative imagery in an arena where all too often posed predictable shots fill the larger agency galleries. The niche content we currently offer in our galleries from our community of photographers is backed by our Rights Managed License which is now the predominant method over Royalty Free pricing options. This is partially due to clients favoring the potential to negotiate on a fee, particularly apparent when multiple mages are required and a degree of flexibility enables the client to work to a budget, allowing us to develop a working relationship with them. It also ensures the photographer receives a higher fee for their work according to how and where the image is used and you hang on to your all important rights.

We currently work with a number of publishers on a repeat basis and we hope to expand on this as we market ourselves to a wider image buying audience via new distributors. However supplying the right imagery is only half the battle. All distributors have their own specific file requirements, whether that's file sizes or how all the IPTC information is supplied to them and having discussed this with a number of distributors we're now looking at upping our current file spec to meet their needs. This means from now on we'll be asking for bigger file sizes and file IPTC info in the keywords and descriptions sections. The industry standard is about 48MB for an uncompressed tif file. There are options for enlarging imagery and we'd suggest using Genuine Fractals. This is relatively low cost software that you can download, try before you buy with the trial version. Photoshop also offers a similar feature that uses a different process. Enlarging your images from your originals is not ideal, but unless you have a high spec camera it's the alternative option. Remember your aiming for Adobe RGB files at 300dpi  that are 48MB as uncompressed tifs, that's a 16 Mega Pixel image. You should then save your files as jpgs at maximum quality before uploading to us. I'll put a post up to clarify the new full spec.

With clients coming back to our galleries it's essential we maintain their interest by providing engaging imagery on every visit. This is why it's important for you to upload those new shots as often as you can via your personal link. If you've lost your link just let me know and I'll resend it to you. We recommend you have atleast 100 images in your stock folio with Trigger, this gives you a higher degree of visibility in our galleries. If you want more visibility, send in more images just like Alaya Gadeh has done. She is an unstoppable creative force and has over a 1000 images online and practically owns the 'floral gallery' with increasing sales as a result. 

As the marketing manager from Corbis related in his seminar, strong editorial selections presented with clarity that demonstrate an emotive, engaging content sell. That's exactly what we're looking for and we're doing in our own house style. With your continued input Trigger is a real resource of creativity, placing your work infront of design professionals on a daily basis.

If you haven't done so already, make sure you benefit from our new distributors by simply renewing your FREE SUBSCRIPTION today.

Tim

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