Trigger & The Big Boys

In a world of bland mega agencies, Trigger occupies a small but perfectly formed creative atoll amidst a sea awash with stock dirge. Millions of images you wouldn't want to use and the rare one you might find if you have the patience of a saint. Art buyers face a frustrating search and are increasingly rejecting what has been, in favour of something new. As a result after years of filling their galleries with literally millions of average staged shots the big agencies are now seeing the light and adding 'creative' galleries to their stock pile. Welcome to the modern world big agencies.

As a small agency Trigger cannot compete on size and we don't want to, we're not designed to do that. It's not how big you are it's what you do with it, afterall when did big equal good and small equal not so good. Trigger is small, we're niche, we're boutique, we're specialist, we love creative stuff and we want our carefully selected photographers to fill our galleries with inspiring work offering art buyers a real new creative choice of images for their projects.

The big boys have recognised that niche can be good and so they've been chatting to us over the past few months. The exciting news is that most of the work in our galleries is now being marketed to a whole new clientele through some of these big boy agencies including Agefotostock with offices in Spain, Paris and New York, DPA Pictue-Alliance in Germany, StockPhotoPro and Glasshouse Images in USA and now Alamy based in UK.

Alamy have 17.58 million images to date, which in anyones books is big, very big. Did we go grovelling to their door in the vain hope they would be interested in a small agency? No, they approached us. The result is we now have over 5000 images online at Alamy and this number will increase as our photographers submit new work. If you've ever tried to get images accepted by Alamy you'll know how difficult it can be. Their QC (quality control) is infamous for rejecting the slightest image aberration and if they reject one image they reject them all!! At Trigger we love aberrations if they add to an image and so this makes the decision by Alamy even more revolutionary.

Congratulations to our photographers for creating great images and to Alamy for recognising their creativity.

Tim

New Photographer - New Licensing Opportunity

Luc Coiffait

Unlike some photographers Luc doesn't choose to focus on one type of photography. He fulfills his love for photography by covering a broad range, including Fashion, Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Landscape and more. Now setting up in London he recently completed his commercial Photographic Practice degree at Newcastle College and has just made his first licensing sale at Trigger.

New Photographer Cristina Carra Caso

Mysterious yellowing landscapes with dreamlike qualities typify the emotive work of new contributor Cristina Carra Caso to Trigger Image.

Patience & Persistence Pays

One of the best ways to make more image sales is to get more images past our editors at Trigger. That's no mean feat as they're renowned for being very picky. The longer you then leave your stock shots in our galleries the more opportunity you will have to sell licenses for your work. If you only submit a handful of images you're going to be frustrated by the lack of activity so you want to build your licensing folio over time until it represents a variety of emotive content. Just like any folio of work instant sales are a dream we'd like to come true but the reality is marketing your work takes time, money and patience. German photographer Alaya Gadeh is a prime example of how to develop a great folio and be rewarded by having the patience for the right client to use her work. Despite being relatively new to photography, having never sold a picture in her life, she persisted with her creativity and updated her licensing folio almost daily, now she is getting results. With over 1000 images in her licensing folio she has filled the floral gallery and the right client was sure to spot her work sooner rather than later. After a 12 month wait The Almanac Gallery based in The Kings Road in London spotted the potential in her folio. Alaya now has a range of stunning floral greetings cards about to hit the shops across England. She has also licensed her work to Italy's biggest magazine L'Espresso and is our top seller at Art.com. Watch this space for what happens next for Alaya.

The Spanish are Enchanted by Vanesa Muñoz

Spanish Publisher Espasa are licensing imagery by Trigger photographer Vanesa Muñoz.
Since its foundation, its mission has been to promote the cultural development of Spain and Latin America through a wide range of works complemented by the best fiction and non fiction today. 'A Dark Enchantment' by Roland Vernon originally published by Transworld Publishers in UK in 2008 is now set to be reproduced in Spanish with the cover by photographer Vanesa Muñoz.

First Sale for New Trigger Photographer

Elizabeth May from California joined Trigger only a few short weeks ago but has already made her first sale. Her work has been selected by Harlequin Publishers in Australia and will appear on a book cover entitled 'Bloodline'.

Read it now listen to it

Hey, congratulations go out to Trigger photographer Martina Zancan who has just had her book cover for Pan Macmillan Publishers reproduced as an audio cd cover. Chao.

New distributors to work with Trigger

Just like every other business on this little spinning planet we're always on the lookout for new customers. Thanks to the web and digital techno stuff artists are in the fortunate position of being able to communicate, sell and deliver imagery in an instant, any time of day or night to anyone with a computer and a credit card. This is the easy bit of course, the tough part is finding the new clients who want to part with real cash. This usually means investing our money or a great deal of time or both in the pursuit of people who want to use your images in exchange for hard currency. As a small agency with a niche licensing art product we have to search even harder to find those specialist clients who recognise the value of creativity. We're not providing the safe, standard stock image you can find on most sites at knock down prices. We're filling our galleries with new inspiring emotive imagery that will captivate our audience.

Trigger clients include the BBC, The Almanac Gallery, Random House Publishing in England, Germany and Spain, Transworld, Orion and Little Brown Publishing in UK, L'Espresso Editoriale in Italy, Espasa Calpe and Editoriale Planeta in Spain, jewellery designers in Paris, interior designers in Sweden, Harlequin Publishers in Australia and JWT advertising in Dubai. Our reach is broadening and we're becoming a real resource for art buyers who are looking for something different.

In our first 18 months of business we've been putting out the feelers, dipping our toes in the water and sometimes getting our fingers burnt. We've doubled our library to 9000 images and now we're attracting attention from other much larger image agencies who see the value in our highly selective image content. This is an exciting time and over the coming months we'll be working closely with image agencies ic.worldwide in USA and Polfoto in Scandinavia to broaden our reach to new clients by utilising their extensive marketing power. We've spent the past few months working day and night preparing all our contributors images. Now we're ready!

To benefit from this new marketing opportunity all our photographers need to update their FREE subscription at: http://triggerimage.co.uk/form.html . You don't have to do anything else, we have done all the work for you and it's totally free. This will ensure more clients see your stock imagery and ultimately your folio.

Best
Tim