Stock Agencies to Work With - Corbis - The Business of Photography by Brad Rickerby

Hailing a Cab, NYC

Corbis (www.corbisimages.com) is the second largest player in the stock photo marketplace. As noted in the last blog post, it has been reported that when combined, Corbis and Getty Images control upwards of 85% of stock photo sales. Every one else, goes industry wisdom, is just picking up the crumbs.

Corbis was founded by Bill Gates in 1989 and continues to be privately owned by him. Based in Seattle, Corbis markets a photographic library of around 10 million images.

Corbis Images markets both Royalty Free and Rights Managed stock photographs, illustrations and CD's. On the editorial side, they market documentary, fine art, archival, news, sports, entertainment and celebrity images. Corbis is know for handling many famous image collections, such as the Ansel Adams collections, and wide ranging vintage images. 

For quite some time, Corbis was not accepting new contributors. They now have a contributor application on their website (http://contributor.corbis.com/workwithus) so it seems that are taking new material.

Seattle Public Market Dusk

While I have worked with Getty, agefotostock and Alamy (the next two agencies I will be posting about) I have not worked with Corbis. As such I have no direct knowledge of their operations, company culture or of how they treat their image suppliers. I do know, however, that they have many, many excellent photographers who work with them and an excellent reputation for quality overall. 

I can only assume, given that excellent reputation, that Corbis is at least as difficult to get to work with as is Getty. You should, by all means, reach out to them. But you might want to have a back up plan as well.

As I mentioned previously, you may want to explore niche stock photo agencies too. These might just be a better fit for your images and quite a bit easier to get to work with than are Corbis or Getty. Just sayin ... 

I will get you information on niche agencies shortly.

Fine Art Color Photograph by Brad Rickerby - Ghostly Runner

Ghostly Runner, Santa Monica, CA

Ghost Runner

Photo by Brad Rickerby

Limited Edition Prints Available

This was a stock shoot for Getty. Typical girl on the beach running at dusk. The concept was fitness, exercise, determination, drive etc. etc. etc. Just another in a long line of standard shoots with an expected outcome to fill the files of a stock agency that has thousands of other images just like it. Right?

Wrong! Not for me. To stand out, to make your product different and therefore more salable ay a premium price, you have to make your image unique. It has to jump off the light table (well, these days, the computer screen - I guess I go back a long way) and say to the buyer, "I am one of a kind. No other image that you can find will be like me".  I repeat this point often, because it is so basic to your survival as a photographer.

To differentiate my image on this day, I had the model, a women, keep running back and forth in front of me. Thirty feet one way, then turn around and go thirty feet back to where she started from. I had her jog rather than run. I knew if she ran fast, I would never get the image I wanted. I set the shutter speed at about a 30th of a second (at around f4) and shot away. In decades of looking at photographs I don't recall seeing many others like this one.

This is another image that has sold well through out the years.

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