Rangefinder Magazine
Features - June 2001

How Photographers Can Use the Internet by Larry Brownstein
How Big a Part Should the World Wide Web Play in Business?

As a photographer you have no doubt wondered if you should be using the World Wide Web as part of your business plan. Should the web be part of your marketing plan? Should the web be an integral part of your image sales and image delivery process? Should it be an online portfolio or a full-blown storefront?

The World Wide Web has been both a useful marketing tool and a lucrative sales channel to me. I hope to show you how you, too, can benefit from the web.

Photographer Gerald Bybee, www.bybee.com.

Several years ago I was bemoaning the fact that my stock photography sales from the five agencies that represented me were beginning to decline. Frankly, I had never been completely satisfied with my stock photography sales, but when they began to decline I became quite disillusioned with stock photography. I recognized that the new royalty-free business model, pioneered by PhotoDisc, was probably one of the reasons that my stock photo sales were going down. However, I was quite resistant to working with PhotoDisc or any of the other royalty-free companies (Corbis, Digital Stock, etc.), thinking that they were going to destroy the business with their low pricing and generous rights to images. It took a few years until my declining sales forced me to open my eyes to other opportunities and I began to work with PhotoDisc.

Once I received my first commission check I never regretted my decision. And why is PhotoDisc so successful? PhotoDisc pioneered the sale of stock photography on CD-ROMs. Each disc has a hundred or more images in a category. The categories range from business to landscapes to backgrounds. Many ad agencies, graphic artists, etc., found the convenience, the price and the generous rights to be irresistible. This business model got the company off and running. Meanwhile, the Internet started becoming popular in the mid 90s and PhotoDisc began selling and delivering images on the web. Within a few years PhotoDisc’s web sales outpaced their disc sales. It is no wonder. Searching for images on the web and getting immediate feedback, and delivery was even more irresistible than the discs. And compared to the model of a traditional stock agency (call the agency, wait for a submission that might not be satisfactory, negotiations, billing, etc.) it was lightning fast. As PhotoDisc has grown and as I have placed more images with them, my commissions have increased and I am once again feeling quite good about my efforts in stock photography. Besides the financial rewards it is also enjoyable to see my photos being widely used and to stumble upon them being used in ads, calendars, etc.

With this success it was natural that I began to wonder if I could use the Internet directly rather than rely upon PhotoDisc. I reasoned that if I offered my images via my website I could pocket 100% of the sales. And I had plenty of images to market that PhotoDisc had already passed up. So I had a great incentive to develop my presence on the web.

	Photographer Pete Turner, www.peteturner.com.

However, my first step was deliberately small. I was not prepared to invest the time and money in developing an automated storefront. I began by developing an online portfolio. In this way I would learn about the technology and be in a better position to gauge whether it was sensible to go the next step to developing an automated storefront.
Once my online portfolio was up and running I had to learn how to get visitors. I learned this lesson well, to the extent that I have received as many as 700 visitors in a day without paying for ads. On an average, the site receives nearly 100 visitors daily.

I was still not prepared to take the plunge to develop a fully automated stock photography site. However, I did want to learn a bit more about e-commerce. So I began to develop a line of photographic screen savers of my images (which I developed myself using an application called Screen Saver Toolkit, which runs on PCs, and creates screensavers for PCs) and enhanced my website to allow visitors to download a limited-time, limited-content screen saver. If the potential customer likes the evaluation copy and wants to order the product, he does so by paying online through a third-party which takes a percentage of the profits for transmitting the unlock code and handling the billing for me. This foray into e-commerce was extremely informative to me. I learned how to create a fully automated storefront on the web! I was selling screensavers for $9.95 each with no overhead and no expense to me after the initial investment in software and development time. I still had my website hosting fee, which I would have been paying anyway to have my online portfolio on the web.

However, I found there was a resistance to paying the small fee. For every one hundred to two hundred downloads of the evaluation screensaver I made one sale. (Not a good ratio!) I concluded that the average surfer is used to getting things for free on the web and is unwilling to spend even a small fee. It became clear that if I was going to sell stock photos—for more than $9.95, I might add—from my website I could not rely upon the random web surfer.

I now attribute PhotoDisc’s success to its great commitment to marketing through catalogs, print ads, e-cards through Amazon.com, etc. These ads are seen by ad agencies, graphic artists and other photo buyers. PhotoDisc’s great technology, and huge database of high quality images are necessary parts of their success, but the marketing is key!

I would need a marketing plan and an advertising budget. And I realized that this investment would need to be preceded by getting more of my images available online—another large expense of time and money. It was not clear to me that prospective clients would come to my site rather than going to PhotoDisc or Corbis, etc. So I chose to go no further in the direction of creating an automated stock photo site.

Photographer Penny Gentieu, www.babystock.com.

So, given that I have not realized the original goal, has the journey been useful? What have been the payoffs of my website? I certainly have no regrets. My site has allowed me to inexpensively show my (online) portfolio. This has led to opportunities that I otherwise would not have had including digital imaging assignments for an electronics company, providing décor art for a doctor’s office, and the opportunity to be one of several photographers in a soon-to-be-launched California Stock website.

The producer of the California Stock site is already successfully running New York Stock Photography at www.newyorkstockphoto.com. The owner, Peter Bennett, found my site through an Internet search and called me and recruited me into the California Stock project. As far as I am concerned, this is perfect—another Internet-based outlet for my photography without the large investment in time and money.

So I am quite pleased with the results of my website and recommend it as a valuable marketing tool for photographers. But how does one get on the net? Do you have to be a programmer, or a computer genius? Definitely not.


If you enjoy computers and have ever done any kind of computer programming you will find that writing HTML (hypertext markup language), the language of the web, is simple. For example, this line of code:
<B><I>Joe Smith Photography</I></B>

tells a web browser to put the text in italics and a bold font. Couldn’t be easier right?

Every HTML statement begins with one or more tags, such as <B>. Every statement closes with the matching end tag, which includes the slash, such as </B>. Some tags are used to format text, others are used to format images (such as, the <IMG SRC> tag) and others specify links ( such as, <A HREF>).

One of the great things about the web is that once you find a website that you like you can find the code for the site. The code must be downloaded to your web browser in order for your web browser to read and display the site. Therefor, the code is available for you to see and to learn and even borrow from. Each of the popular browsers provides a way for you to see the actual text downloaded.

For those who are interested in learning to develop their own site I can offer some references. These books are listed in their order of importance:

Creative html Design by Lynda Weinman and William Weinman. This book provides many examples of HTML code and shows what the code looks like in a web browser. There is no better way to learn HTML!

Designing Web Graphics by Lynda Weinman. This book covers issues critical to a photographer, allowing you to create web images that look good and download fast too. Issues include resizing, sharpening, compressing, file formats, etc.

JavaScript For The World Wide Web by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith. Once you have mastered the basics of HTML you will want to add some “rollovers”, improve the user-interface and add some smarts to the site. Javascript is a great way to do this.

The JavaScript book is somewhat advanced and definitely requires some programming experience. But don’t worry, because there are many programs you can use which can create JavaScript for you, including the latest version of Adobe Photoshop.

Photoshop, or a similar image-editing tool, is a necessity to allow you to prepare your images for the web.
When I began to plan my website the most important thing I did was to find several sites, not all photographer’s sites, that impressed me. Among them were:

Photographer Gerald Bybee, www.bybee.com.

Photographer Pete Turner, www.peteturner.com.

Photographer Penny Gentieu, www.babystock.com, see page 46.

I also encourage you to visit my site at www.larrybrownstein.com to see how I partitioned my site into galleries ) and used JavaScript to aid in navigation.

For those of you who have no interest in developing your own site, I have some recommendations on finding and working with a web developer. If possible, work with someone who is personally recommended to you and look at some of their work on the web. If you find a developer another way, check references and look at their work on the web.

Once you have chosen the developer the most important thing is to clearly communicate what you want in a site. I recommend using Photoshop or at least pen and paper to diagram what each and every page of the site will look like. Leave nothing to the imagination or you may be unpleasantly surprised. Once you have defined your requirements a developer can make a proposal to you.

Once your site is developed you need to have it hosted by a Presence Provider (PP). Some Internet Service Providers (ISP) will host your site for free if you already have Internet access through them. This may be a good option for you. However, I chose a PP called ProHosting—www.prohosting.com—because I wanted the benefits of the excellent customer support, and the wonderful statistics that are automatically compiled for me and available online. These statistics give me a wonderful picture of who visits my site and allows me to make educated business decisions.

ProHosting’s basic service is $17.95 per month.

Now that your site is up and running you will want to get people to your site. The most important thing to do is to add a keywords metatag to your main document, usually index.html. Add all the keywords that someone might use to find your site on a search. Then go to the main search engine sites and click on Add URL to let the search engines know about your site. Most importantly go to www.yahoo.com and register your site there! If you are on Yahoo! You will get traffic!

Good luck with your forays into cyberworld. I hope it will inspire and re-invigorate your business as it has mine!

Larry Brownstein is a travel, and landscape photographer who is represented by PhotoDisc, The Stock Shop, Rainbow, and Ro-Ma stock. To see a gallery of his work go to www.larrybrownstein.com. Contact him at larry@larrybrownstein.com or by telephone at (800) 240-1669.