STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY:
thoughts, experiences, insights

Ask anyone who ever submitted images to a stock agency about reviews and for sure you’ll hear a lot of complaints. For us photographers, a rejected image is not only wasted time, effort and sometimes a lot of money but also a blow to our creative self-esteem. We react by getting angry, frustrated, sad, annoyed and we start questioning our skill and talent. These are not good feelings and no matter how long you have worked in this industry or how successful you are there is a good chance you still feel like that once in a while.

So are reviewers good or evil? Mind you, I never been a reviewer myself and I am a successful stock photographer so my opinion here might be a bit biased. However I will try to be as objective as I can. I think the answer to that question is (as to absolutely all questions) – “It depends”.

First of all, the stock photography industry is still divided at this point, with traditional stock agencies or “macrostock” on one side and crowd-sourcing or “microstock” on the other. The difference between these is not so much in image prices – there is a strong trend of price converging between “macro” and “micro” – but how the business is run and where the agency gets it’s content. Historically submitters to “macros” were mostly professional photographers, i.e. people who knew how to take good quality photos. If the photos were refused, it was a reviewer’s judgment call that these photos are not marketable and won’t sell, or they’d limit certain subjects because some categories were already overpopulated in their collection. So you think about a concept, do your marketing research, spend money and time on the photoshoot and post-processing and then someone looks at your work and says – “Nah… don’t think we need that”. Frustrating? Yes. But at least they don’t tell you that your work is not professional enough. Microstock agencies do.

The reason is they emerged as businesses based on the “crowd-sourcing” model, which means anyone who had some sort of a camera and was able to find the shutter button on it could submit images for review. It was absolutely necessary for them to have a strict quality control system. Some of the stuff the reviewers had to to look at (and still do sometimes) was just God-awful. The rejection reasons were worded to address particular technical flaws – like focus issues (some submitters didn’t know they have to look at their images at 100% resolution), noise (for images taken with point-and-shoot digital cameras), lighting problems (for images with blown out highlights or clipped shadows), digital artifacts (for JPEGs saved many times with high level of compression), and so on. They felt they needed to educate their submitters since many of them didn’t have much experience with stock photography.

These days it is pretty hard to get accepted as a contributing photographer to top “micro” agencies – they all demand professional quality of your initial “sample” submission. Many photographers submitting to micros are professionals, some of them migrated from traditional stock agencies, however rejection reasons stay the same. That, combined with the fact that reviewers are human beings, sometimes leads to problems: rejection reasons get misunderstood, blown out of proportions, or plain abused. Usually one can notice when an agency goes on a “campaign” to eliminate some problem or other. For example, some customers complain about “noisy” images. Scores of images get rejected for “noise” as a result, even those taken under bright studio lighting with a Nikon D3X at ISO 100. The reason to go on such “campaign” is valid – the noise levels produced by cheap point-and-shoot cameras are unacceptable in stock photography. The result sometimes is counter-productive: high quality images get rejected by some reviewers who don’t quite understand which levels of noise are acceptable. I’ve heard stories about vectors rejected for noise. Another agency decides to limit the number of similar shots in their library, which is a very understandable goal. There are people who take 50 shots of the same object at slightly different angles and scale and then submit them one by one, littering the libraries with nearly identical shots. But then we see images rejected as “similars” that are not similar at all – out of 2 shots of a model a frowning one gets accepted and the smiling one gets rejected. Or a landscape orientation get through but portrait one doesn’t. Yet on another site a common rejection reason is for “compression artifacts”(in an image converted from RAW and saved once with the highest JPG setting).

The list of examples can go on and on. To add to the common misunderstanding of quality issues, there is also conflict of interest to consider. Practically every micro agency allows their reviewers to have their own portfolio on the site. An unscrupulous reviewer could reject images if they can compete with their work, or (and this did happen) reject your image only to duplicate your shot and submit it as their own. Unfortunately, dealing with unreasonable rejections is a part of the stock photographer’s job. In an ideal world all reviewers would be highly trained professionals that would always make informed and unbiased decisions. I do hope the level of reviewers’ training improves on microstock agencies. But even if it does, there will always be a human factor – someone wouldn’t get or like the image you submitting and it’s not going to make it in.

Some agencies don’t have reviewing process at all. They let their customers to look at parts of the image at 100% magnification and decide for themselves if the quality is good enough for them. But most still employ reviewers to go though thousands of images submitted to them every day – to ensure quality, avoid legal issues, moderate content. Some of them will misunderstand directions given to them, make mistakes or simply won’t like your style.

So how can we deal with the rejections? The best thing to do is not get emotional about it. I know it’s easier said then done, but remember your effort is not wasted. If you’re convinced that your image is good and will sell, you may try to re-submit it with a note to reviewers explaining your point of view or submit it to another agency. If you suspect the reviewer might be right, then try to improve it and call it a learning experience. You can even set up your own site and try selling on your own and be your own reviewer. Dealing with rejections is just part of the job. Eventually you get used to it.