Since leaving the Aurora Photos photo agency (now Cavan Images) in 2019 after many great and storied years, I have been hunkered down, licensing stock on my own. I’ve had good success and I enjoy fostering that personal connection with licensing clients, but the reach is limited, and negotiations can be time-consuming.
Parallel to organizing nearly a million images for high res scanning and fine art printing in the last couple years, I’ve also been organizing and post processing thousands of images with a mind to an eventual return to another agency for stock licensing.
After a trial run, and some discussions with the Adobe folks, I found Adobe Stock Premium to be a great home for my lifestyle, documentary, food, and outdoor images, and in the last couple months I’ve begun filling up my account in earnest. So far I have about 500 images, with a goal of 2000 by the end of the year.
I learned a lot about stock licensing from the many mentors at Aurora. I think it was Aurora photographer and principal Corey Rich who said licensing stock through an agency is like building a low-risk medium reward retirement account, and he was right. To that end, it’s important to see it as a volume-over-time investment, rather than thinking you will stroke it rich with a few killer images. Definitely there were single images in my Aurora archive that hit it big, but they were never the ones I expected would even sell. And now with Adobe, some of my historically top-licensing images didn’t even make the cut.
So, I’m trying to not sweat the details, and to be open to what they feel the market bears.
Click here to check out my stock images with Adobe Stock Premium
If you’d like to hear more in-depth experiences and thoughts about stock representation, let me know in the comments below and I will put together a blog post about it.
Published on Jul 03, 2023
Filed under: Behind the Scenes,Outdoors,Personal Work,Photography,Uncategorized
Tags: adobe, adobe stock, aurora, licensing, photographer, photography, premium, stock photography | No Responses