A Photographer Turns the Table
Two years ago, photographer Ron Chapple decided he didn’t like existing RF (Royalty-free) deals “because of the low percentage of each sale paid to the photographers. The big guys pay south of 20 percent and the highest offer I ever had for RF is 17-1/2 percent.” So, Ron decided to roll his own, and early in April, Thinkstock went online.
“It’s a community concept,” Chapple says. Thinkstock is “a group of content- or artist-specific e-commerce enabled stock photo Web sites.”
Small and focused, Cloudstock.com was the first site to go live, with 418 images of clouds (all Ron’s). Another site, Wiredstock.com, has just gone live with 2,400 technology-related images (again, all Ron’s), and more sites are in the planning stage, covering all the high volume stock photo categories: Lifestyles, travel, concepts, still life, and textures.
“The community part is real important to me,” Chapple says of the Thinkstock collection of sites. “The big guys (Getty and Corbis) are run by money managers and Wall Street, and something needed to be done for the artists. Although I don’t want to position ourselves as ‘something the industry needs,’ our original goal a year and a half ago was content, not a major branded site.”
Chapple acknowledges that thus far, traffic on Cloudstock is “not tremendous — we’ve had less than 10,000 unique visitors. And we’re still doing our usability testing,” he reports (and borne out by a couple of issues I encountered with the Cloudstock Lightbox Manager while preparing this article). Chapple says that “the folks who have registered on the site, however, are blue chip — they are buying our images and CDs.”
As much as anything else, Cloudstock was designed to test the waters and get Thinkstock’s systems up to speed. Those systems include Crosfield Magnascan drum scans (yielding 60MB RGB master image files!) and the usual suite of software. Adobe Photoshop plus MainEvent’s PhotoScripter accomplish most of the imaging tasks and Canto Cumulus is used to manage the workflow (a legacy — Thinkstock will move onto a custom-built browser-based image manager shortly). Next month, a new business management package comes online with the requisite accounting and financial tools. The site is running on a Sun Sparc Enterprise server.
Content is (Still) King
With over twenty-two years as a shooter and fifteen in stock, Chapple attributes his success to “having the content, the right pictures.” While Ron declines to quote exact numbers, he does acknowledge that he’s been the number one seller at FPG for many years. “I am represented in many image categories, across FPG’s entire collection.” Over 1,000 of those images are available at the FPG Web site (point your browser at www.fpg.com and do a search for ‘ph:2338’ – no quotes).
For the last seven years, Chapple has shot no assignment work at all. “Stock, for me, meant freedom to create,” he says. “In terms of an agency relationship, FPG has been great-and it may continue to be a success for me. But, I’m doing Thinkstock from the Royalty-Free point of view, and I’m putting a few eggs into some other baskets.”
In so doing, Chapple is changing hats — from photographer to agent. “I feel great about that,” he says. “I would hope I understand what drives photographers. I’ve had great relationships with the folks at FPG and hope I can make it work from both sides now. Part of this is a reaction to the corporate aggregation of the last three years, and the other part is because I can build on the opportunity.”
More Creative, More Profitable
Chapple believes Thinkstock can provide image buyers with a better product. “Getty has the potential of over art directing shoots andending up with a sameness to their images. Art Directors don’t want to be told how or what to buy; if the GettyOne and Corbis sites aggravate a client, that cuts out 40 percent of the traditional rights protected (and 75 percent of the royalty free) image choices. Plus, if money continues to be pulled away from photographers’ businesses, creative quality will ultimately go down.”
“There’s never been a successful aggregation of creative talent in this industry that has been for the benefit of the artists,” he adds. “While I certainly don’t have to do this – I am still doing well with FPG – I see a business opportunity to create a great community of stock photography sites,” So, Ron Chapple is going for it.
Read more by Sam Merrell.
This article was last modified on March 12, 2022
This article was first published on May 24, 2000
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