Royalty Free Photography and The Creative Eye photographers cooperative.

When the ASMP decided to assist the organization of the cooperative agency called Creative Eye, the first giant objection I had beyond the sad attempt at a creative name, was the fact that the organization was absolutely, concretely, opposed to having a division of it's stock photography represented as Royalty Free. Granted, these were the early days of the stock photography revolution and digital photography was pretty much in it's infancy, but to me, the writing was on the wall. The only companies making decent money in the stock photography business were PhotoDisc, Corbis, and Digital Stock. All of these companies were getting the lion's share of the market with their CD collections of Royalty Free images organized by theme. Bandwidth on the internet was still too narrow for most people to permit digital delivery, but that was obviously right around the corner and images were going to be available fast and cheap 24/7

To make things worse, Creative Eye was struggling. Initially, membership was relatively inexpensive and many of us jumped onboard. It was a beginning to bringing to the profession of photography something it still needs to this day: Unification. But when the banks pulled funding after 911, CE was in Dire Straights. They reached out to the community with the bad news of what it was going to take to keep the ship afloat: Nearly $800.00 from every existing member just to get through the next two quarters. That's when I wondered out loud, why are we not offering Royalty Free Stock Photography? There is a hungry hungry market for this product. Thousands of photographers are willing to produce it and accept the ridiculous commissions of 20 cents on the dollar. Further, when companies like iStockPhoto offer discounted credits and other promotional incentives, the artist is the entity who ultimately pays for the promotion, while the agency makes sometimes more than 80% of the proceeds. How many photographers would've jumped at the chance to earn 75% of the proceeds had Creative Eye jumped into the market offering what the market wanted more than anything to buy? I say that CE's money problems would've ended abruptly!

One of the amazing things that PhotoShelter has brought to me as a business owner is that now I have an all encompassing e-commerce solution that allows me to earn 90% of the proceeds of any sale. 10% goes to PhotoShelter for the e-commerce fee, but that's it. All I need to do is promote and populate my stock photo galleries and I can choose which images are Royalty Free and which will be Rights Managed.

I still wish Creative Eye would have flourished though. The Profession of Photography needs a unifying element to bring community, consistency and best practices to this industry.