Does the World Really Need Your Photograph?

Question for you. Does the world really need another photograph of an elk?

This is an important question and one that gets raised within the professional community on a regular basis. More than that, photo buyers are often asking the same thing.

Some species (read: charismatic megafauna) are photographed TO DEATH. You know these animals. They are the ones where at any given moment 200 plus photographers are running around places like Yellowstone National Park trying to capture images of.

In some instances, the world just can’t seem to get enough of these photographs. One example of this from my own stock photography files are brown bears in Alaska. I have written about this fact before, but despite the fact that there are thousands of photographers pimping their brown bear photos on stock agencies, these images continue to be in high demand – especially if you are creating high quality work.

But this isn’t the case for other animals. Bears are symbolic. They scream wilderness. And anything and everything having to do with wilderness or threats to it often conjure up images of bears in editors and art directors’ minds.

But what about elk? Or coyotes? Or whitetail deer? Or great blue herons? Or roseate spoonbills, for that matter?

Don’t get me wrong here. I love elk. I love photographing elk. I only recently kicked the addiction of chasing the elk rut up the spine of the Rocky Mountains from Colorado to Alberta every year. And quite frankly, this question has nothing to do with elk at all.

If every photographer you know is photographing the same animals, how do you make a living selling photographs of those animals?

In the case of common species like elk, you have three basic options with one underlying theme.

1.     You can sell fine art prints of elk

2.     You can sell directly to hunting magazines such as Field and Stream or Bugle Magazine

3.     You can sell stock through an agency like Getty or Alamy or your own website

This part is straight forward. This is basically the exact same considerations we make with any photograph: how and where am I going to sell this?

But the difference with a species like elk is that if you are going to sell those photographs, they must be extraordinary – or at least really beautiful, powerful, or unique.

Otherwise, your photographs are in competition with tens of millions of other elk photographs.

Me, I only have about 10 photographs of elk that I make sales on.

10!

And I’m someone who has spent years photographing the elk rut all over the American and Canadian West.

So, if it’s tough to sell photographs of elk, then what’s a wildlife photographer to do?

Photograph the uncommon and what’s taken for granted.

Case in point: a robin pulling a worm out of the ground.

If you live in North America, you have likely watched American robins pull worms from your front yard every spring and summer. Yet, when I do a simple search on Getty for “Robin pulling worm,” I find exactly 1 (one) single photograph of an American robin pulling a worm out of a yard.

Most wildlife photographers don’t sell their work on Getty – even though they are the largest stock photography agency in the world. So, aside from this meaning that Getty is a great place to sell your work because there will be less competition, maybe it’s better we look at a different stock agency that has a lot more wildlife for sale: Alamy.

When I do this same search on Alamy, I am met with 42 images of an American robin pulling up a worm.

A search for “elk bugling” on Alamy, however, returns 1,809 images. And this is just what’s sitting in stock agencies. Big magazines that routinely publish photos of elk like Bugle, North American Elk, Field and Stream, etc. do not typically purchase images from stock agencies but instead tend to work directly with photographers.

Returning back to these 1,809 images of bugling elk here, I can assure you that it is easier to sell a photograph of a robin pulling up a worm when there are only a total of 43 photographs of this across two of the largest stock photography agencies in the world, than it is to sell a photograph of an elk bugling.

It’s basic math.

Oh, and those 43 photographs of robins? In my opinion they are absolutely awful photographs.

So, herein lies the thing that usually determines whether or not a photographer is going to be successful at selling wildlife images. If all you ever photograph is the big charismatic megafauna found in national parks, then you are going to be in competition with every single wildlife photographer on the planet. This fact alone is what will keep you from making sales unless you are an extremely talented artist whose work of common subjects stands out amongst the very best.

Alamy keeps a “Picture Needs” list that you can access and look at once they begin representing you and your work. Currently, there are 251 animals on this list that Alamy is telling wildlife photographers the world over they need photographs of right away. I’m not going to include the entire list in this particular article (that’s coming), but I will share the first few because I think that it makes my point quite well.

1.     Kangaroo Island dunnart

2.     Hispaniolan trogon

3.     Hastings River mouse

4.     Chinese paddlefish

5.     Many-banded krait snake

6.     Psychrolutes marcidus

7.     Anelosimus studiosus

8.     Crimson Rosella

9.     Gulper eel

10.  Barreleye – also known as a spook fish

These are just the ones at the start of the list. And as you can see, species like coyote and elk and wolf are not amongst these. In fact, when I scroll through the entire list of 251 species, there is exact 1 single animal that some of you reading this may actually have in your stock files already: the North American beaver. And the need is specifically “beavers from Yellowstone national park.”

That’s it.

Some other notable entries pop up here like “sloth swimming,” for instance. But to get this shot means you will likely need to travel to one very specific and very remote island off the Caribbean coast of Panama that is also routinely used by narco-traffickers as a stopping point between Columbia and Honduras. Here, you will find the endemic pygmy sloth. And every time you see a clip of sloths swimming on a BBC or National Geographic documentary, it’s of these sloths on this island as they swim between various mangrove islets.

Sure, there are birds on this list as well. None of which are “bald eagle” or “great egret.” Instead, it’s requests for “short tailed Albatross in Alaska” and New Caledonia crow.

Likewise, there are charismatic mammals on here – such as the sloth photos I mentioned. But like “sloth swimming,” we find “puma den.”

I think you get the idea here.

None of this is to say that you need to team up with research expeditions to be able to make a living selling wildlife photographs. Though I can assure you this is an amazing experience and can definitely pay your bills, the fact of the matter is that basically any and every species around you that is not big and exciting also happens to be really great opportunities for you as well.

As I have discussed here before, I’m not a proponent of “shooting for the market.” I photograph what I love to photograph. But with this said, what I love to photograph is rather broad and fluid.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a blind 10 feet off the ground in the middle of a place called Croatan National Forest. Despite the DEET, despite the Thermacell I have running, yellow flies are feasting on my blood every time I stopped swatting long enough to trip my shutter button.

Each day, and there have been 7 of them so far, is broken into two different nesting cavities that Annalise and I are working – one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The nest we are photographing in the morning is a woodpecker’s. Alamy search result for “woodpecker” returns 57,712 images (Getty is 9,138). But this isn’t just any woodpecker. This is the nest of an endangered species known as the red-cockaded woodpecker. Alamy search results turn up 186 hits on red-cockaded woodpeckers. Of this, half are illustrations. The other half that are photographs are 99% portraits. Getty returns only 11 results for red-cockaded woodpecker. Of which, 1 is a pileated woodpecker and 8 might as well have been made with an iPhone. So, I’m set up photographing red-cockaded woodpeckers in flight as they come into the nesting cavity as well as portraits when they land with beaks full of insects.

The nesting cavity we are photographing in the afternoon is of an eastern bluebird. Alamy search results for “eastern bluebird” return 3,653 images. However, this is a unique ecosystem. This is a longleaf pine forest, one of the most endangered forest habitats in the world, and one in which the eastern bluebird cannot survive in without the presence of the red-cockaded woodpecker. So, altering the search terms a bit to “eastern bluebird longleaf pine,” I get a total of 0 (zero) results. Likewise, “eastern bluebird red-cockaded nesting cavity” returns 0 (zero) results.

Personally, I like being in the woods. I like photographing birds. I love woodpeckers. I love eastern bluebirds. Woodpecker and bluebird photos are a dime a dozen, however. Actually, they’re probably cheaper than that in the royalty free stock photography market. But red-cockaded woodpecker photographs are uncommon. Even more so for flight photos. Likewise, Eastern bluebirds in abandoned red-cockaded woodpecker cavities are non-existent in stock agencies.

So, as you can see, I am right where I want to be. I’m photographing species I enjoy. But I am also creating images that are niche and fill gaps as well.

In addition to the stock agencies though, I am also pulling my top tier images from this personal project to be put into my PhotoShelter database for magazines who I normally work directly with their editors. From here, those photos will be put into separate private galleries for several different magazines who I know will likely be interested in these photographs sometime over the next year, and who are set up to be able to download as needed.

I will, of course, make more money selling these photographs directly to the magazines. So, I am prioritizing those photos and those sales above the stock agencies for obvious reasons. These editors get the cream of the crop. Stock agencies get the second-tier stuff.

Sure, I could be in Grand Tetons National Park right now (Yellowstone is closed due to flooding), joining the endless caravan of photographers searching for photographs of grizzly #399 and her cubs. I do love Wyoming in the spring. But instead, I’m out on the coast in the longleaf pine savanna where I could spend every day for an entire year photographing and never come across another photographer, photographing the uncommon.

If you are serious about working with magazines and / or selling your work with stock photography agencies, then you will do well to broaden your horizons some in terms of what you are photographing. Of course, you should always follow your heart and passion. But recognize that some subjects are going to be incredibly difficult to make a living from.