Best Business Practices for Photographers [225]
You might try creating several boilerplate licenses that are PLUS compliant. Suppose you want one so that you can send images to a prospective client for their non-exclusive review for the next month. Take a look at Figure 26.28.
Figure 26.28
The PLUS Licensing window Media Summary in the Terminology panel of HindSight's suite, showing a one-month license for internal review only.
Figure 26.29 shows what it would look like if you were generating it on the PLUS website.
Figure 26.29
The PLUS Licensing Generator on the PLUS website, showing a one-month license for all uses.
Suppose you regularly do public relations event work for businesses, and you want them to be able to use those images for all manner of PR for a period of one year. Figure 26.30 shows the block of text you could cut and paste from Terminology and use for all your ingestions.
Figure 26.30
The PLUS Licensing window Media Summary in the Terminology panel of HindSight's suite, showing a one-year license for PR uses.
And again, generating the text on the PLUS website would look like what you see in Figure 26.31.
Figure 26.31
The PLUS Licensing Generator on the PLUS website, showing a one-year license for PR uses.
What other types of licenses might you use? For wedding photographers, the license should specify "personal use," so a bride does not think she has the right to use photographs of her when she starts a bridal boutique or give them to the gown maker so the gown maker thinks she can use them for marketing. For photographers who are covering events and selling images of athletes competing, "personal use" license language embedded would cover similar potential misuses. The list goes on and on.
To explore PLUS licensing for yourself, visit www.useplus.com, select the Use PLUS menu, and choose License Generator to make up your own licenses. Before you do that, however, explore the website, read about the PLUS Packs, and otherwise familiarize yourself with all that PLUS has to offer—free to photographers.
Chapter 27 Stock Solutions: Charting Your Own Course Without the Need for a "Big Fish" Agency
So, you've preserved your rights to exploit your images beyond the original assignment. Perhaps you've got a large library of analog images that have been gathering dust and depreciating, as outlined in Chapter 25. Determining the best outlet for your images is crucial to having your images seen by photo buyers and generating revenue.
Nowadays, there are a number of solutions. Prior to the Internet and digital files, most photographers delivered their images to one (or a select few) agents. The physical distribution of these images was time-consuming and costly. Further, to make the most out of your stock, the images had to be originals or high-quality duplicates in order to make the sale. Now, the wide variety of domestic and international outlets for images to be viewed and licensed has grown to a point where you have several options.
What's the Deal with Photo Agents These Days?
When photo agencies were handling physical images, there was a large amount of backend work. Often the agent handled processing, writing captions, affixing those caption labels to slide mounts, categorizing them, and filing them in their library, integrated into the tens or hundreds of thousands of other images. Each time a request came in, someone had to review the request, go around to all the file cabinets, pull the images, place them in slide pages, make a photocopy of the page, put it in an overnight package, and ship it. Then they had to call to determine usage, secure the safe return of those images, and re-file them for future licensing. During this time, those images were unavailable to other prospective photo buyers, and for timely news stories, the photo agents would produce duplicates of the images, splitting the cost of them with you against future sales. They would then re-caption and re-categorize the duplicated