Well, I couldn’t put it off any longer. One of the problems that comes with owning your own business is the number of “projects” that are waiting their turn in line. In my studio the line is a long one. There are columns to write, books that need to be completed, this blog, and a whole bunch of other projects aimed at either the educational side of my business or the continual search for cash that the business demands. One of these, my stock photo file, has been successfully ignored for so long even I can’t believe it.

Last night, in a rare ‘what should I work on now?’ moment, I decided the time was right to look through all the images shot for the last few books I’ve written and get them off to my agents.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, ‘stock photography’ is the licensing of images that were taken for jobs or for the heck of it, through agents who represent photographers, for various and sundry purposes that return a percentage of the license price to the photographer, usually 50% of the fee negotiated by the agent. It sounds good, but success is driven by subject matter (and how unique the images are) and by demand for those particular images. There are other considerations, too, but it’s fodder for a long article, not the stuff of blogs. (If you’re interested, though, drop me a note – if enough of you do I will write a thorough article about it.)

OK, so I’ve been shooting for books and web articles for the last several years, along with shoots strictly for the fun of it. We’re talkin’ five years and five books here, and the current total in that image catalog is something like 39,000 images (and those are the edits!). Sorting through them to determine what might be salable, tweaking them in Photoshop, keywording them so editors will see them on the agents’ sites, and burning them to disc is, well, daunting.

But, never one to let the sheer enormity of a task ruin my day (or keep me from watching the latest episode of ‘24’) I dove in.

It took all of five minutes to realize this was not gonna be easy. It would have taken less time, but I can be sorta dense sometimes.

By the end of the evening I’d found, tweaked and finished about three dozen images, beautiful shots of a mother cuddling and breastfeeding her new baby, one of the most evocative things in the world. The original folder contains about 80 images, which means I’ve got roughly 38,920 to go (assuming that I stop shooting immediately, of course).

I’ll keep you posted.