Alexandre Rotenberg's Brutally Honest Guide to Stock Photography & Footage

I have a confession to make. Late last year, after shooting stock photos for some 13 years, I nearly quit the whole stock business. Not because I was unhappy with what I was producing, but because the results simply no longer justified the effort.

It’s easy for us to blame the agencies entirely for cutting our royalties, with Alamy merely the latest greedy clowns to join the party, but at some point I had to take a hard look at my own failing business strategy as well and what I saw wasn’t particularly pretty.

Comfort Zone Shooting

For the most part, I simply wasn’t producing enough work that was commercially interesting even with the unique perspectives that a drone offers.

As you know, I did a hell of a lot of travelling, mostly to places I would have visited anyway, and came back with a ton of random shots. There was nothing necessarily wrong with them and they would have sold well 10-15 years ago. But nowadays, the market requires more specialisation – more on this later.

When I did shoot something specific, it was often a place that was already heavily saturated. Even then, I was usually competing against local photographers who knew the location better, had better access and could return again and again in better conditions. Not exactly a winning strategy, hence the low ROI.

Book Cover Obsession

In hindsight, I was also far too obsessed with book covers and still am to a certain degree.

They’re great fun to create and flexible since you can shoot in all sorts of “bad lighting”. Also, there’s a legacy element for me as there really is something special about walking into a bookshop and seeing your work staring back at you from a shelf. But sentiment doesn’t pay the bills.

After building a portfolio of nearly 7,000 book-cover images, so far this year I’ve licensed just four covers and the amounts were not even that interesting.

September to December traditionally produces stronger results for me, so perhaps the year can still recover somewhat, but so far I’ve been disappointed.

I’ll go into much more detail about the book-cover market in another post. For now, I’ll leave it at this: just because something isn’t working particularly well for my niche and style doesn’t mean it won’t work for yours.

Anyway, enough doom and gloom.

I promise the rest of this post will be more positive because this is really about what I’ve done to change and hopefully reinvigorate my failing stock business.

Shooting for Amazing Aerial has made me completely change the way I shoot

A small caveat before I continue. I promote Amazing Aerial as an Ambassador, but the purpose of this post isn’t to promote them. It’s simply to tell my story and explain how my thinking has changed.

I joined Amazing Aerial late last year, shortly after my trip to Madrid and Toledo, but initially didn’t upload very much.

To be honest, I was highly suspicious. After so many years in this industry, I’ve become jaded. Everything ends up on Getty and Shutterstock anyway to be sold for pathetic subscriptions, I thought.

I genuinely thought Amazing Aerial might turn out to be another Robert Harding-type situation where exclusive content ends up licensing for only slightly better than microstock prices.

Hugo Kurk, a Success Story

Things started changing when I became friends/colleagues with Hugo Kurk and watched first-hand as his portfolio and results grew at a frankly ridiculous pace.

It wasn’t just his strong Dutch Calvinist work ethic that caught my attention. More importantly, it was what he was shooting. He’s so deliberate on his research and execution while sharing pretty much everything openly on his YouTube channel.

Watching his approach made me realise that I didn’t need to completely reinvent the wheel. I could adapt parts of his workflow to my own circumstances, which I’m slowly doing.

It’s really not rocket science although rockets would be a cool niche – 5 examples

Amazing Aerial runs a fun internal challenge for the friendly community of contributors around the broad theme of “My Changing World.”

The idea is to create content around the enormous changes taking place around us: modern infrastructure, technology, energy transition, the move away from fossil fuels, large-scale construction projects, new transport systems, industry and so on.

Basically what appears in the first few pages at Amazing Aerial’s collection on Adobe Stock Premium.

As you probably know by now, I live in Portugal. Portugal may not have the same level of industrial infrastructure as Northern Europe or East Asia, but there are still plenty of interesting and universal commercial subjects to photograph here.

And, of course, I can apply the same thinking whenever I travel.

Here are five examples from my portfolio

Example 1

Aerial view of a blue electric car parked in a charging station next to a solar panel array

Instead of simply photographing a solar farm, combining solar power with an electric vehicle immediately tells a broader story about electrification and the energy transition away from fossil fuels.

Example 2

Aerial view of a dense cityscape with uniform buildings stretching towards a power plant with towering smokestacks, Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

Again, it’s not just a cityscape. It’s a cityscape connected to energy production, urbanisation, industry and pollution. Very ugly scene that will soon produce some pretty results.

Example 3

Aerial view of Praia Vermelha with foamy waves crashing on the sand, shadows of people and visible plastic pollution in Rio de Janeiro, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Environmental issues are another huge universal theme. The fact that the location is not known adds value.

Example 4

Aerial view of the modern residential complex at Quinta da Marinha featuring white villas with geometric roofs, private swimming pools, and lush pine trees in Cascais, Lisbon, Portugal

Architecture, urban development, luxury housing and changing lifestyles all provide potential commercial concepts. This image is a commercial license since I’m not focusing on just one of the houses.

Example 5

View of people surfing and swimming in the Atlantic Ocean at Matosinhos beach with industrial port infrastructure in the background

This is probably one of my favourite combinations. Leisure and industry occupying exactly the same landscape. It’s visually interesting, but it also tells a story.

Must keep on building my portfolio

So far my Amazing Aerial portfolio has grown to just over 2,700 images and videos, from which I’ve earned just under $500. Still early days but I’m optimistic.

More importantly, it has changed the way I look at potential subjects. Next I’ll discuss a neat tool for research on where to shoot.

Introducing OpenGridWorks

In one of the Amazing Aerial weekly talks, Paul Prescott mentioned a neat free tool called OpenGridWorks.com. Although it wasn’t built for photographers, it’s a surprisingly useful location-scouting tool for stock shooters.

OpenGridWorks brings together public datasets showing power plants, transmission lines, substations, data centres, gas pipelines, submarine communication cables and even planned transmission projects. As usual if you’re on the premium plan you get access to a lot more information.

Here’s more details on what’s available on the free version.

So yeah, I’m playing around and scouting some locations to shoot next, both locally and on my travels using this tool.

Follow the rules

The usual disclaimer applies when photographing infrastructure or potentially sensitive locations.

Check local regulations, airspace restrictions, privacy requirements and any specific limitations surrounding critical infrastructure. Obtain authorisations where required.

A drone with a good telephoto camera can also be extremely useful, since it allows you to photograph certain subjects legally from a safe distance while still capturing useful detail provided, of course, that the flight itself is permitted.

Now for my shameless plug-in – I do have an eBook out on the subject.

What’s next for me?

I’ll be staying in Portugal until late September. It’s a small country geographically, but there’s still a hell of a lot I haven’t properly explored from this new perspective.

I’m heading to Coimbra next week and perhaps Évora the week after.

The next time you hear from me will be in my August earnings report, where I have a special announcement that I want to make. Wishing you a nice summer holidays.

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I’m Alex, eccentric, based in Lisbon, and on a mission to explore every corner of the globe while capturing stock images and footage along the way.

For the past 13 years, I’ve been grinding as a travel photographer/videographer and freelance writer. Along the way I’ve also written The Brutally Honest Guide to Microstock Photography, a book packed with war stories and practical tips for anyone crazy enough to enter this business and more recently, The Brutally Honest Guide to Drone Laws in Europe.