How would you like to have a person unknown to you before calling in to ask if he could send you a check in the hundreds? Sounds like the Nigerian scam? It might, but with a solid stock archive this will be true.

After Lance et Compte, Infoman and Air Farce, one of my photo will be used in a TV show. The Rick Mercer Report called me last week to inquire about one of my photos, and today they confirmed that it will be used in this week Tuesday show.

So you are following my blog for a while now. So you read me about micro-stock, about standing you ground when it comes to negotiate. And now you want to start charging a fair price too. So where do you start? How much do you charge? How much is a fair price?

It all depends of the usage the client wants.

You see, you don’t actually sell a photo. You sell a license to use a photo. That’s pretty different, and it is pretty important because you can resell the same photo over and over again to different clients. Or even to the same client when the license is expired.

The standard for stock pricing is fotoquote, from Cradoc fotpsoftware. From a series of drop down menus, you tell the software the usage your client wants, and it tells you back the price you should charge.

For instance, If a company wanted to buy me a picture for the front page of their annual report, up to 10000 copies in Canada, the price would be 1300$

A 1/4 of a page editorial use in a consumer magazine that sells up to 100000 copies would fetch 300$ for the same image. Slightly more that what Time magazine paid recently for their cover…

Still the same photo, but this time for advertisement on a billboard , more than a hundred of them, for a 3 months campaign? That would get me 2800$

And if the same client would also use the image in a magazine advertisement, that would be on top of what he paid for the billboards.

Thank you, Jonathan Roy. After your “show” in Chicoutimi, CBS’s Air Farce bought me a picture of you. And now that you will face the court for your action, one of my photos of you is featured in… Sports Illustrated!

Since the photo was sold thru the Canadian Press agency, I don’t know yet how much this sale will get me yet. It might be only a square inches in size, but there is one thing for sure: that will get me more money than the guy who sold a photo for a recent Time magazine cover…

I’m in my hotel room in Maniwaki, QC. We are here to see Cindy’s grand-mother, or if you prefer: Edward’s grand-grand-mother. It’s a very long way from home, but it would be even worse if we were visiting her parents.

The fun think about being a freelance photographer that has stock photo as part of his business is that every travel that you make can count as a business related stock shooting. Because that’s what I do: I stop here and there to collect photos for my bank. So gas, restaurant, hotel and every other expenses are tax deductible.

How much Time Magazine, one of the most prestigious magazine of the world, is willing to pay for a front page cover photo?

One dollar.

And the photographer, who will get 20 cents from the license, seems pretty happy about it.

I’m baffled. Remember my humbling stock experience? It just happened again! Geo Magazine, one of the most prestigious magazines in the world, just bought one of my archive images. Again, my pro gears did not help me. I took the photo, again, long before I turned pro. This time with my first SLR, a first generation Canon Rebel mounted with the cheapo kit lens.
Wow.

After Kevin Desfossés, it’s another Remparts’ goalie to have some great play after a stock sale. A photo of infamous Jonathan Roy has been used in the last episode of Air Farce, a CBC TV show. The segment is here, starting at about the middle of the video.

It’s still at the early beginning of the project, but here is my new “Google-friendly stock photo system”. I have more than a thousand photos to add, but I wanted link to it so Google can start to crawl.

The system cost me some serious buck to be exactly how I wanted it to be, but I’m sure I will recoup my investment pretty quickly. Sometimes, you have to invest money to make more money.

It’s always nice to see how my stock photos are used once sold. Here is an advertisement for an upcoming QMJHL game that will appears in some newspapers tomorrow.

Great story on Slashdot on how a stock photographer represented himself in court and won a copyright infringement over a big corporation that produced false documents to try to prove they bought the image from someone else.