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Natural History Specialist Agency


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Hi all,

 

It has occurred to me that my small, but perfectly formed, collection of NH photography is just NOT selling at all through Alamy or a.n.other agency I use - to my chagrin!

 

Is anyone out there happy to point me in the direction of an NH agency they use or have heard good things about?

 

Nick J

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You could try NPL (Nature Picture Library) or Oxford Scientific. Both good agencies I believe. Not from experience though I'm afraid.

 

Oxford Scientific was great, then it was taken over by Photolibrary and was less good. Now of course it's part of Getty Images and well.....um...

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Thanks Chrissie and Keith,

I have only lodged them thus far with Alamy (not many and no sales) and fotoLibra (utter waste of time). So I am trying to place 'specialist' pics with specialist rather than generalist libraries. I will have a look at NPL.

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My own experiences with a mainly natural history collection (tropical mammals and insects are my "area")........

 

NHPA - this was my early target and I got in by accident really when Bruce Coleman (who I started with) was bought by PhotoShot, who bought NHPA also:

 

Bruce Coleman - defunct

NHPA - no sales in three years

PhotoShot - no sales in four years

 

AGE - no nat' history sales, other sales but not nat' hist'

 

SEApics - had regular sales but the owner had a struggle with illness which caused sales to disappear - but now she is active again, I like SEApics

 

Getty - in through backdoor arrangement as well. Do not give them images anymore as I do not like their ways. Apart from the fact what I do and what they want are not really aligned. Nearly everything they finally accepted sold once and then went off the radar.

 

NPL - a target of mine but alas, I did not get a reply

 

Masterfile (has some strong NH specialized shots)- I did not get a reply, that was along time ago.

 

Alamy - I average about 2 sales per month

 

EnviroSEA.org - my own attempts at direct representation. Slow, but some publishing houses are now contacting me through this site (Photoshelter driven) for my rarer species. I do a sale a month on average (to date its largely story usage I get from this site with a sale constituting 2 or 3 images at a time to a publishing house). I did hold many of my rarer pics back from Alamy to see how EnviroSEA worked with those, but to be honest I would have done better (I believe) to have put them with Alamy.

 

there have been various other small experiments along the way with start-ups in Asia, and US but all led to dissappointment.

 

So I continue with Alamy, who have been my best performer by far really BUT on a collection split of 80/20 (nat' hist' vs non nat' hist') my sales are probably 80/20 in favour of non nat' hist,

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Thanks Chrissie and Keith,

I have only lodged them thus far with Alamy (not many and no sales) and fotoLibra (utter waste of time). So I am trying to place 'specialist' pics with specialist rather than generalist libraries. I will have a look at NPL.

 Nothing to suggest, Nick, but I am glad you also think that fotoLibra is a waste of time - actually more of a waste of space.  I had a bit of a stoush with them over the ridiculous email they sent around stating that unless the contributors sent them a response they would assume that all RM images already submitted were exclusive to the agency and that we would have to mark in some way that each individual image was exclusive (or not).  Also they wanted to know what images were on which agency.  I told them that it was none of their business as there was no exclusivity in any event.

 

Sheila 

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I'm about to put an initial submission into FLPA. I've been doing a little research and one thing they do which is different from here is that when they say your initial submission must have a 70% pass rate they mean that they have to consider that 70% of the images you submit are saleable in their eyes. 100% of the images will need to be perfect technically though. So even though for instance here you could probably submit a picture of a fly on a tennis ball (an example I actually saw once on a site - 2 non relevant hits on Alamy ;) ), unless they can see a market for the image, it won't get through.

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