Q    What is your background and what led you to a career in photography?
I started my interest in Photography in High school.  I studied Commercial Photography and Graphic Arts at Northern Arizona University  and got my Bachelors degree.  I then spent 5 years as a freelance photographers assistant in Phoenix and then in Seattle working for over 100 different photographers on a wide variety of shoots.  I then had a short stint after I quit assisting when I was just starting to market myself as a full time photographer.  In 1996 Jim Cummins, a prominent photographer from the Seattle area asked me if I’d like to learn the stock business as his producer.  He was only shooting Rights Managed stock photography at that time for distribution through FPG, an agency that was later bought by Getty Images.  I took the job and started leaning about the stock business.  We did 70 to 100 stock shoots a year for five years.  In 2000 Jim was diagnosed with cancer and I then started doing all the shooting for the studio while Jim paid attention to his treatment.  Tragically Jim passed away after 11 months and I then bought a large amount of equipment from the studio and started my own stock photography business, Tim McGuire Images, Inc

Q    Where did you learn the craft and business of photography?
I learned the basics and practiced the basic a lot in college but mostly I learned the craft as a freelance assistant working for as many different photographers as I could in 5 years.  I learned the stock business from Jim Cummins while working in the late 90’s as his producer.  The ASMP was always a great resource for learning about the business of photography and the importance of presenting yourself as and being a professional.  I’ve been a member since 1989.

Q    You are involved in both Assignment photography as well as Stock licensing. What percentage of your monthly revenue is generated from each of these initiatives?
Actually I do very little assignment photography. This year 99% of my income is from stock royalty income.  I hope to start changing that soon.  I think it’s unhealthy and a bit risky to have all my income coming from that one segment of the market, especially since I’m opposed to licensing my stock as Royalty Free Imagery, which is becoming a large part of the market.

Q    Besides stock licensing and assignment work do you have other ways of generating revenue as a professional photographer?
Not right now.  I’d love to start selling art prints and finding other avenues for my work.  Right now in the 4th year of my current business plan I am just starting to take some attention away from building my Rights Managed stock photography business.  I look at the stock income stream I’ve built as a base for my business on which I can build other income streams and marketing opportunities.  This stock income also will, hopefully, enable me to pursue more personal work and travel, which could both become additional revenue streams.

Q    How do you pursue new customers and what marketing and sales strategies have shown the best return for your business?
I'm not really doing that at this time but one thing that interests me from a purely financial perspective is outdoor oriented / location catalog production.  I hope to make some inroads in this market over the next few years.

Q    Do you have a photo-rep? If so who and how does this relationship help you accomplish your goals?
No.

Q    According to your website, your images are represented by Getty, Corbis, Workbookstock and Mira. Please describe your experience with each of these agencies. Is there a benefit to working with many different distributors?

a.    Getty
I had images at FPG when I was working with Jim Cummins that were transferred to Getty when they bought VCG, the parent company of FPG. I had maybe 6 months of collaboration with my Getty editor before they offered me the latest Getty contributors contract.  This contract essentially reduced my income from my creative stock work by 20%.  I talked to many people at Getty and no one came up with a good argument as to why it was a good idea for me to sign a contract that lowered the amount I receive from the licensing of my work by 20 %. For that reason and the fact that I feel Getty is a large corporate entity building it’s dominant place in the stock imagery market on the backs of artists rather than for artists, I did not sign the new contract and thus could not continue submitting work to Getty.  They honored my old FPG contract and they still do for those images I still have distributed through Getty Images.  I still get 50% royalties rather than 40% or lower.  In my opinion Getty Images first interests after making clients happy are in serving the best interests of their stock holders and I think those interests are often in conflict with what is best for photographers and creative professionals in the long term.

b.    Corbis
I came to Corbis through The Stock Market.  The Stock Market was a relatively photographer friendly stock agency who was bought by Corbis a few years ago.  When Jim Cummins got sick and I started shooting for his studio we had just switched representation from FPG to The Stock Market, so for a year I shot for the Jim Cummins Studio working closely with the people at The Stock Market.  When I struck out on my own and decided not to continue my relationship with Getty Images I approached the people I knew from The Stock Market and then signed a contract with Corbis as a distributor of my work.  I am generally very happy with Corbis though I worry about what will happen with Corbis if it ever becomes a publicly traded company with a higher obligation to stockholders who only see those who contribute creative work to Corbis as one of the company’s largest expenses.  I hope Corbis, if it does go public will continue to place a high value on the contributions of independent photographers and artists in the same way it does now.

c.    Workbookstock
Workbookstock is a start up stock distribution channel (I think around 5 years old) that in the beginning touted itself as anti Royalty Free and in many ways an alternative to Getty / Corbis.  They have since started distributing third party Royalty Free brands side by side with the Rights Managed collections they have and are also using Getty Images as a sub-distributor for parts of their Rights Managed collection.  The people at WBS are very helpful, easy to work with and seemingly photographer friendly.  I have 163 images with them and see very few sales when compared with Getty and / or Corbis.  I do like their higher percentage of royalties for photographers, their website and the special tools they have for photographers to track their sales and image search statistics.  I am worried that with the advent of some of the WBS collection being sub distributed through the Getty Images site the marketing to bring clients directly to the Workbookstock site will fall off because inevitably Getty will sell those images well for WBS who will then see they can save themselves the marketing dollars, let Getty do the marketing and make the same or more from what they get from Getty without having to spend the money to market their site for direct licensing.  That would be a loss of  income to photographers as a group when looked at in terms of how much the creators of the images get of the gross license amount paid by the client.  WBS denies this is the case, which may be true, but I still worry about it.  Right now I’m in a wait and see mode with WBS.  If sales get better I might submit some more work.

d.    Mira
Mira is a GREAT (!) idea on paper and in it’s concept of being a photographer owned distribution channel / stock agency under the umbrella of the larger concept of a cooperative company operating for the sole best interests of the photographer / owners of that cooperative called Creative Eye.  In actuality Mira and Creative Eye are a dream of many which have failed to come to fruition time and time again for many various reasons, which i will not go into here.  A few years ago I decided to support Mira by paying my dues and supplying it with some of my imagery.  So far it has not paid off at all but as with anything worthwhile these things don’t happen over night.  For Mira to become a success it is largely put upon forward thinking photographers to invest in something like this in order to make it happen and as has been proven time and time again by photographers we cannot, as a group, look at the long term outlook and act as a group to affect change for the improvement of our profession.  I hope that can change with Mira but it is a long term and risky investment which I’ve chosen to make for very idealistic reasons.

**  I also just started putting my non-exclusive images from Mira on Alamy to possibly improve their licensing potential.

Q    Are the images you have submitted for stock exclusive to each of these agents? If so, are you satisfied with having just one agent market your images?
With Getty and Corbis I am happy to let them have exclusive rights to these images.  They have the marketing clout and reach to make it worth the exclusivity.  With Workbookstock the images are exclusive but I’m not convinced that was a good idea at this point due to lack of licenses. Mira and Alamy are totally non-exclusive with regards to images.

Q    You are a founding member of the Stock Artist’s alliance (SAA). What is the goal and purpose of this organization? How did you contribute to this cause?
While I don’t speak for the SAA I believe the goal of the SAA is to be an advocate of and for photographers best interests in the stock photography industry.  This is done by communication between photographers, education of all in the industry including clients, and using the collective voice of all the SAA members to promote better business practices, fair and equitable treatment of photographers and their rights in their creative works, and better ways of licensing and marketing of that work.  I was Vice President and on the Board of Directors of SAA for two years.  I helped in the early development of the SAA’s White paper on Licensing Models.

Q    The Stock Artist’s Alliance promotes Rights Managed licensing over Royalty Free licensing models. Is this also your view? Please explain why or why not.
I believe the Rights Managed (pay per use) business model to be better for the long-term best interests of independent stock photographers.  The pay per use model allows photographers to leverage their copyright ownership in their creative works to maximize the income they can get from their work.  The rights allowed copyright owners have been hard fought for in past decades and to totally ignore the value added to creative works because of these rights and laws is shortsighted in my opinion.  Royalty Free Licensing, while theoretically preserving copyright ownership by calling the “in perpetuity” license a license, in practical terms, throws out any ability for the creator of the work to control it’s use or benefit from it’s repeated use. This in my opinion throws any useful copyright ownership “out the window”, so to speak.  The Royalty Free business model, in most all cases, also allows the lion’s share of revenues to go to the distributors of imagery rather than to the creators.

Q    You had input into the creation of the SAA White Paper on Stock Licensing Models which states “The producers and distributors of Royalty Free have irrevocably changed the stock industry in just a decade. By flooding the marketplace with a glut of images offered to clients at overgenerous terms, RF has spurred the devaluation of professional photography and created a tougher business environment for professional photographers to make a living.” According to this statement the SAA feels that Royalty Free has hurt the industry but recognizes that the impossibility of going back to the days when all images were offered as RM. Would you suggest that an Artists should consider offering images as Royalty Free or would you advocate that photographers abstain from Royalty Free licensing in an effort to change the industry?
I would recommend abstaining from RF to any and all visual artists.  I’d also suggest that artists think long and hard about what exactly they are doing when they offer their images as RF.  They should read and understand the SAA White Paper on Stock licensing Models.  They must understand that the work they put into RF distribution will be their competition for the rest of their professional lives or as long as that work is relevant to the market.  Those who offer their work as RF may or may not make a decent return on investment in the short term and if they don’t make it in the short term they will certainly not make it in the long term since those who wanted the image already have it and never have to pay for it again.  The quality of RF collections is high enough now that very good work is going into these collections and that work will be relevant for a long time.  Putting great, classic, and somewhat timeless images into RF will put photographers on an ever increasingly steep treadmill where they have to constantly make better and better pictures in order to keep a cash flow going.  Otherwise, if photographers do not make better and better pictures the clients, who are increasingly governed by the bottom line bean counters will use and re-use the good RF pictures already licensed and sitting in their in-house RF collections.  At some point it will become too expensive to create better pictures and make a profit, especially considering that at least 80%-90% of most RF gross stock license amounts go to the distributors and not to the creators.  I suspect that RF will eventually become mostly wholly owned by large corporations who own both production and distribution… and even then it may not be the best market segment to be in, in terms of profitability.

Q    SAA’s White Paper on Stock Licensing Models also mentions PLUS, the Picture Universal Licensing System, an attempt to standardize and simplify the Rights Managed licensing process. Do you think it is possible that a simplified licensing system like this could help those accustomed to licensing RF images to begin using more RM images for their projects?
I do!  The Rights Managed business model could use a complete overhaul to bring it into the digital age. PLUS is one of the ways that this could happen.   RM, in many ways is lacking and could learn from the simplicity and ease of RF.  I believe there is a huge gap between the extremes of RF (CD’s and single image downloads) and what has historically been the Traditional RM (pay per use) model and there is huge opportunity for those who can develop a pay per use model that lands somewhere between the two extremes that makes both clients and creators / distributors happy.  Perhaps the best solution for creators is to take the distributors out of the equation and do their own distribution / marketing.

Q    In the recent past new licensing models have emerged and seem to have stirred up some strong reactions from industry veterans. What are your views about working with these models and how they affect the individual photographer and the industry at-large?

a.    Custom Stock
Custom Stock is great for clients and for companies like OnRequestImages BUT a terrible evolution for independent creators of imagery.  It’s basically a photo assignment turned into a contest of who can make the “best” photo(s).  For professional photographers this is a very poor business model to participate in.  It might be fun for an amateur but when running a business you have to make a profit and entering a photo-making contest has never been proven to be a good way to recover expenses and overhead even if you win the contest from time to time.

b.    Royalty Free Subscriptions
This is the bottom of the barrel in terms of offering added value to clients.  It may appeal to some clients and photographers choosing to service the low-end /low budget market but because of my views on RF licensing I have even bigger problems from the point of view of a independent professional photographer with subscription models.  I don’t think there’s much money to be made here by professionals  (I may be proven wrong or maybe I already am).  For some reason subscription RF bugs me less than single image or CD RF and I think that is because it offers so little in terms of added value to the client that I think it’s not a market segment I want to even compete in.  Sorry, I don’t have a really good grasp of this business model and it’s implications yet.

Q    In a recent Interview with About The Image, David Norris the CEO of OnRequest Images stated “I believe that photographers, just like every other business, must evolve and adapt to new markets and new opportunities, to continue to be successful. Our business model provides a better opportunity for artists than previous models and we are proud to pay photographers a higher royalty rate (50%), faster, than any other business in the industry.” Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Please explain.
David Norris is a very smart businessman and if he can get the custom stock model to work then it is because his company has taken advantage of the over supply of photographers who are hungry enough and short sighted enough to TRY and make any amount of money any way they can.  It is no knock on David or any of the other fine people that work at OnRequestImages.  It’s just a business and we are all trying to make money the best way we can. 

My question is whom does this business model benefit the most?  I don’t happen to think that photographer benefit at all from this custom stock business model.  Photographers definitely must “evolve and adapt” to business markets and opportunities, however whether the business model being promoted by OnrequestImages is an “opportunity” or not remains to be seen and I personally think it is not an “opportunity” for independent professional photographers who want to base their business on a sound business plan.   Don’t be fooled. Custom Stock is an evolution of the assignment business model not the stock model, though it does have a stock component.   How can a photographer plan a revenue stream in their business based on shooting assignment ideas which seemingly cannot be found anywhere else in stock, with a 1 in 5 chance of recovering any revenue for their time, expenses, and overhead?  Yes, the rejected images will go into a stock collection but so will the other three rejected images (sets of images) based on exactly the same set of criteria.  What if your images are not as good as the other 3 or are only better than 1 of the other contestant’s images?  There is little to no chance of those images ever generating any revenue.  At least if the shoot was a similar, traditionally produced, independent stock shoot, based on a photographers own ideas of how to compose the shot and illustrate the concept there would exist the possible advantage of being a little different and/or original in either composition and/or style from others trying to illustrate the same idea.  With custom stock I’m assuming all participants get a pretty detailed idea of what the “client” wants, so I’d imagine the shots would all be very similar.

Q    I’m sure other photographers would like to know what equipment you use on a regular basis.

a.    Cameras – Canon Eos 1Ds Mark II and 1Ds
b.    Lighting – Elinchrom Mono Heads, Lumidyne, SunRay HMI’s
c.    Computers/software – Adobe PS CS2, Adobe camera RAW, Mac G4 ibook and Desktop, Iview Media pro, Extensis Portfolio

Q    What advise would you offer to someone just getting started?
Write a good business plan and follow it / revise when necessary.  Be Professional and resist only thinking in the short term.  VALUE YOUR WORK!  If you don’t nobody else will!!

Q    What are you most proud of?
Being able to make a living as an independent self employed photographer

Q    Aside from business and photography what are you passionate about?
Climbing, traveling, music, nature / the environment and the protection / preservation of it.  Politics as of the last year or so.  The US government needs to change it’s course in my humble opinion!!

Q    Favorite vacation spot?
Italy

Q    Favorite band/musician?
Lyle Lovette, though lately I really like listening to Citizen Cope and Latin music (I’m learning to Salsa dance!)

Q    Favorite book?
Can’t think of one that is my favorite.  When I was a kid I loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory…

Q    Favorite movie?
I can’t single one out.  There are soooo many good ones.

Q    Favorite photographer (besides yourself)?
Richard Avedon,  Ansel Adams

Q    Favorite image you have created? (Click on the link below to view).
Again, I have a hard time with these kinds of questions because I find it hard to pick THE best one.  A picture I am very happy with and that always makes me feel something is this one, I like my portraits also,  here’s one.