Continental Drift - March, 2010

Welcome to the March edition of Continental Drift.

This month sees Alan Skyrme travelling to Europe: specifically to Cyprus and Sicily with a couple of days en route spent in London. He will return to his studio in Natal at the end of April.

Since the last newsletter.....

Alan Skyrme Gallery

We have removed a number of images from the "Recent" section and will soon start work on reorganising the site - to separateour Fine Art images from our Commercial images while maintaining a single stop for both types of image.


Shoot Acai

New images will be added to the site in the coming weeks but in the meantime we are building a storyboard about acai prior to selling articles on the subject to health food magazines.

Shoot Froot

We continue to build stock of tropical fruit images.


Library sites

Images continue to be added to our library sites at Alamy and Photographers Direct. We are now considering illustrations as part of our stock, though preference will continue to be on photographic images.


Shoot Stories

We have discontinued the Shoot Stories site, and as a result will also discontinue the linked Shoot Images Gallery site.



The Image Market

The global financial crisis has obviously had a significant impact on all markets but the creative image market has also been impacted by strategic decisions taken by some (though not all) stock image distribution libraries.
A market for low cost micro stock images has established itself, appealing to buyers that want to download royalty free images for general use where image quality is not necessarily a priority. This has squeezed the market and put pressure on photographers who produce high quality editorial (Rights Managed) quality images. This micro stock market is now suffering - high volumes of images flooding the market from a multitude of amateurs with digital cameras of varying quality.

Alan Skyrme Photography has always prefered to work either directly with its clients or, when selling stock images, to produce high quality editorial images. We use top of the range professional equipment in our own studio settings.
We prefer to work on a fair trade basis with quality libraries such as Photographers Direct and Alamy. As a result we will continue to build stock placed with these two agencies, though we will also consider placing royalty free images (NOT micro stock) with a third agency later in the year. Traditional Royalty Free images are very different to micro stock royalty free images - in nature, in quality and in cost.

We work on a basis of client loyalty where regular orders are rewarded by lower costs and will continue to do so to ensure customer satisfaction.


Alan Skyrme Photography