Taking Stock

It takes a special sensibility to be a stock shooter. There are no boards, scripts, or shot lists to guide the way, and a paycheck is far from certain. Stock shooters often take on all the costs of equipment, film or video raw stock and post to create spec images that may not sell for years, if they sell at all.

Then there is the challenge of making sure that the people who can use the images know they exist. Some stock cinematographers have used advertising and the Internet to publicize their libraries themselves. This takes business acumen, patience, and the ability to service clients quickly. Often, a TV show or a commercial will need that within a day or two. For a particular library to be worth anything, someone must be able get a VHS of possible shots to the client to choose from and then, just as quickly, be able to get a high-quality (usually digital Betacam these days) version in their hands.

Many shooters prefer to work with an agency, which for a fee of 50% (or often more) of the sale, promises to market the images along with the rest of their catalog of images. This is a popular route, although some shooters do not like the fees and worry about falling through the cracks of a large agency's inventory.

Given the challenges, the people who take on this work have a passion. Witness the following examples.

John P. Elsner started Fast Footage in Minneapolis the late ‘80s after he realized how much he'd enjoyed using his Bolex to create some time-lapse images. Since that time, he has turned time-lapse photography into a business and acquired more Bolexes, some intervelometers, and Mitchell and Arriflex 35 cameras.

His niche of time-lapse plants, flowers, and clouds allowed him to set up shop in his hometown and grow his business to represent other photographers and other types of footage.

“Time-lapse is something you can focus a lot of time and get interesting results without a huge expense for the film. Carefully done, a 100-foot roll of 16mm film [his stock of choice is Kodak's 100-speed 7248] can give you quite a few 10-second sequences.”

Shooting time lapse, he explains, involves a great deal of trial and error. “You're really trying to predict. You're hoping the flower will grow and fill the frame a certain way, but you can't be sure it will.

“You have to really like doing it. If you're not in it for the creative part, I wouldn't recommend stock photography to anybody as a career choice. It's a very convoluted way to make a living.”

In his first two years in the business, Greg Harrington has discovered that “there's really no rhyme or reason to what sells.”

Harrington, who specializes in shots of children, wound up in the stock business after a soured deal to shoot a spec commercial left him with some nice shots of his own kids swinging, fishing, and playing. He invested a substantial amount of money to shoot more 35mm vignettes on an Arri III and shopped his stuff around.

Harrington eventually went with 16 different stock libraries. “Five sold some things, and seven sold nothing in a year,” he says. “Some of my favorite shots weren't selling at all, but some of my least favorite ones were. Eventually, most of my stuff has sold, but I never would have been able to predict beforehand what clients would want.”

Like most stock shooters, Harrington shoots images clean. “Everybody told me, ‘don't go saturating colors in telecine or sticking fancy filters in front of the lens.’ Let the client do whatever they want to the image in post, but deliver something very straightforward.”

Harrington deals directly with clients sometimes, but also continues to use those agencies that had some success with his images. He believes that it takes a special understanding to judge shots of kids. “I give them maybe 8- or 10-second shots,” he says, “but there is usually a magical two seconds in the clips — a look, a smile — that is what the client needs. Not every rep knows how to find those two seconds. That kind of understanding is very important when it comes to making a sale.”

As an example, he mentions Don French of The Source Stock Footage Library, Tucson, Ariz. “I was getting no sales at all in Los Angeles, and then Don called me to say he's sold three shots to Fox TV in Los Angeles,” Harrington says. “Some of the people who work at the stock houses will tell you right away, ‘This will never sell.’ Don is very encouraging. The sale he made to Fox was of shots some other guys had declared worthless.”

Greg Huglin, Greg Huglin Films, Santa Barbara, Calif., started out shooting surfing and ocean sports in 16mm in the ‘70s. As that niche faded, he segued successfully into print work for fashion. Despite the lucrative assignments, he was still not fully satisfied. “I frankly got sick of art directors telling me what to do,” he says, “so I started doing stock — 35mm still and motion.”

Huglin says he prefers to deal with motion stock houses over still houses, because he controls his original. “If the agency's not communicating with me about a problem, I can fax the lab and cut them off from my footage. I haven't had to do that much, but when I do, I get a fast response.”

Huglin has focused his energies in this specialized cinematography primarily because it is what he loves to do, and it takes him where he loves to be, shooting water sports, rock climbing and mountain biking. “I spent 10 weeks last year in Africa shooting white sharks, and those images were used in AT&T and some NBC, Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel.”

He has six 35mm cameras including a custom-tailored Éclair/underwater housing complement that can run at 150fps. He also uses a vintage 1945 Bell & Howell for rock climbing.

“Sometimes I'll get a list from an agency that says go shoot Santa at a mall. Go shoot a guy running through an airport. There are guys who are really good at that, but it's not for me. On the other hand, I do have the patience to sit for 30 days waiting for the perfect shot of dolphins going by.”

But the real patience, he says, is required in the business portion of the work. “The lag is about two years before I see profit from a shoot. Most people don't want to put $100,000 out now and wait two years to maybe make it back. You have to be self-motivated and intensely driven to last in this business. That's a plus for me because it fits my temperament. I work harder for myself than I ever would for anybody else.”

Martin Lisius began StormStock, Arlington, Texas, in the mid ‘80s, but his fascination with weather and photography go back to his childhood when, at the age of 12, he was already using a still camera to capture lightning bursts on film. Today, producers turn to StormStock when they want images of hurricanes, tornadoes, microbursts, hail, and other extreme weather conditions.

“There are two facets to what I do,” he says. “Storm chasing and photography. You have to know how to do both well.”

Those twin talents have allowed Lisius to sell and resell his images to commercials, documentaries, TV programs, and feature films. “Storms are very stockable,” he says. “A producer can't just go and shoot a storm whenever he wants to.”

Lisius uses 35mm film almost exclusively to capture images. “You shoot on 35,” he says, “and you're not going to shoot yourself in the foot when they come up with a different Hi-Def format.

“We also like to service feature films,” he adds, “which are almost all shot and finished in 35. Then, we transfer the film to Hi-Def D-5 on a [Philips] Spirit DataCine. One day in the future we might transfer to 2K or 4K [data], but we wouldn't originate on any video format until there was a real universal acceptance of it by all our clients.”

Robert Glusic has been shooting nature and scenic landscape stock images on video for more than 20 years. He was among the first people to buy one of Panasonic's 1080i cameras. “I prefer video,” he says. “You see the results right away. You can play back what you've got immediately. You can shoot as much of a subject as you want and then select the best zoom in, pan, close-up, lock-down. With film, that gets very expensive very quickly.”

Glusic has managed to build his business despite the claims by many people that stock footage must be shot on film to sell. “Most clients say they want film,” he says, “but often they can't tell the difference, or if they can but you have a very high-quality shot, they don't really care.”

This is not to say that he has not had to deal with format drift in his career. He built up a whole library by lugging around an early Sony 3/4-inch deck with a separate camera. Then came a time when he had to essentially re-shoot his library in Betacam and then in Digital Betacam. “I think that the stuff I'm shooting in 1080i will be the last time I have to re-shoot,” he says hopefully, though he doesn't consider it much or a hardship to keep returning to the national parks and other scenic locales.

His images of rainbows, waterfalls, the jagged beauty of Big Sur, and the splendor of Yellowstone have shown up on HBO, Cinemax, and the Learning Channel and in a variety of corporate videos and commercials.

He estimates that he has on the market approximately 500 hours of images on NTSC and 50 hours of HD footage and still spends about half of every month shooting more. “I don't get quite the same thrill,” he says, “as I used to the first time in a new park, but it's a great place to have your office.”

Doug Jones, owner of International Travel Films, Hollywood, is responsible for countless establishing shots of building exteriors on sitcoms. His faded images of downtown New York show up in an educational film within Being John Malkovich. Shots of the pyramids and the Eiffel Tower pop up on TV screens inside a shop window during Pleasantville.

Jones started shooting travel movies in 1968, where there was a large demand for feature-length 16mm travel films, exhibited live and hosted by the shooter himself.

Jones reckons that he has addressed some five million people in more than 6,000 lectures over three decades, so by the time cable television helped kill off this travel film business in the mid-'80s, he had a backlog of film from more than 50 countries. He soon found success selling signature shots as stock footage, often to the type of cable program that eroded his former audience.

“The quality of 16mm has improved tremendously since I started,” says Jones, who continues to use the format. He also continues to use a Canon Scoopic (already at the end of its run when Jones went into the business). “It weighs seven pounds with the 100-foot spool, and everything in place and looks like an unassuming piece of amateur equipment.

“I don't think I'd go into this business if I didn't start out with a huge library of shots in the first place,” he says. “It can take so long to see a return on your investment, but I have to say that has caught up with me and now I get checks and sales from footage I shot years ago. So now I'm glad I have built up this library; I see it as an annuity that will generate income long into the future. But if you want to get to that point, you really have to be in it for the long haul.”