Pictured: Mark Adams and the Rocketclips team.

Mark Adams has been a contributor to Shutterstock since 2010. Since launching his own company, Rocketclips, in 1999, Mark has created a niche shooting high-quality, royalty-free stock footage featuring model-released talent. Recently he took the time to answer questions as Shutterstock Footage’s Featured Contributor.

Shutterstock: How did you get your start in the world of stock photography?

Mark Adams: I graduated from Art Center College of Design in 1978 and began a 20-year career as a commercial photographer. In 1984, I partnered with another photographer and we began shooting lifestyle stock stills. Things took off, and by 1996 I was a full-time stock shooter. Read More

Photo © Otávio Almeida

Last month, several members of the Shutterstock team attended the World Photo São Paulo conference in Brazil. Our director of content operations, Anthony Correia, gave a presentation about stock photography that was well received, and several attendees requested copies of the presentation.

We’re happy to share the presentation with everyone interested in being a successful Shutterstock contributor — just follow the link below to download it. This presentation is a beginner-level primer to shooting photos for Shutterstock, including some helpful tips on lighting, subject selection, composition and keywording. Read More

What’s more popular, spring or summer? Cats or dogs? In the past few months since we introduced the Keyword Trends Tool, we’ve had a lot of fun comparing words Shutterstock customers search for. We also identified some interesting seasonal trends that can help you figure out the best time to upload images to Shutterstock.

Here are 5 of our favorite charts, made with words suggested by members of the Shutterstock contributor team, and what we learned from each one.

1. Dogs beat cats.

You hear people talk about how popular cat pictures are on the Internet. But doggone it, Shutterstock customers are decidedly canine people, performing more searches for “dog” than “cat” week after week. Arf!

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Dear Shutterstock Contributors,

My name is Scott Braut and I was recently appointed Shutterstock’s new Vice President, Content.

I’ve been with Shutterstock since 2009, and I managed the relaunches of our Bigstock and Shutterstock Footage brands. I’ve also worked for major content brands including the Associated Press, Scholastic, ABC News, and Corbis. Just as importantly, I’m also a photographer, and have a lifelong passion for photography and video.

I oversee our Content Operations team, which handles our review and submission processes, and our Contributor Relations team, which communicates with our contributors. I also work to source great new content from image and footage contributors, and partner with the Shutterstock tech team to improve the submit.shutterstock.com site.

Our teams are looking forward to strengthening our relationships with you, providing more educational materials for artists, and creating new ways to share your images and footage with our customers. We’ll be listening carefully to your feedback.

Thanks for being a part of the Shutterstock community. Keep creating great content and sending us suggestions.

Best regards,

Scott Braut
Shutterstock Vice President, Content

CandyBox Images, based in the Czech Republic, has recently emerged as a major player in royalty-free image production.

This team of 15 has been a Shutterstock contributor since 2008 and now has over 13,000 images in their collection. Specializing in images for creative professionals, the Candybox portfolio covers in-demand subjects such as business, health and families.

We asked founder Jean-Marie Guyon (pictured) some questions about Candybox Images’s success. Below are his answers, along with a selection of his favorite images from Candybox.
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What catches your eye when you look at this image? The warmth of the background? The bag in the center? Or the engagement between all three women? Probably the interactions of the photo subjects. That level of human connection makes this photo popular with our customers on Shutterstock Images — and its also a quality in demand on Shutterstock Footage.

Footage clips of customer-employee interaction are in high demand. To help inspire you to create footage like this, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite tips for locations shooting. You may also find these tips helpful for shooting still images, or shooting people in other environments. Read More

Heiko Kiera has been a Shutterstock contributor since 2009. He specializes in filming wildlife video in the Everglades. Recently he took the time to answer five questions as Shutterstock Footage’s Featured Contributor.

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Don’t let a soon-to-expire exclusivity agreement with another stock image agency hold you back from uploading images or footage clips to Shutterstock. Shutterstock’s “Opt Out” feature lets you upload your images or footage clips whenever it’s most convenient for you, and still respect your exclusivity obligations to other agencies. Put your exclusive images or footage clips on hold until your exclusivity contract runs out, at which point you’re free to distribute your content on Shutterstock without missing a day of sales.

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Shutterstock footage is growing and so is the demand for stock footage content! That’s why we’re looking for new talented artists to join our team of footage contributors. We’re looking for talented fresh faces as well as experienced videographers to join that team and we want to make it easier than ever to do so.

Shutterstock footage can offer several benefits:

• Access to a large pool of buyers.
• Competitive royalties for your accepted submissions.
• A reputation for fairness and transparency with our contributors.
• Powerful marketing tools that will help you sell your submissions.
• Up to $15 per sold clip.

If you are already a successful image contributor for Shutterstock, we invite you to give footage a try. You can earn larger average payouts and you’ll be part of a young but growing business. With so many high-quality DSLR cameras available these days, it would be easier for many photographers to seamlessly shift from photographing stills to recording video and you can find some tips and tricks on how to do so by reading this recent Shutterbuzz post.

On the other hand, if you are an existing videographer with a large collection of clips that you’re ready to upload for review, we want to simplify that process for you. If you plan to upload 500 or more clips, email us at 500clips@shutterstock.com and let us know how many clips you have and what type of content it is (business, lifestyle, animation, etc.). If you have a link to your work online, please provide it.  Based on the nature of your request, we may be able to provide some submission assistance.

Please note that all submissions will still be held to our video review submission guidelines. We look forward to reviewing your creative clips.

Sort. Share. Promote.

We’re happy to introduce a new tool for Shutterstock contributors that includes some of your most-requested features. It’s called the Catalog Manager, and it makes it easier to organize, track, and share your Shutterstock portfolio. It’s easy:

• Sort your images into sets.
• Share sets with anyone—and earn referral fees from new customers.
• Track your statistics from each of your sets.

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