europeforvisitors - 2:56 pm on Oct 26, 2006 (gmt 0)

I'm not an especially good photographer (I'm average at best), but I've licensed a number of photos simply because my travel site had a picture of a destination that a book or magazine publisher wanted.

On a recent trip, I met a professional photographer who shoots a lot of stock while traveling. One of his specialities is photos of a certain category of people. If a newspaper is running a story on [certain category of people], it will often buy one of his stock photos just because he's the guy who has a bunch.

Given the amount of competition in the stock-photo industry, I suspect that having several clearly defined niches (Elbonia or plumbers or car manufacturing) is the best way to compete with all the other photo sources out there. Someone who wants a photo of the Statue of Liberty or an airliner can easily go to Getty or iStockPhoto, depending on his or her budget, but an editor who needs a picture of a meatpacking plant or Widgetville, Elbonia may have fewer choices. (Note that I said "editor": If you aren't a professional photographer, you'll probably have better luck competing in the low end of the market--newspapers and books, say--than at the high end where art directors for Fortune 500 advertisers hang out.