After receiving yet another month of appalling sales figures from my small stock collection with Getty Creative Moment, a mere US$1!!! I have decided to terminate my contract of representation with Getty due to their very poor sales performance. It is very rare that I actually get any money from the behemoth agency and their policy towards their contributors is that we don't matter and can be paid any old sum. 

Hence, I have been left with little choice other than to request the cancellation of my contract with them and removal of any images they currently hold. What huge fail Getty Images has become, mainly due to greed and stupidity.

​This is symptomatic of the mess that the stock photo industry has developed into with the advent of Microstock and the race to the bottom over prices. The bottom line is that most photographers now simply can't afford to supply agencies with stock material - which is a time-consuming business and quite hard work (when you are submitting a few hundred images per month).

​In the end, though partly due to the greed and idiocy of their corporate accounts departments, it is the publishers who will suffer, as they find professional stock images hard to come by. What many corporate execs in publishing firms fail to understand is that paying peanuts for stock has ruined the career of many a photographer and that it will cost them a lot of money to get illustrations for their publications in the future as one by one, pro photographers quit the stock game.

Sure, there are a multitude of people who upload to Shutterstock and Dreamstime, but again the bottom line is that US$0.25/0.35 (respectively) per download does not usually mean any kind of profit margin for the photographer, who has now been relegated by the industry as a photo-walla, slave labour in other words.

While there is some very good images on these microstock sites, the problem is that the selection is likely to diminish in certain subject areas.

​Sadly, agencies across the board have failed their most important component - the photographers who actually take and produce the pictures, all the while, the workload has increased, tagging, uploading, storing, backing-up with the digital era. In the pre-digital era, I would mark up my select 35mm slide with a very fine tipped marker pen and put them in a slide folder and post them to the agency. It was much more efficient than digital submissions, which take up quite a lot of time.

​Producing stock images involves quite a lot of time and money and it is very skilled work. A day's stock shooting expenses near one's residence can still easily cost £50 in petrol and more when camera equipment, car depreciation and the time spent shooting and editing, not to mention the uploading and tagging to a myriad of stock image sites.

​Hence, the business of supplying stock now mainly falls to the odd hobbyist and certain others who normally don't rely on photography as their main income.

​I do have small portfolios on Shutterstock and Dreamstime, though the revenue is not sufficient to realistically bother to upload much in the future. At the moment I am putting some new submissions in - though the poverty from my photography business is now so severe, that I have had to start a completely different business to simply pay basic living expenses.

It is likely that I may put my archive back onto Photoshelter, though the problem with that is the cost, which is $50 a month for the pro service and sales off Photoshelter can also be few and far between. Should I return to this option, then I will let you know with a post on this blog.

Until then, I hope to put more of my work on this blog, though it depends on time, as I get no sales at all through this web site.

One of the highlights of the autumn and winter months in the Scottish Highlands is the amazing and beautiful Aurora Borealis - or the Northern Lights.

​I was fortunate enough to capture this display in the Dornoch Firth in Sutherland, Scotland, UK. It is not easy to snap the auroras, as they are relatively rare and sometimes short-lived or obscured by cloud. Getting to the right location in time is no easy business and of course, on clear nights in the autumn, winter and spring, very cold.

​As I now have 4K UHD video capability, I hope to see this breathtakingly beautiful phenomena again to make some time-lapse footage and of course, more amazing images!

The Falls of Shin in Sutherland in northern Scotland are a famous spot to watch the annual migration of Atlantic salmon to their spawning grounds. I spent a few afternoons this summer photographing this amazing and timeless quest by the salmon. You can see the images in a slideshow here. I also took plenty of 1080p HD footage and put together a short film showing the often black-comic nature of the salmon's journey up the River Shin.

I recently returned to live in Scotland after two and half years living and working in the Iberian peninsula in Spain and Portugal. Needless to say I missed Scotland a lot while I was away and it is great to be back and now living in the Scottish Highlands.

​Being based in Edinburgh and Perth in previous years, sadly, I had little chance to photograph the area I love the best, the Scottish Highlands and the Outer Hebrides, Orkney and the Shetland Isles. As I am now based in Sutherland - not far from Inverness - with the vagaries of the photography business permitting, I hope to spend a lot more time on Scottish Highland landscape photography when time and money allow.

​In 2010 and 2011, while I was based in Edinburgh, I did get some chances to photograph subjects and landscapes in the Outer Hebrides (I managed to travel to most of the Western Isles in 2010, though sadly, lost many of my images in 2012 due to the theft of my Mac and two external HDDs in Spain) and the Shetland Islands. While I was based in Perth in 2014, I did manage a day trip to Ben Vrackie.

​The short slideshow here is just some highlights from my growing collection (particularly of the Scottish Highlands) of Scotland stock images on Getty Images. You can see all of my Scotland images on Getty by using this link. As I am now based here again, I will be submitting more images when time and cash flow allow! I'll also be highlighting some of this new stock imagery here on my blog, so do bookmark it and check back from time to time!

I've been busy over the winter submitting lots of my back catalogue stock images to Getty Images. There is now a fair bit of my Everest Himalaya portfolio available on the site.

​It is something of an honour to get the opportunity to photograph the Top of the World and it is one of the favourite parts of my entire collection.

​Most of these images were shot in Nepal during 2005-2008 and include aerials from a four-hour helicopter trip. I hope to submit more of this portfolio to Getty Images and it also includes many images of Sherpas who live in the Everest Region and also the flora and fauna.

​In total, I spent well-over a year living at the Top of the World and have completed both the Kala Pattar ( Everest Base Camp ) and Gokyo Valley treks. My Everest portfolio therefore, is one of the most comprehensive of recent times.

Perez's Frog - or the Iberian Green Frog ( or Pelophylax perezi to give the species it's latin nomenclature ) is a great species for a wildlife photographer - something I have been doing more and more in the past few years.

​I came across these ones at different locations in central Portugal in Aveiro District and they turned out to be slightly tricky, but interesting to photograph. I have now put a fair few of them into the Getty Images Creative archive (just click on the image for access). There are also some nice close-up HD clips of these frogs (and individual frogs of course) on the same image platform.

I now have a small, but growing collection of mostly HD stock footage clips available for licensing from Getty Creative Video.

Just visit my video collection on Getty Creative Video here. At the moment, there are around 60 clips, mostly of XXL wave surfing in Nazare, Portugal, Iberian Green Frogs and some clips from pre-earthquake 2009 Kathmandu, Nepal.

​I have tried submitting more of late, though sadly, the video editors at Getty are rejecting quite a lot of very useable 1080p HD clips. This may be as the market is looking more and more 4K-orientated. I hope later this year, to be 4K UHD capable and then? Who knows? Perhaps the Getty editors will look at my footage in a more favourable light?

​My HD video and recently 4K UHD (which is mostly time lapse at the moment) stock video footage collection has expanded a fair bit in 2016 and I hope to film more in 2017 (for a variety of reasons).

​As it appears 4K will have a lot of impact on photographers who produce stock images and video, I am currently assessing various workflows.

Hello and welcome to my blog!

​I have only recently recreated a site for promoting work from my own camera, so have not had much time available to populate this blog with interesting posts. Though I have put quite a lot of interesting new images out and plenty of them available on Getty Images.

​One new line of work is building up some Microstock portfolios with various sites and I may feature those from time to time.

​Mainly, I will be using this blog to promote new sets of amazing or wonderful or just plain useful stock images that I have available. Sometimes I may post the occaisional article about photojournalism and photography-related matters and of course, the new emerging landscape which is 4K UHD.