By Iain Stasukevich, May 28, 2010
Yuri Arcurs' Web site bills him as "the world's most successful microstock photographer." He sells more than two million licenses per year through stock image libraries such as iStockphoto, Fotolia and Shutterstock. If you watch MTV or read Time magazine, you've probably seen his work, and it's easy to spot the Yuri Arcurs style: clean, colorful and well lit.
"Our goal is to create the most usable images for any situation," says Arcurs, who speaks in the plural when he references the nine staff photographers who make up part of the small army behind his stock photography empire. His Denmark-based studio—which seems almost large enough to land a small plane in—offers sets and props for just about any situation one can imagine, including a kitchen, a hospital, a laboratory and a bedroom. "Business and lifestyle have always been our biggest sellers," he points out.
It seems only natural that as a successful stock photographer, Arcurs would eventually make inroads into the stock footage business. "It was always planned," he confirms. "We wanted to see what people wanted and what other videographers were doing, so we watched the market for a few years and then launched slowly. We're still observing."
Despite the success of online libraries like iStockphoto and Shutterstock, the video footage business still has a lot of catching up to do. According to Arcurs, the best stock videographers are probably working on other things, like being good stock photographers. "What we'll see over the next three years is the same thing that happened with stock photography: Once the money started making it worthwhile for the big professionals to go into it, over time a lot of the good photographers migrated into doing footage and made things very competitive," he says.
Transitioning from still photography to video can be a daunting process and requires some thought—for example, what video camera will you use, and which video editing program? Also, shooting, retouching and submitting video footage can be more time-consuming than still photography.
Arcurs uses Canon EOS 5D and RED ONE cameras for his footage experiments. "The 5D offers extremely good image quality, and I think the RED is a phenomenal camera," he says. "RED has a huge advantage in that it shoots in RAW, and that means you can tweak and bend the files much more than you can the Canon files, which come out as QuickTime movies and are very limited in color information. They have to look almost like the end result when you shoot them."
Potential rival stock footage videographers shouldn't fear an 800-pound gorilla like Yuri Arcurs Media muscling in on their territory. "We'll be shooting 20 to 30 percent video, whereas the rest of it will be still photography," says the titular CEO. "In the meantime, I'm going to continue to focus on what I'm good at: good lighting, good models, good themes, good ideas."
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