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Lightroom Photos for sale
by a Staff Writer
Offering a 5,000 strong image collection, Jon Mitchell, Lightroom
Photos' founder is putting the agency on the market.
"Lightroom is a great archive with a lot of potential and I am putting
it on the market as a growing concern. With a small amount of
investment, the agency could earn good revenues from Rights-Managed
stock," he said.
Started in 2001, Lightroom Photos initially represented some top
photo-journalists like Brian Harris and Diego Alquerache, though
cashflow problems led to Mr Mitchell cancelling all agreements with
contributors.
Instead, he recruited (virtually) several hundred photographers and has
since built-up a good collection from handout PR sources (such as NASA,
the ESA, the US Navy, etc.) of satellite and reportage images from the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus some coverage of large-scale
disasters like the December 2004 Tsunami, the 2005 earthquake in
Pakistan, Hurricane Katrina and Wilma, plus historical material from
the history of American military aviation, WW II, the Korean War and
the war in Vietnam.
In addtion to this, Lightroom also has images from Antarctica, plus Jon
Mitchell's own extensive collection of images from over a decade and a
half in photo-journalism.
Mr Mitchell estimates that the Lightroom Photos collection numbers in
total some 20,000 select images, of which about 2,500 are digitised.
"Digital photography came about just as I was starting to well with
slides. Scanners were very expensive and the whole business of
digitisation is very time-consuming, so it took ages to get the
collection to this level of digitisation," he says.
Of course, he says, the handout collection grows a lot quicker. "I am
very selective with handout pictures and only pick what I consider to
be the best available from these sources. It has paid off though, as
certainly many researchers find it a useful service - to be able to
search and download these images from one site (rather than hundreds)
and get an optimised high resolution file to download. There is room
for expansion of this service and sometimes I issue more pictures per
day than Reuters or AP!" he adds.
Mr Mitchell says he is selling the agency for financial reasons. "I
have put years of work into this collection and my personal finances
mean that it is difficult to keep investing in new equipment, etc and I
am now editing my own publications online, which is a bit more secure
than my current setup," he adds.
The price of the archive will be discussed with interested parties and
Mr Mitchell thinks the agency has excellent potential in the medium to
long term.
"Certainly, the company needs a better base and some investment. Though
the collection is certainly capable - with the right distribution - of
earning 20-30,000 GBP per annum and perhaps a lot more with different
sales strategies," says Mitchell.
Jon Mitchell can be contacted via email at this address:
jonstmic@rediff.com or leave a message with Chantal Mitchell on +44 (0)
1234 721536
NB For those who have not noticed, Lightroom Photos is a sister company
of this publication.
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