Welcome. If you’re considering joining a stock photo agency, or you are already working with one and aren’t receiving the guidance, support, and sales your imagery deserves, we’d like to tell you a little bit about our community.

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Who we are

The technical answer: “Blend Images is a photographer-owned and operated creative content development company, specializing in multicultural stock images and video.” But fundamentally, Blend is a team of over 150 image-makers working together to build the strongest commercial collection of stock images and footage across all major licensing models. With one of the world’s largest network of resellers, Blend has had significant revenue growth since inception and has proudly paid out more than 35 million dollars in royalties to our photographers over the past 10 years.

Unique Company Culture

At Blend, we truly believe we’re better together. All Blend photographers are invited to join our StockPros e-mail list, where we share production resources, technical information, and have ongoing conversations about how to help each other become stronger image-makers. We provide each photographer with a personal editor to guide you in making new content. We have face-to-face meetings and workshops every year. And we offer creative briefs and trend analysis information on a regular basis. By joining Blend, you receive access to our exclusive Blend Artist’s website that contains one of the largest collections of creative research available to any stock photographer.

Our Staff

Founder and CEO, Rick Becker-Leckrone, has worked in commercial stock photography since 1990. Rick and his team are among the most experienced image-licensing professionals and creatives working in the field today. Blend has staff in Seattle, WA; Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas, NV; New York, NY; and Miami, FL. We take pride in being easily accessible to our community of contributing photographers.

Our Pictures

Blend’s library includes five major content collections.

Rights Managed (RM):

• Blend Images is unique in distributing our RM content across all major agencies, including Getty Images and Corbis. Coupled with our best-of-class aesthetics and production value, our RM content commands high price points across the largest possible distribution platform in the industry.
• Rights Managed content is designed to attract clients who create unique advertising and use stock as a replacement for, or adjunct with, assignment photography.
• We have seen increased demand for RM imagery over the past several years and we expect continued strong growth for the foreseeable future.

Premium Royalty Free (RF):

• Our Premium RF collection remains the core of our library. With over 100,000 images, this collection’s breadth and depth of this offering is targeted to buyers who need imagery on a regular basis, but don’t want to be tied to the repetitive and often uninspiring content found in Microstock.
• Premium RF is the most widely distributed collection at Blend Images, available at over 100 distributors worldwide, including all major and mid-sized agents. This collection also has Blend’s longest sales history, affording us robust data-mining analysis to advise photographers how to generate content with the very best sales potential.
• Blend’s royalty rates are the best in the industry. With base RF rates over 20%, we provide a strong incentive to shoot. Even better, once Blend accepts 1000 of your images (RF, RM, or Motion collections in aggregate) the royalty rate increase automatically to 50%.

Value Priced RF – Boost (BT):

• For clients with lower budgets or very high frequency image utilization, “Boost” is a perfect fit. This value priced content is imagery from our RF collection that has not been licensed at our higher price point in over 4 years.
• Royalty rates for Boost are identical as those for Premium RF.
• This content is distributed worldwide to a select sub-set of our distribution channel that carries value priced imagery and is available on popular Microstock and subscription sites.

Memento (RF):

• Our newest collection of images created by iPhone or Android devices. Commercially released stock imagery for contemporary design. Fun, quirky, but ultimately strong conceptual content.
• Licensed through our Royalty Free contract. Soon to be uploadable by in-phone App.

Blend Motion (RR/ RF):

• Recently launched, the Blend Motion collection has come out of the gate with very promising sales volume. This all high-definition video library provides valuable content options for broadcast commercial, in-house, and web-based motion projects.
• We distribute motion content in two licensing types – Rights Ready (a form of Rights Managed) and Royalty Free. We have over 40 resellers of our motion product and see this segment of our business as a high-growth opportunity.

Sales and Marketing

When looking for representation it’s important to consider an agency’s ability to get your work in front of as many prospective art buyers as possible. By focusing on generating only high demand content, we have put together an extremely comprehensive distribution network. Our overall RPI is higher than most other image collections, which results in higher search rankings throughout our worldwide network.

Blend has over 100 resellers in all major creative markets. Your work will have access to resellers like Getty Images, Corbis, Masterfile and Superstock. And since we have non-exclusive agreements with all the largest sales agents, you benefit from exposure to a much larger audience than you would with any single agency. Blend also licenses content through our website. We have many regular customers who love working with Blend directly as our content is more focused than one encounters at the larger agencies. For those looking for the best business and lifestyle content, blendimages.com is a great place to start (spread the word!).

Sales reporting and royalty statements are available online through our “Loupe” application. With this system you can track how many images we have on file, quickly see your top-sellers, download reports to Excel and much more. Using Loupe, you’ll have editors helping you analyze your sales and determining the best direction to take in developing new productions.

What You Can Expect From Us

• Competitive return per image for productive shooters
• Regular communication
• Responsive, highly experienced assigned editor
• Timely edit of submissions
• 24 hour access to royalty statements
• Monthly payments for all closed sales
• Web-based content editing and final image ingest
• Access to many of the world’s top selling stock shooters
• Creative briefs and research documents
• Face to face creative meetings

And, hey, we're nice folks. We love stock photography, and we love photographers, because we ARE photographers. We do understand what it takes to create the very best work. We've all been on shoots that have generated killer shots. And of course, we’ve all had the occasional production that just didn't fly. We know the kind of investment photographers make in their content, and we take our role seriously to generate the very best returns possible. We only hire staff who are helpful, committed, and most importantly, have enough experience under their belt to be able to provide truly useful input. We actually return phone calls: imagine that!

What We Expect From You

A desire to generate the very best content you can, a positive attitude, and regular submissions on a monthly or bi-monthly basis which are based on our needs list and input from your editor. That’s it. You make great shots, and we’ll get your images in front of buyers.

Let’s Go!

Step One:

To get started, send a link to a website with samples of your work to Sarah Fix. Sarah will get back to you within a few days. If it looks like we’d be a good fit, then the additional steps will be taken.

Step Two:

Submit between 10-15 high-resolution digital sample images to Jasmine Hartsook to assure your files will generally pass our quality control standards. These sample images don’t have to be shots that will go into the Blend Images collection. The review will take 1-2 weeks, and you’ll receive technical feedback via email. We prefer to receive your samples via spring-loaded hotlink but you may also provide your own FTP information or use a large file delivery system like Dropbox.

Minimum Digital Requirements to Qualify For Photographer Representation:

• Blend Images requires 48-52MB (when open and uncompressed), 24-bit RGB (8 bits per channel), jpg files at 300ppi resolution.
• Files should be produced in a color-managed environment with Adobe RGB 1998 as the color profile.
• Images should be captured using professional level DSLRs, Pro Digital Backs or high-end scanners that can deliver the required quality.
• Images should be fully retouched, color corrected, and free from dust, dirt, posterization, artifacting, or other image flaws when viewed at 100% magnification.

Step Three:

While awaiting feedback, you will receive a Blend agreement and W-9/W-8BEN tax form for review.

Step Four:

Once the files are approved and you are ready to move forward with signing the contract, you can sign, scan, and email a copy of the tax form and agreement to Sarah Fix; or print, sign, and mail two copies of the agreement and the W-9 to: Blend Images, Attn: Sarah Fix, 3008 Sentney Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232

Step Five:

You will be set up in our online system with a photographer prefix, username, and password (that you will change after first login.) You will register on blendimages.com to access the back-end online system for communication, access to our forms, sales data, and submissions.