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One Photo + Proper licensing = A photo worth $15,000

You may have seen this photo on our homepage before. We obviously put this up to trigger a reaction and yes, it worked:

• No way you could have made that much!!
• How?
• Where is this place?
• That's 2/3 of my annual salary!

We also get a lot of requests to explain the back-story for this photo, so I decided to write about how, in one year, I made $15,000 with this one photo in licensing fees alone. This photo is my personal record and I continue to receive requests about it, so I'm not sure it's done making money for me yet.

Some years back I read about Japan's largest and most ambitious underground construction site, a 2 billion dollar project which can only be described in superlatives. The full name of this project is "The Metropolitan Area Outer Discharge Channel" however most people call it "G-Cans". It was designed to balance out the water level of 5 large rivers and help prevent Tokyo from flooding. They built five overflow "silos" or "cans", each of them measuring 70 meters in depth with a diameter of 35 meters, next to the rivers and connected them with a giant pipeline that stretches over almost 7 kilometers with a diameter of 10 meters. The pipeline ends in this incredible hall, a water reservoir 177 meters in length, 78 meters wide and 25 meters high. From this hall, there are several 747 engine powered pumps that can pump 200 tons of water per second into a sixth river, the Edogawa.

(Graphic Courtesy Edogawa River Office - Click here to see an interactive animation how G-Cans works - Japanese only)

I am always on a mission to explore the "unknown" parts of Japan, so this place became a top priority for me and I had to visit it. After a few calls and emails, I received permission as the first foreigner to shoot the G-Cans construction site. As this was not an official assignment, I decided to offer the photos in advance to a Japanese magazine I regularly published in, however the editor was non-committal because without seeing the pictures, he could not really imagine what kind of place this was.

After my fantastic experience of visiting G-Cans, I showed the photos to the Japanese magazine, but they said they were not interested, so I immediately uploaded them to my then-current web site for everybody to see. It took only a few hours and the pictures and links to this particular gallery went viral and got mentioned in hundreds of blogs. A few days later, I sold the first non-exclusive license of this picture for $1,500 dollar to the US based magazine Popular Science, which then published this photo in their "MegaPixels" section.

Since Popular Science is read all over the world, after my photo was published I received many more requests for the exact same image from other international magazines, which lead to further publications like this one (another $1,000 dollar license fee).

While the picture above became the most requested one, I received requests to use other images from the same series, for example the editor of the UK based Tank Magazine wanted to use this picture below....

...or the Sunday supplement for the popular German Newspaper Welt am Sonntag used these...

...or a Dutch band, which again used different photos within their CD cover inlet.

This sudden popularity of my G-Cans series also attracted the marketing company working for Land Rover, which licensed low-resolution images for the planning of the "Designed for the Extraordinary" campaign, directed by Jordan Scott and filmed partially inside G-Cans.

As you can see, properly pricing and (especially non-exclusive) licensing a photo can lead to interesting opportunities for a photographer and make a big difference to your bottom line. It took my photo about a year to make $15,000 and as mentioned before, it continues to attract attention. Remember, a good photo can continue to make you money for a long time. Do this with many of your photos and you are on "the road to profitable photography".

On a side note, since I have shifted my focus to consulting for the international photo industry and Shakodo, my current web site is not made for selling pictures. Since there is an interest by many members of Shakodo on creating and maintaining e-commerce projects for photographers and how to sell photos with them, I will review very soon some of these by making my huge photo collection of "unknown" Japan available for licensing and chronicle my experiences here in this very blog.