Photogain.com, What When Why & How

What

First of all I am extremely excited that you are reading this and interested in learning more about Photogain.com. For those of you that are just now learning about Photogain.com let me take a moment to help you get your brain around what the excitement is all about.

When

We officially announced the beta launch of Photogain.com at the 2005 Photo Plus Expo in New York. Although we presently still have our database programmers and HTML coders busy building out additional functionality our stock sales area is up and fully fictional. This means you can already begin selling your images online and keeping 100% of the net profits and art buyers can begin to uncover a new wealth of fresh images. We are saying "net" profits because we have to pass along a small 3% credit card processing fee to our credit card company. That means you keep 97% of what you sell. There has never been a better time to jump onboard and begin building a great new stream of income. Especially if you choose to sell downloadable images which means you never have to ship a product. You can now make money while you sleep.

Why

As a working commercial photographer now for well over twenty five years I have always had in the back of my mind that my stock images would at the very least contribute to my retirement and hopefully supplement my income in the interim. After gathering well over 10,000 quality stock images I began the process of deciding how to sell them. Most of my colleagues had signed with major stock agencies and I was blown away by how big a slice of the pie these big agencies were taking in commissions. I also learned that the photographers submitting to these stock agencies also had very little or no control what-so-ever as to what was actually chosen to be sold by the agencies. To further ad insult to injury these same agencies had locked my fellow shooters into contracts that prevented them for selling to any other groups. This just did not seem right and fair to me. In any event I shelved my stock sales idea for the time being and just kept shooting and gathering images.

How

Along about 1995 I began learning how to code and build Websites. After a few of my clients saw my Noel Studios, Inc. Website they were soon asking me if I would consider building a site for them. Before long I quickly realized that this was going to be more than I could handle. About this same time my studio manager mentioned to me that her husband was from the computer/Web industry and that he was giving Web seminars that I might want to attend. Well, I did attend and learned a plethora from Joe, her husband. In fact I'm still learning from him. To make a long story short Joe Jaynes and I ended up forming a new Web development and hosting company, Abacus Arts, Inc. in 1997. We have been very blessed over the years with great clients and now own all of our own servers which we keep in the time Warner data center in Spokane, WA.. We have built a very solid business always investing in the best hardware, software and personnel, but also most importantly, we have worked hard to build great relationships with each and every client we have brought onboard.

It is the infrastructure provided by Abacus Arts, Inc. that now allows us to build the Photogain.com community and provide both photographers and art buyers with what we believe is the next generation of stock photography sales. Our goal is to connect art buyers directly with photographers; to empower the individual photographer to make image sales decisions and to provide him or her with the proper tools to quickly react to market trends and demands. Furthermore we are also excited about building a community where photographers can get deep discounts on gear and also join either online or in person for some fabulous learning opportunities from some of the best photographers in the world. Thanks to the solid foundation of Abacus Arts, Inc. we are now able to make all this possible.

Now

We are extremely excited about bringing on new photographers now so if you are interested please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have. The Photogain.com founders and mentors are presently jurying portfolios for consideration of free membership while we are growing our base. We hope to hear from you soon!

Rip Noël

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RipNoel