Inside SmartFrame: Alan Capel, CCO

CCO Alan Capel discusses his beginnings as a freelance cartoonist, the way people value images today, and what commercial photographers should be thinking about.

How did you get into the imaging industry?



I did a completely unrelated degree – leisure studies – and quickly realized I didn’t want to work in that industry. I spent most of my time drawing doodles and cartoons, so I decided to make a go of being a freelance cartoonist.

I used to send these cartoons off to Private Eye to try and get them published. At the time, when the big newspapers used to pay £5 or £10 per cartoon, Private Eye paid £96. I used to get really nice notes from Ian Hislop saying “not this time” and so on. But then I got a message that just said “taken one” – and a cheque in the post. I had to buy Private Eye for weeks to finally find it, as I wasn’t told when it would be published. Years later, it was reprinted in the 25th anniversary edition, so I got paid again – which was nice!

I worked as a cartoonist for a year, and it was brilliant and I loved it, but it was ultimately very hard to make money. As a result of that, I got to understand how magazines and newspapers worked, and I realized I wanted to do something different but still in the creative world.

I saw an ad for a job as a picture researcher, and I had no idea what that was, but it sounded interesting from the description. That was with a company called Tony Stone Worldwide, which became Tony Stone Images. My job was to match images to a brief supplied by a customer and go off and find those actual physical images in the collection – and I loved it. 

That business ultimately became Getty Images. The people who started Getty identified photography as an area they wanted to build a business around, and Tony Stone Images was the best business they could have bought.

You’ve held several senior roles at the likes of Getty Images, Alamy, and now SmartFrame. Outside of the shift from analog to digital, what’s been the biggest change in that time?

The shift from analog to digital, while it brought lots of efficiencies – chiefly, serving the product digitally – also led to the problems we have with mass image theft, lack of control, and a driving down of the price of images as the number of good photographs increased phenomenally. 

You’d have thought that with the move to digital, photographers and the picture industry as a whole would have made a lot of money because people could distribute and find images more quickly. But it didn’t necessarily mean people wanted to use more images – although I guess the internet allowed for deeper content repositories.

The other thing is that it’s quite an incestuous industry in that everyone seems to sell everyone else’s images. There are very few businesses that retain true exclusivity over the images they have. 

It would be interesting to know how things would’ve panned out if everyone had retained their own images, and just sold what they created. But as it is, people with great images look for as many different outlets as possible – and some businesses are much better at selling images than they are at producing them. Everyone gravitates toward their own strengths, and you end up with the best images being distributed by the best distributors. 

So, the pie that’s available can end up being sliced four or five times. That’s an interesting evolution – there aren’t many other industries that operate with that much collaboration across competitors.

Do you think people value images differently to how they used to?

People still value great photography. A fantastic picture still wows. It’s no coincidence that there are still those “pictures of the year” that come out in December and everyone’s fascinated by them. Sometimes it’s the moment that’s captured – and sometimes it’s just visually stunning. 

So I do think people still value imagery, but economic pressures, the sheer ubiquity of photography, and the squeeze on publishing and advertising have meant that over time, the cost to play in the market has come down. So at least in monetary terms, the value of images has eroded massively.

 

It wasn’t uncommon in the early days of Tony Stone Images for images to be sold, daily, for hundreds or thousands of pounds. Fast-forward to today, and photographers would be doing cartwheels if they managed to get three figures. That said, you could argue that the incremental unit price to view or use almost anything – music, videos, and so on – has gone down over time anyway. So there is a perception that photography has lost its “value” but it’s down to the advancement of technology, rather than people not valuing, for example, beautiful or evocative images.

Outside of AI, what do you think commercial photographers need to prepare for?

They should be looking at where and how revenue’s going to be generated in the future. 

In the stock and editorial press photography world, the current model just isn’t sustainable. If I was talking to someone thinking about becoming a photographer, I wouldn’t say “don’t do it” – it infuriates me when people in our world say that. That’s just going to kill photography. I’d say: embrace the art form, learn your craft, stay bang-up-to-date with technology, and be aware of AI and how you might want to use it or avoid it! 

If you want to pursue more authentic photography, you’ll need to figure out how to make money – possibly in four or five different ways.

SmartFrame offers a unique alternative to the conventional market. You can still create images the way you want, but we provide a platform to market them and present them to publishers — and we believe our approach will outperform the current model.

But you should look for all commercial outlets. Some photographers start off thinking it’s all about the “art” and being in a gallery, but then realize they don’t have to sell out and compromise their creativity or integrity. Instead, they can build a business licensing images at a high rate here and a lower rate there. 

Your photography might work beautifully as prints – so consider looking at limited edition runs with a gallery, if you think your work warrants it. Alternatively, find a print site that makes your work available affordably so people can have it on their walls, while also making sure you’ve got your bread-and-butter route through sites that are really good at licensing and marketing photography. Having all your eggs in one basket is too risky.

What does your role look like?

I wear a number of different hats and I have a few different teams reporting to me. I’ve got a team that deals directly with publishers to get new ones on board; a team that does the same for advertising and campaigns; and a content team that’s focused on the images we have and how they’re displayed on the upcoming SmartFrame Images platform (below).

We’ve identified a sweet spot with sports images. Not only are they extremely popular, but it was interesting for us to find that a lot of sports brands don’t own their own images and don’t know how to monetize them. We help them do that, and that’s another of our teams. 

The rest of my role is working with the senior leadership team to help lead the business, build the strategy, and make sure we’re heading in the right direction – and to respond quickly to whatever challenges come up.

How have you found working at SmartFrame?

It reminds me a lot of the early days of my career, both at Tony Stone Images and at Alamy. Tony Stone Images was pretty well established when I joined, but it was still relatively small. But I joined Alamy when it was really small; I was one of the first employees. And a lot of what I learned there, I’ve brought to SmartFrame.

There’s a collective will and spirit at SmartFrame that I see in bucketloads, and that’s one of the reasons I joined. I didn’t want to join a company doing the same thing I’d been doing for the last 30 years as I could have stayed where I was. I needed a new challenge – and this is definitely a challenge, because it’s breaking new ground. That makes the atmosphere really exciting. There was a warmth in the business that I felt before I joined, and that’s continued. It’s a solid team, there’s a lot of honesty, and there are some really smart people driving it forward.

What do you wish you knew at the start of your career?

Even when things haven’t worked out, I’ve learned something from them. That might sound like a cliché, but it’s better to go through something and learn from it than to know everything at the start. Maybe it sounds arrogant to say in answer to your question “there is nothing I wish I knew” – but part of the challenge is working out how to make things better and grow. If you always knew how to do everything, you’d just sail through and it would be very boring!

Is there something that we’re not talking about that we should be talking about?

While it’s not been totally overlooked, nobody’s really cracked the issue of copyright awareness. Every kid grows up knowing they can just steal images. There still isn’t a strong enough reason for the superpowers – be they economic or governmental – to do something about it. The government doesn’t do enough to enforce copyright protection, and a lot of the current conversation around AI is shining a light on that. People are talking about it, but it’s still never important enough.

How do you switch off when you’re not at SmartFrame?

I’ve got four kids – two little ones and two bigger ones! – so I spend a lot of time with them. We’ve got a house full of pets and a garden that needs looking after, so I’m often out there chasing chickens, dogs, cats, and horses, which is a bit mad!

I’m a huge Leicester City fan, so I go and watch them too. I’m also really into music, and I try to get to gigs and festivals when I can. But mainly, I spend time with my wife and kids. We live just on the edge of the Cotswolds, so there are lots of nice places nearby. I love a good dog walk and pub lunch!