Westend61 Shoot Club: We support newcomers to stock photography

We don’t really want to be an agency that puts itself in the spotlight. Our role as a provider of royalty-free images relies first and foremost on our wonderful community of photographers, who supply us with their first-class stock photos from all over the world. The quality of our portfolio stands and falls with the creativity and skill of our photographers. Just as important, however, is the reliable, cooperative, and competent support of our Art Department.

This year, Westend61 turns 20. When we look back on the past two decades, we can feel a little proud of the profound know-how that our team has acquired. With every briefing for our photographers, with every image processing, and with every keyword tagging, we profit from this wealth of experience, and we constantly strive to develop it further. We know the ups and downs of the market, especially the challenges for newcomers in stock photography.

Shoot Club into the limelight

In our interviews with photographers from our community, we often ask them for a few tips for stock photography newbies. This advice can be briefly summarized as follows: It’s hard to get started, be patient, and persevere. That’s how Katharina Mikhrin sums it up for us:

Just start! Keep producing new images and be patient. Stock photography is diverse. There is a wide range of subjects and areas. You can try everything. If you keep at it, you will find your subject.

Katharina Mikhrin

But in the beginning, most stock photography newbies have to learn from others before they can find their own style. This is true even for seasoned photographers in people, wedding, or advertising photography, because stock photography is a genre unto itself. The economic return is often a long time coming.

This is exactly where we want to start with our “Shoot Club” by supporting aspiring stock photographers with our expertise. New perspectives and ideas are the be-all and end-all in Westend61’s colorful world of images. Just as the photographers benefit from our briefings, we also need a new and somewhat different view through the camera lens. This is the only way we can keep our finger on the pulse of time and offer our customers a high-quality portfolio.

The “Shoot Club” is our support program for talented newcomers whose potential we want to develop with the help of individually tailored briefings (which we call “missions”). Each mission is based on one of our Photographer Inspires, in which we regularly provide our photographers with inspiration on the latest image trends.

In these missions, we help the photographers by giving advice and assistance when it comes to planning and executing their photo shoots. Together with their art director, they first discuss ideas and work out a plan for the shoot. The Art Department also assists them with location scouting, model selection, and editing.

“Go Greener” to kick off

As early as the third quarter of 2022, we launched the first round of the “Shoot Club” as a test run, so to speak, and contacted and briefed the selected photographers. The basis was the Inspire “Go Greener” with cutting-edge topics around the mega-trend sustainability. For the first project, the photographers were able to choose from various image worlds, including “Sustainable Architecture”, “Recycling“, “Saving Energy“, “plant-based eating“, and more.

So here we present the promising result in our “Go Greener” pinboard. Keeping with the topic, we can say that the new talents have convinced us with their “sustainable” productions! And we are already looking forward to the next creative ideas in round two focused on the topic, “Urban Life.”