This category includes establishments primarily engaged in providing commercial photography services to advertising agencies, publishers, and other business and industrial users. Establishments primarily engaged in still and video portrait photography are classified in SIC 7221: Photographic Studios, Portrait, and those primarily engaged in mapmaking are classified in SIC 7389: Business Services, Not Elsewhere Classified. Establishments primarily engaged in producing commercial video tape or films are classified in SIC 7812: Motion Picture and Video Tape Production.
481219 (Other Nonscheduled Air Transportation)
541922 (Commercial Photography)
Commercial photographers provide the images for American business. Whether those images are as simple as a daytime photograph of a small town ice cream shop for a newspaper advertisement, or as complex as a carefully lit, elaborately staged still photo of an ice cream sundae for a nationally distributed magazine advertisement, they are created by commercial photographers. Commercial photographers also provide photos for annual reports, brochures, catalogs, and a range of other business needs. "Commercial work means: You make it. We photograph it," photographer Bud Hjerstedt told the Northeastern Wisconsin Business Review. "You can't think of a single thing, a single company, that cannot use photography."
The commercial photography industry is remarkably eclectic, with few boundaries in terms of business size or activity. Large cities may provide employment for hundreds of commercial photographers, some working out of shops with several thousand square feet of studio space and sophisticated film processing facilities, some working freelance with their own equipment and facilities. In larger markets, many commercial shops develop specialties in some area of photography, such as food, fashion, or industrial photography. Small towns, on the other hand, may have just a few commercial photographers who shoot an advertising layout one day, a senior picture the next, and a wedding on the weekend. At the time of the last industry census in 1992, there were just over 4,200 commercial photography establishments with combined revenues of $1.5 billion operating in the United States. By the late 1990s, the Bureau of Census estimated that sales rose to $2.2 billion.
Salaries for commercial photographers depend on the region and how hard the photographer is willing to work. Ken Bourdon of Bourdon & Bourdon Studios told the Tribune Business Weekly that a small town photographer may charge between $600 and $1,200 a day for his or her work, while a photographer working in a large city can charge from $2,000 to $3,500 a day. Such per day charges include all the lighting, staging, and assistants that the photographer may employ. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that there were over 154,000 people employed as photographers and camera operators in 1996; 4 out of 10 of these photographers were self-employed. Larger commercial photography shops also employ photo processors and lab technicians. Self-employed commercial photographers have the potential to earn much more than the salaried studio photographer, but the potential risk for failure is greater. An established freelancer with many jobs and contacts can make $350,000 in an average year. By contrast, median annual income for salaried photography/camera professionals was about $30,000—the top and bottom 10 percent earned $75,000 and $14,500 respectively.
The commercial photography industry has traditionally been open to self-starters who learned the trade in the armed services, at one of many photographic schools scattered throughout the country, or from a more experienced photographer. With some technical expertise and a flair for visual images, one could set up shop. As the industry becomes more sophisticated and more dependent on complex digital equipment, additional training will be required.
The leading technological development in the industry is digital image processing, which was revolutionized by the 1992 introduction of the Leaf Digital Studio Camera, made by Leaf Systems Inc. of Southboro, Massachusetts. The Leaf Camera, which sells for a base price of $29,000, converts visual images to computer pixels immediately. This allows the photographer to instantly view and manipulate the "photograph" on a computer screen. No film processing is required.
The cost of digital equipment remained stagnant through 1996 and into 1997. The cost of Leaf Systems equipment had not dropped since 1993. However, the equipment was expanding and improving at a phenomenal rate; new digital cameras and computer photography software, as well as new digital printers, were being developed that could make high resolution images on photographic paper almost as good as standard photographic prints. By the close of the century, Kodak, Ricoh, and Sony had all developed small, handheld compact digital cameras in the $300-$500 price range, including software. However, digital cameras with resolution comparable to standard photographic methods still sell at prices as high as $20,000.
For those studios that could afford the high price of going digital, it was a profitable transition. Infinite Photo & Imaging, an Arlington, Virginia full-service lab, equipped itself with state-of-the-art cameras, computers, and printers to become a fully digitized lab in the mid 1990s. Their new equipment produced high quality 4×8 foot prints, the most requested size, with any style of paper needed for commercial, trade show, corporate, and museum printing. By the beginning of the new century, they were capable of producing the world's largest, seamless photograph (48 inches by 67 feet) and large-scale reproductions up to 80 feet in length.
A watershed for the industry came when Warner Bros. publicists for the 1994 film Batman Forever used some of the latest digital technology. Warner credited the technology with helping the film break summer box office records. Publicists used standard color negative cameras, but used digital scanners and printers to make the posters and publicity photographs. The digital printer used could create a print every 75 seconds, greatly speeding up their production. These images were also scanned onto CD-ROM for delivery to New York for processing onto the movie Web site. At the premiere of the movie in California, photos of Jim Carrey's arrival were taken on digital cameras, stored on a memory card that could hold up to 84 images, then sent via modem to New York. They were placed on the Web site before the premiere was over.
Digitizing has also changed the industry in unexpected ways; for example, it introduced companies to stock photographs kept on CD-ROMs. By 1997, stock photographs sold for $250 to $1,500, depending on quantity and demand. With a CD-ROM, a company could buy a disc containing thousands of stock images for a cost of $10 to $250.
Even as digital equipment becomes increasingly prominent, traditional cameras and films will remain a part of commercial photography for many years.
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