I recently got an enquiry from a company in the Netherlands, looking to license one of my images to use in their new office kitchen.
As I mostly do commissions (for small businesses, non-profits and families) and some assignment work (for publications), stock enquiries like this are rare, and most of my images aren’t suitable for stock use.
But I have a few images posted, and they’d come across one of mine that they liked. Since they’re based in Rotterdam (one of the largest container ports in the world) and focus on trade with Asia, they were looking for an image of containers on an Evergreen shipping lines vessel.
A quick Google image search later, they’d found one of my images in my small stock library hosted as a quiet part of one of my sites.
They found it because I’d captioned and tagged the images accurately (and because there aren’t that many good Evergreen container ship images around apparently), and they got in touch and asked about fees to license the image.
We sorted out a price and I worked with them on a new version of the image that fit the exact proportion and size they needed.
They printed the file locally, and as you can see the image now adorns their hip-looking kitchen (thanks to Richard Vredenburg for the image).
I’m chuffed that there’s one of my images on the wall in an office in Rotterdam, and it’s amazing that this digitally-connected world allowed this small miracle to happen. Twenty years ago there is no way an image I took at the start of a family cruise could have ended up being looked by Dutch people making coffee, and now we take it for granted.
Here’s the original image (in its custom Rotterdam crop version):
