KRAAS Images, a Caribbean stock photo agency, expects to earn a little over US$5,000 monthly from its themed collection that is to be rolled out later this year.

The subsidiary of Kraas Media also plans to launch stock video and audio content in order to widen its library.

“We would have to modify our current platform to facilitate these extensive options,” said Staysean Daley, CEO of Kraas Media.

She figures that offering footage and sound files will translate into a 20 per cent increase in the company’s annual sales.

Founded two years ago by Daley, a photographer herself, the main service of the company is the licensing of highquality images from professional photographers around the Caribbean.

It targets advertising agencies, production companies and freelancers locally and internationally. Most of the traffic on its website, www.kraasimages.com comes from Jamaica, followed by Trinidad and Tobago, New York and Germany.

Among clients it has done work for are the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS).

It has a similar pricing strategy to big players in the standard stock photography industry such as Gettyimages and iStockphoto. Prices are categorised as royalty free — solely based on file size and resolution and rights managed — based on usage, distribution, time period and market.

“We got started because we saw the need for Caribbean images,” said Daley. “It turned out that an image of a student in a tunic or a photo of the Coronation Market wasn’t easy to get.”

She added that inability to offer beach footage that was requested by a company in Denver pushed Kraas even further to offer footage and audio.

“It happened in our first year and it was very disheartening,” she recalled.

As for images, the company currently has 34 contributors including photographers and illustrators from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Cayman Islands, Grenada, St Lucia and Colombia.

However, chief among the setbacks faced by Kraas Images is the reluctance of local photographers to join.

“They have a lot of reservations as to whether we will own their work and if they’ll get their money,” she said.

But that isn’t the case.

Kraas sublicenses work and sells images for contributors, more specifically, contributors receive 60 per cent of the sales made on rightsmanaged work and 55 per cent on royalty-free work.

“But we ask for exclusivity. We wouldn’t want it to be a case that another company has the same image,” she said.

Additionally, photographers get a login to view the number of times their photo has been used and the payment that is due to them.

Its website has been endorsed by JAMPRO, in a bid to help quell the fears of potential contributors and to highlight that the company is legitimate. The state agency’s stamp of approval can be seen on the site, via its logo.

Kraas has also received support from the Branson Centre Of Entrepreneurship to develop its business model and plan.

Moreover, the company has done workshops to drum up appreciation for the arts as a viable career by giving basic photography, design and illustration as well as video footage and audio skills to youths and adults and providing job opportunities. The next workshop is scheduled for August.

“This (workshops) will increase in content volume estimated at 10,000 images, 5,000 illustrations, 1,000 sound and audio files by the end of 2014,” Daley told the Business Observer.

Its themed collection will include between 50 and 100 works in each portfolio, namely, ‘Bragadocious’, ‘Pickney’, ‘Jamaican Crismus’, ‘Hard at Work’, ‘Caribbean on the Road’ and ‘Hello Baby’.

For instance, ‘Pickney’ will include various images of children, while ‘Jamaican Crismus’ will include Christmas images that are unique to the country.

At the same time, Daley said that she and her business partner, Christopher Birch, are looking into making a portfolio of images unique to each Caribbean island.

Also included in the holding company, Kraas Media is Kraas Designs, which focuses on designs for print and web production.