I’ve been working on IndianShutter.com for over a year now … slowly, surely, exploring organic growth paths, curves and so on …

Here’s what I have to say about this project that’s so close to my heart.

IndianShutter.Com – The World’s first Portal for exclusively Indian Images. Also the world’s first portal that presents amateurs, hobbyists, novices and nearly anyone with an image, an opportunity to sell their photographs online.

The digital camera is here to stay, and share space along with conventional film body cameras. A plethora of digital image products and players in the market is proof of the revolution that has shaken the world of photography in India and redefined how things will work for a long time to come. Gone are the days, when photography was a domain that required a high level of technical expertise and huge dedication. The digital camera has brought with it all the technology needed to capture a good film, leaving the photographer to just focus on the creativity.

This explosion has spawned a new paradigm in the way image content is shared and sold. The World Wide Web has become THE leader in terms of delivery models related to photography. Organizations like Getty Images, Corbis and so on offer paid stock photography, sites like Shutterfly and Flickr provide space and capabilities for storing and sharing image content.

The Indian Image domain, however, has not yet been exposed to the ripples that have emanated from the epicenter of this explosion. Indian image content on the world wide web is today, driven hugely by tourism and enthusiasm. Indian Image Content has also been typecast to the world… Image searches with India as a keyword turn up, prominently, bushy bearded gents from Rajasthan, ladies carrying matkas in the noonday sun, sadhus and snake charmers, snotty kids standing in the barest of clothes and so on.

Indian commerce, industries, infrastructure, medicine, natural wealth, business, technology and other domains find no place in the world space, in terms of content. The demand from local as well as global organizations is on the rise for such India Specific Image content. Statistics collected online reveal that this market alone is poised to touch roughly 40 million USD in the next three years.

There sadly, is also no space to provide a selling forum to millions of amateurs, and even professionals. Most sites that allow photo upload and sharing are sadly restricted to just that. They dont offer opportunities to sell, or way ahead to generate revenues.

IndianShutter.Com aims to bridge this gap by providing Indian Specific Image content for local and global markets. Indianshutter.Com also aims to be the perceived favored destination for photographers from India and other parts of the world to upload and sell Indian image content.

IndianShutter.com is focussed on providing commercial values to all photographers who upload their photographs. Towards this end, we are contacting various agencies, media houses, studios and so on in India as well as abroad, to be their preferred destination for Indian Images. We are also connecting to various agencies for posting assignments and getting the best of the pick from photographers in India.

Our services will slowly move onto various domains including Photo Blogging, Ground Level Activity Clubs in twenty cities in India, Travel & Tourism Pages akin to Lonely Planet and of course, to Citizen Photo journalism. Also on the cards is developing capabilities to push and pull images through mobile devices.

At the core of our business model :

1) Develop every photographer as an asset from 0$ to 1000$ per annum.

2) Aim for and achieve a databank of 100,000 photographers in 3 years, each with an average value in terms of quality of photographs uploaded and sold of 1000$ per annum.

3) Sell out at valuation derived by measuring photographer as an asset.

4) To achieve the above, offer a variety of services, training, interactions and facilitations online as well as on the ground.

IndianShutter.Com offers a plethora of services to photographers, including free as well as premium services to create portfolios online and upload images for sale. Over 180 categorizations at the lowest level allow a photographer to upload images into specific and exact zones. Coupled with well chosen keywords and description, searching for an image would ideally be just a click away. This intuitive approach towards categorization coupled with keyword provides extremely high visibility for every photograph.

IndianShutter.Com offers a full community for a photographer, be it a novice, an amateur or a professional to be a part of. Starting with yellow pages specific to photographers, the community zone is designed to blossom into a huge activity centre that will provide learning, skill enhancement, product knowledge, operational knowledge, commerce and other interactive tools towards interacting for betterment of images, skills and for growing capabilities and knowledge.

All content posted on IndianShutter.Com will be exclusive copyright of the photographer uploading the content. The photographer can upload images of various resolutions and sizes up to a lowest factor of 300 DPI (below which images don’t really sell). The actual images are not displayed to the buyers, only thumbnails and low-res watermarked previews are displayed. A premium package photographer can specify his own price, as well as offer pricings against various usage options for every image. Buyers are sent a link to download the image, after payment formalities online have been completed.

Every photographer gets to see stats online, in terms of number of images uploaded, number of hits per image, images that have been purchased, at what price, etc. Photographers can also get to see images that rank high in popularity (hits) or ratings, or comments.

IndianShutter.Com, in its quest to be the perfect partner to photographers, aims also at mentoring photographers in terms of providing inputs on improving and enhancing images posted online, right from colors, hues and crops, to optimizing and enhancing keyword sets. Each image is manually inspected for conformance to IndianShutter.Com norms of objectionable content, before it is uploaded.