Business from Scratch: Interview with Fabio Formaggio and Cristian Negroni

It can be said that Fabio Formaggio and Cristian Negroni are the dream team. Two friends with a passion for photography and no strict agenda whatsoever. Together, they’ve grown their business and today are some of the top contributors at Depositphotos.

Their story and their journey is a reminder that with a little perseverance and determination, anyone can turn their life around using their passions and interest as a guide. With a catchy name, OneInchPunch has won over many clients. They share a little bit about their business, the stock photography industry and their outstanding work.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey to becoming a photographer, and discovering microstocks.

Hi everybody! We are two photographers from Italy, Fabio Formaggio and Cristian Negroni. We were bartenders in a disco club and microstock changed our lives.We learned everything by ourselves through the trial and error process, but I don’t suggest everybody to do it. Four years ago we didn’t know anything about photography, so we really had to dig in and learn fast.

What are some of the themes in stock photography that really resonate with you?

When we first started, we captured a lot of pictures on the topics of friendship, happiness, love and travel. I think these are the most common themes in all the stock platforms. Now we try to mix everything and tell a compelling story in every frame.

If you had to pick one genre of photography to shoot for the rest of your life, what would it be?

If that ever happens,we choose a crossover between lifestyle, portrait and travel 🙂 Photographing people in amazing places basically.

What are some of your passions, inspirations and motivations as a photographer?

When we started we were looking at the big names in stock photography but now we love some master photographers in their field. We try to learn and apply our knowledge to our photography style, that is lighting or editing. We learn for the sake of learning and we can apply to our style only 5% of what we learned. Our motivation was to sell lot of photos, but now it’s really to be a better image creator and photographer, that’s what keeps us very busy and always improving or changing our style.

The lighting in your photographs is always spot on, how much time do you spend in the post production stage?

A lot, but less than before. Our skills now are better than before. Also we try to get what we want in the shot, taking care of composition and lighting.

What’s the hardest part about running your own business?

The hardest part is the planning. Dealing with models, locations, planning trips and realizing a project one after the others is really a hard job. Shooting and editing – that’s the fun and easy part 🙂

What do you think consumers are looking for when they search photo banks?

They are searching for the best image ever. They also care about trends, so what is sellable today maybe won’t be in two years.

Do you have a favourite photograph from your portfolio? If so, which one is it and what’s the story behind it?

My favourite photo is the next one I’ll will shoot. But one of our bestsellers is with three runners on a bridge, legs only. That was taken in a crappy place next to my home in Milan. That reminds us that we don’t need to travel the world for taking sellable pictures, but we do it 🙂

What do you choose to focus on with your portfolio? In other words, what are your priorities?

We want to take stunning pictures of course. At the moment we are mastering lighting and editing.So we are working hard on that, trying different options that work well for stock and our workflow as well. We also care about models and locations.

You work with many models for your shoots, and they all seem like they’re having such a great time! What’s your secret?

Yeah in order to do that you must have fun with what you are doing and create a mood. So joking and laughing with people you’re working with is never a waste of time. Being strict with sticking to the storyboard doesn’t work well for us.

What do you think will be the major trends in photography in 2018?

I have seen that Instagram is affecting a lot the styles of some photographers. The mix of human being and nature is very interesting. We also noticed a major improvement in skills from some of the photographers.