BEHIND THE CLICKS – A Quick Chat with Stock Photographer Alex Rotenberg

You’ve roamed the world, used some the fanciest photo equipment and learned plenty of techniques. What’s the weirdest object you’ve ever used to stabilize a shot?

I usually carry a tripod or a mini gorilla-pod like a responsible adult, but let’s be honest, sometimes they stay at home because I convince myself, ‘I won’t need it.’ Then, of course, I stumble upon a perfect night scene and curse in multiple languages.

Weirdest stabilizer? My wallet. Not just metaphorically. It was thick enough to prop up my camera for a long exposure of a bridge in Seville. The result was a beautifully sharp shot with dreamy skies… that’s earned me a grand total of about €2.17. So, the shot was stable and sharp with low noise. The finances? Not so much while I hear plenty of noise from debt collectors.

These days I tend to be more practical as I just shoot handheld at ISO 50,000 and pray to the gods of Topaz Denoise that they do a good job which they usually do.

Can you show us one photo that perfectly captures your entire career vibe?

That’s a hard one and I’ll have to get serious. With nearly 30,000 images online, choosing just one is like picking your favourite regret. But if I had to, it’s a shot I took in Budapest in 2015 of Syrian refugees protesting at the train station after being blocked from traveling to Germany.

One image of a girl, maybe 9 or 10 years old has sold over a thousand times, but more importantly, it struck a chord. My own grandparents were refugees who fled to Brazil in the 1920s, so that image carries a strange kind of ancestral déjà vu.

These days, I shoot moody, conceptual book cover images. But that photo reminds me that photography isn’t just about pixels, it’s memory, identity, politics. And in this AI-washed era, where it’s getting harder to tell what’s real, those moments matter more than ever. See the Rounder’s refugee solidarity page.

You call your stock photo guide ‘Brutally Honest’. Are you honest with yourself? Is there a truth you don’t like to admit? Something too brutal, even for your blog?

Brutally honest? Absolutely. That’s why I started the blog in the first place, to push back against all the “get-rich-quick” nonsense influencers were spewing about stock photography at the time until today.

This microstock industry isn’t passive income. It’s a “get slightly less poor very slowly” scheme. And sure, I enjoy parts of it but if I wanted money, I’d have opened a coconut stand in Cascais with the help of Damiano – hey I might be onto something.

The uncomfortable truth? After all this work, I’m still earning around $800/month net on average. Years ago, I thought I’d be making double that by now. But royalties keep dropping, AI is flooding the commercial market and the cost of eggs and pretty much everything else has gone up 40% during the past 4 years.

That said, my focus has shifted as these days I’m much more into creating book cover imagery for Arcangel. I’ve licensed 40 book covers so far with many more on the way. Book covers for me are genuinely satisfying, both financially and creatively.

Describe your photo style as a food dish. What are the ingredients? What does it taste like and how do you serve it?


My photo style is a chaotic fusion dish served at a restaurant run by an emotionally unstable chef.

On one hand, I shoot commercially which needs to be usable, sellable, algorithm-approved and aesthetically pleasing. On the other, I want to go full Damiano-mode: moody, high contrast, noisy, unhinged wide angles and all. Unfortunately, those rarely sell.

So the dish? Imagine a juicy, photogenic cheeseburger, a true crowd-pleaser smashed together with barnacles (because I’m always shooting by the sea), and a random scoop of açaí on the side to keep up with Brazilian roots. Makes no culinary sense, but hey it pops in the photo and the colour scheme looks great.

The presentation is absurd: moody lighting, sweet and salty, hot and cold, raw and half-baked. Critics don’t know whether to clap or gag. They just murmur, ‘Interesting. Keep going, Alex. You’re almost there. This time next year, you’ll be rich.’ Except that within that next year sales drop another 30%.

And naturally, the dish is delivered by drone, just before it crashes into Botafogo Bay for the second time. Here’s the dish as created by AI.

Do you ever look back at early work and think, ‘Caralh* – that was a conscious choice of mine’? Got an example?

Constantly. I sell images every day and some are over a decade old, many of which in hindsight make me cringe a bit.

Out of 30,000 uploads at various agencies, I’d say 20,000 are basically just snapshots (at the time I didn’t think they were). Of the remaining 10,000, maybe 1,000 are decent. And out of those? Maybe 100 make me genuinely proud.

I once uploaded a photo of a red heart on cobblestone in Milan using selective colour later while post-processing. I genuinely thought, ‘This will change stock photography forever and make me rich.’ It didn’t.

It did, however, earn enough for an espresso and some likes on social media.
I also had a tilt-shift phase, those fake miniatures. Again, great for social media likes, not so great for licensing.

But I don’t beat myself up. Every stage reflected what I knew at the time and technology has evolved particularly drones. If I’m not cringing at old work, I’m not evolving. Hopefully by 2030 I’ll be cringing at my 2025 masterpieces.

I also had a phase when I was doing quite a bit of tilt-shift photography for that miniature look. It looks great for social media likes but rarely sells as it’s too niche.

Congrats! You’re granted the power to erase one overused trend from photography forever. Which  one  dies  today?

Oh boy, where do I begin? But if I had to delete one trend from the face of photography forever, it’s the selfie.

There’s so much beauty in the world, and somehow, we’ve decided that the most interesting thing in every frame…is our own face combined with those fake-looking filters?

I get it. Ego is undefeated. But if your head is blocking 80% of Botafogo Bay and the Corcovado at golden hour, maybe it’s time to flip the camera around and admire the view for once.

Thanks for putting together this fun interview and until next time!

Seat Open

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