Stock Photography

Agencies Some agencies do not make it past a one year anniversary. I urge you to consider this as you spend hour after hour uploading your images to a (possibly) new money maker. The probablity is exciting. The endless hour uploading, naming, describing, etc. is - not so much. Meh, in fact. The uploading, naming, describing and keywording is one critical area of selling stock for the following reasons: Uploading images can be painfully slow, like watching an obnoxious, music-is-loud-and-off-key child's show motion. Some agencies (sites) make this easy on you and some do not. There are a lot of factors involved here. Those factors include available resources and funds and involved labor hours. Naming images is more important on some sites, than others. This is where doing your homework/research on a site pays off. Some require that you name your images in a certain way (which can also be multi-factorial) and others are fine with the names that you give them. When I first started out to sell my work, I always started submitting to a certain agency first and naming my images the digitally assigned image number. That way, It was easier to go back and see which images were accepted and which were not (and for what reason(s) that they were not accepted). Describing images can be a real personal tedium. It might help you, if you decide to organize your images to include the description so that you don't have to type that description 95 times for 95 different sites. The only way to do that is to include the description in a text file, so that you can also include keywords, dates (dates are pertinent for some sites in some situations). Keywording is a critical within a critcal. You need to select as many applicable keywords (words which describe and will be used to *fetch* an image when buyer is looking for one. It can be a difficult task. There are some photographers who keyword innapropriately (to get traffic) and overuse keywords. I always wonder how this effects my photos, which are keyworded without the spam and dishonesty factors. And, there are times when I come upon an image that is titled thusly; "VERY FUNNY FACE!" I wonder what buyers think when they see this. Is the photographer trying to pitch the possiblity that the image is REALLY that funny, or is the photographer trying to hypnotize the buyer (come look at THIS one! It's quality!). Equipment I have purchased two different Fuji models and while they seemed to have been the best, they still were not adequate. I bought two different Olympus models and they were awful! Almost every image had purple fringing and noise. In fact, there was a lot of noise. One camera didn't have a name brand. I figured that it would be a bad purchase, but I just had to see how bad. This was dumbness. Absolute dumbness. I bought a lomography camera and it was see-through, but that was its only highlight. I don't think that I had a single lomograph, accepted. I have seen good Kodak images, but I didn't take too many decent ones with either of the two models that I tried. I bought one of them from CompUSA and when I returned it, I had to accept store credit as opposed to the cash outlay that I employed to get the camera with. Eeesh. I ended up with a one hundred dollar thumb drive (how much do those things go for these days? Well, not a hundred bucks I can tell ya. Not even. The last digital attempt came via the newest Polaroid digital. It was expensive and awful. Nice. The Wal-Mart guy was snotty when I returned that one. Nice. Forums No matter which web site you sign up with, you will want to be active in their forums and never say anything (even slightly negative about the site (or site personnel, or anything), for which you are posting. It is bad form, amongst other things. Not to mention that their revenge was very real. One one web site in particular, I noticed that I had more downloads, the more that I posted to the forums. Money If you want to make money with photography, stock is an excellent way to go. You are free to sign up with as many web sites as you can keep up with and make money with every download that they sell for you, which you may convert for download credits and/or store credit, depending on the web site. The size of the image and number of downloads per image and status (exclusive or non-exclusive for example) are common pay factors, starting at $0.25 per download (depending on the web site). It's a pretty neat deal if you were going to be shooting anyway and I have been shooting like a mad woman, ever since I bought my second digital camera - and even long before that. I have purchased nine cameras and none of them were good enough to be seen next to, much less using or trying to pass its product as stock of any value at all.

This page was last edited November 7, 2009.