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 possible money maker. The
probablity is exciting. But, the endless hours spent uploading, naming, describing, etc.
can be a bad idea if it doesn't pay off in the end.
The uploading, naming, describing and keywording is one critical area of selling stock
for the following reasons:
Uploading images can be painfully slow. Some agencies make this easy on you and
some do not, for any variance of reasons. There are a lot of factors involved here. Those factors
include available resources, labor and hours involved.
You might want to consider renaming your images to match the assigned name
given by a particular agency. If you do this, It is easier to go back and see which images were
accepted and which were not. It can also help you organize them.
Keywording is critical. You need to select as many applicable keywords which are words
which describe and will be used to fetch an image when a potential buyer is looking for one.
It can be a difficult task. There are some photographers who keyword innapropriately to get
more traffic. I would think that this would be frustrating for potential buyers.
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. I bought one camera that
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. That was nice.
I have used a Nikon D40 for most of my stock years and it was okay, but there was still a lot of
noise. My last camera buy was a Sony DSLR. I wasn't able to submit a single image and I don't
know if I just didn't give the camera enough of a chance to really learn it, or if it was just not that good.
Throught talking to other stock photographers, which has overall been very helpful and through
Internet reserach, it has been my experience that the best cameras come from Canon, Nikon and
Fuji. Currently, I am shooting with a Canon T2I. I like it so far, but I know that I will not be
taken seriously as long as I am shooting with it.
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. In most instances, you are free to convert those fund for
download 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 eleven
cameras and most 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.
