With the growth of the Internet, a corresponding demand for digital images has been created. This in turn has created an expanding opportunity for photographers (and not just professional photographers) to sell their photos online thanks to “stock photography”!

I really like the online stock photography Internet phenomenon, since it is the first in the world and probably the only business model which allows amateur photographers to earn some money from their hobby.

In fact, if you are a talented (and somewhat dedicated) photographer and you shoot hundreds of pictures every month, you can earn a very significant part of your living shooting high quality pictures for stock photography agencies.

What is Stock Photography?

Imagine, for a moment, that you publish a travel magazine, newsletter, or website.

You’re running a story on travel in Europe, and you need photography to accompany the story.

One way of obtaining those images is to send a staff photographer to Europe to get the Europe shots you need.

Another way is to hire a freelance photographer based in Europe to go out and take the Europe shots you want. Each of those options is incredibly expensive.

The third approach is to purchase stock photography.

These are images that a photographer already has, and that are available for you to reprint.

The Advantages of Stock Photography

The primary advantage of stock photography is that you can get the Europe shots you need at a fraction of the cost of using your own photographer or hiring a freelance photographer.

There are two types of stock photography: Royalty-Free (RF) and Rights-Managed (RM). Most stock photography websites offer both RF and RM images. Royalty-free images are usually less expensive than rights-managed images, but those images are also more widely used.

In other words, the royalty-free photos you publish will also be published by hundreds or thousands of other publishers.

Rights-managed stock images, on the other hand, are not as widely circulated. The fee for using the image is typically based on whether or not you want exclusive use of the photo (if so, the cost is higher), how large the photo will be when it’s published, and the circulation of publication.

For example, a 1/4-page Europe shot on an inside page of your travel magazine will cost less than if you were to use the image on the cover of your magazine. Likewise, if your magazine has a circulation of 25,000, the image will cost less than if your magazine has a circulation of 1,000,000.

The ability to view and immediately download stock photography is another enormous advantage of stock images. There’s no need to wait for negatives, positives, slides, or prints; you can simply view all of the available images and download those that you want at whatever resolution you need.

Because the images are digital, there is no degradation of quality, as is often the case with duplicated transparencies, for example.

Consumers Benefit from Stock Images Too

Photography has long been recognized as an art form, and people are increasingly choosing to display photography as art in their homes. If, for example, you treasure your travel adventure to Europe, you can easily find photos for sale from photographers who sell stock images. You can obtain high-quality pigment prints that will remind you of that special trip for years to come.

Stock images are ideal for both publishers and consumers, and the availability of such images is made possible by the digital revolution.

First of all, there are three basic things you need to consider when looking at how to sell photos online:

1. What are the best sort of photos to take?
2. Where should I sell the photos that I’ve just taken?
3. What can I do to ensure that my photos prove popular to buyers.

Let’s deal with each in turn.

1. When asking the questions as to what are the best sort of photos to take, you need to have a mindset of “think commerce”. Most of the people that are buying photos online are doing so because they want to enhance the “saleability” of their websites. The old adage of “a picture is worth a thousand words” is as true in the digital age as it ever was in the past.

With that in mind, there are certain categories on stock photo sites that are very popular with buyers; those being: photos of electronics, photos of businessmen and women, photos of money and other photos that may be beneficial to their website or business. Well taken nature shots are also very popular online sellers.

You will find that any photo ‚Äì regardless of category – with an element of real “uniqueness” could also prove to be a popular online seller, particularly if it’s a shot of someone in the public eye.

2. In terms of where to go to sell your photos online, the basic rule here is to find out where your prospective clients go to buy their current photos and make yourself visible there. Your choices are:

• to sell your photos yourself using software designed specifically for the task or by creating your own website (good luck to protect your images)
• to sell your photos on eBay or other auction sites
• to sell them to online stock photography sites where you get paid a portion of the sale each time your photo is downloaded

3. To ensure that your photos prove popular to prospective buyers you will need to combine two of the elements that we’ve already spoken about. You will need to take photos in categories that we already know to be popular with buyers, yet you’ll need to make your photo stand out from the pack. How do you do this? You provide some sort of twist on an already established theme.

Go to the stock photography sites that I mentioned in the previous section and do some research in the popular categories: electronics, pictures of businessmen and women, pictures of money. Look at what’s there and make a decision on how you can come up with something different. If you have any Photoshop skills, then you really have a powerful tool to add an element of uniqueness to your photos.

Which Stock Agencies to work with?

There are many stock photography sites that will be happy to sell your photos and share with you the received revenues.

Alamy, iStockPhoto, Fotolia and BigStockPhoto are just few stock sites to name.

All stock sites allow you to register for free as their submitting photographer and start upload your work to their banks.

However, be aware that many sites will ask you to provide detailed personal information such as a scan of you picture ID / passport and will ask you to sign and fax them a signed copy of their submitter agreement.

I completely understand them in their effort to limit the image fraud on the Internet and to protect both their buyers and their submitters image copyright owners from the fraudulent behavior.

In addition to proper submitters authentication, many stock photo sites will ask you to pass a professional online test, which should verify that you have all the required photographic skills and that you understand rules of the game on stock photography market.

Don’t be afraid of that test. If you know the difference between shutter speed and the aperture and can explain what is DOF you will pass it for sure.

Some, like Alamy, have higher selection standard and ask for a first set of submission before accepting you as a contributor. Smaller agencies are less selective.

The basic stock photography rules are quite simple:

1. Do not submit images that include any copyrighted material – Avoid company logos, trademarks, third-party images and brands.
2. Provide a model release for any recognizable person in your image Each site has its own standard model release form (example) that you have to fill in and send along with each image containing a recognizable person. I suggest you to download and print model releases for all the sites you have selected to submit your images and always keep these releases handy (I keep a couple of these on me). When you shoot a person, do not forget signing her on one or more model releases! Note, that most sites will also ask you for the copy of model’s ID and for the witness signature. Some sites will request to send them a copy witness ID too. Some agencies will even ask for a property release, or simply won’t accept photos for some specific monuments (you can shoot the Eiffel Tower during the day, but at night, the lightning system is copyrighted). Keep all this in your mind when you prepare a stock shooting session
3. Editorial content Some stock photo agencies have a separate section / category for editorial images. Different rules set apply for editorial content. Editorial content can be used only in news and therefore these images do not require model releases and can include any copyrighted material. So, if you have shoot carnival in Brazil do not throw out all your pictures because you do not have model releases for all these people. You still can submit your images as editorial content at some stock photography sites. However, be aware that there are not too much buyers for this type of content and the submitters’ competition is tight.
4. Use appropriate lighting and composition This is common sense, but I will mention it anyway. Your images compete for the buyers attention with images created by highly qualified talented professional photographers which shoot for years, own nice equipment and definitely know how and when use it. You must think creatively in terms of lighting and composition, otherwise your images will never sell. For instance, if until now you have relied on your built-in flash as a proper source for indoor lighting it is a time to change your mind. Go to the stock sites and take a look how other photographers use light in their work. You will probably need to switch to some more professional sources of lighting for your indoor photography. Again ‚Äì be creative and you will win the war for the buyers’ attention!
5. Images format must be JPG, typically from at least a 6 Megapixels DSLR camera, and with max file size of 8-10 MB
6. Properly prepare your images before uploading them to stock photo sites First of all it means digital editing. There are many software applications that can help you to edit your image, starting from the industry leading Adobe Photoshop tool or the newest, and much cheaper, Photoshop Adobe Lightroom (now $183.49). However, making your image look gorgeous is yet not the final destination for a properly prepared stock photograph. Think about buyers. Buyers still have to find your image among all the similar pictures in the web image database provided by a stock agency. It means you have to user proper descriptive keywords to index your imagery before uploading it to a stock photo site. All the stock photo agencies allow you to upload images and add keywords through their web sites. However, imagine yourself adding the same keyword to each one of your images at every stock site you have decided to work with. It easily multiples the amount of time you are going to spend preparing your images to be sold. Such multiplication of image preparation steps makes all the preparations process completely ineffective. I told ya to use IPTC tags & metadata Editing of IPTC data and selection of proper descriptive keywords can take significant amount of time, especially if English is not exactly your mother tongue or if you just prefer to shoot images rather than index them.
7. Prices and payments – what income you can expect Most stock photography agencies implement pay-per-download business model, giving their submitters some payment each time their image is downloaded (purchased) by a buyer. This is a micro-payment model and the prices you get paid start as low as $0.20. However, if you were successful to create a highly demanded image you can easy hit few hundreds downloads a month, so your earning arithmetic can be $0.2 x 300 = $60 monthly, just for a single image.

Of course, the rule of the thumb says the more images you have online in each and every stock photography agency, the more images you sell monthly and the higher income you will get.

Typically, stock agencies send you a check or a PayPal transfer at the end of every month. However, this is true only if you have earned more than a certain amount of cash, typically $50 – $100. If your earnings still did not reach this pre-defined amount you will be paid at the end of the month when your income reaches that payment barrier.

What else?

You might also wanna try ImageKind.com – I recently discovered this community for creating, buying, and selling art. It is one of the fastest growing online art sites on the Internet.

They introduces a new development in print-on-demand services. Artists of all types including, digital photographers, photographers, illustrators, graphic designers, painters, printmakers and draftsmen, can sell their work online with a free Imagekind online art gallery.

Customers can readily find a wide variety of wall art, framed art, digital photography and poster art on our site. Imagekind fine art prints can be ordered with millions of combination of frames, papers, canvas types, and sizes.

Within the first month of creating my free online gallery (max 24 images), I generated over $200 worth of sales… Now I am gonna upgrade to the Annual Platinum Account ($94.99/yr for unlimited galleries with unlimited images/gallery) and hopefully it’s gonna boost my ROI!

In Conclusion

The field of photography has opened up in unprecedented ways due to digital photography. Today, a photographer no longer has to have access to or be a wizard in the darkroom. Instead, he or she needs to master the realm of digital imagery and computer photo manipulation.

Because today’s images are already in a digital format, it makes it that much easier to upload and transmit them. This has led to an increasing number of stock photography sites and has allowed those who need the services of a photographer – either as publishers or consumers – to have more choices than ever before.

And make sure to link me to your profile in the comments if you decide to create an account with a stock agency!

Good luck!