Photography buffs who love taking snaps of just about anything and everything can make money out of doing what they love if they sell stock photography online. A number of these stock photography websites are used by people from all over the world in their various online and printed materials. Whether it is for family newsletters, personal stationery, business presentations, sales brochures, or corporate websites, images from stock photography websites are popular sources for creative imagery. Photographers who would like to sell their works can turn to these websites to earn some income. If you are one of these people, you have to learn a few tricks in order to maximize your income potential.
Not every photographer who undertakes to sell stock photography online makes lots of money on his images. In fact, it could take some time before his photographs gain interest and get downloaded by end users. For photographers who constantly dish out interesting and creatively unique photographs, the income from these stock photography websites can overshoot their one-shot deal gigs from special events and wedding photography or portrait photography. You have to be able to offer online users of stock photography high quality and unique photographs that would suit their purposes to achieve this. In some cases, photographs that are flexible for use in different purposes and in different industries could work to a photographer’s advantage.
There is a vast market for stock photography online. It is still a viable business opportunity to sell stock photography online despite the large number of photographers who sell their images. What you have to do is to make sure that your photographs stand out from the rest of the images on the online libraries. It’s not about the quantity of photographs that you upload and make available to subscribers of stock photography websites. It’s about the quality of the photos you take and how powerful these images are perceived as a medium of communication. A high quality photograph not only has to have a high resolution. It also has to look professional rather than just another picture taken by an amateur photographer. Users are actually looking for photographs that do not look generic. A photographer who uses a point-and-shoot automatic camera will not likely take photographs worthy of being chosen from among hundreds of photographs in an online stock photography website.
Turn in unique photographs to increase your chances of having your images sold and downloaded. Being unique when you sell stock photography does not necessarily mean that you have to shoot some exotic or out of this world subject. You can still be unique even with ordinary subjects. There are endless ways by which you can shoot a combination of elements and subjects. Yet, many photographers make the mistake of shooting the same scenes. How often have you seen photographs of children on grassy knoll doing a jump shot and combinations of images or a bikini-clad babe in a wrap walking along the shoreline at the break of dawn? Get an idea of what is already in the market and try to innovate in your angles, lighting, composition, or framing of the various scenes in order to make your photographs unique.
There are several other style pointers that you have to keep in mind if you want to make your images sellable in the stock photography websites. To start with, you have to make sure that you leave some allowance in your photographs for some editing and tweaking by the end users. A lot of those who use stock photography do not use the exact image as downloaded from the stock photography website. Art directors and graphic designers making use of these images might have the need to manipulate the image to change the color of the background, or to add some text somewhere on the photograph. It is also not advisable to shoot photographs with identifying marks such as words on the models’ clothing or promotional logos on some of the props.
It always pays to keep your portfolio updated at all times. Even if you do not get a surge of sales within weeks of uploading your portfolio, you still have to keep on shooting better photographs and uploading them to your online portfolio. Keep tabs on the trends in creative imagery, try to find out what people are looking for in the images that they use, and improve your work to increase your chances of being picked among the multitude of stock photographs online.