EDITORIAL
PICTURES - NEWS PIX
Stock photography consists of existing photographs that can be licensed
for specific uses. Book publishers, specialty publishers, magazines,
advertising agencies, filmmakers, web designers, graphic artists, interior
decor firms, corporate creative groups, and other entities utilize
stock photography to fulfill the needs of their creative assignments.
By using stock photography instead of hiring a photographer to perform
on location shooting, customers can save valuable time and stay on
budget.
Stock photography is sometimes called a photo archive, or just stock
photos. Outside the U.S.A. they are generally referred to as picture
libraries. (Quoted from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_photography)
Don't miss the keyword 'licensed' above. Selling stock is not selling
photographs. Selling stock is selling the right to use certain photograph
in a certain way - e.g. use it in a book not exceeding a certain number
of copies; or use it in printed advertising, etc. This approach allows
to sell the same picture multiple times to the same or different buyers
for different use. There is a big difference between "royalty free" licensing and "rights managed" one.
That will be explained later.
Stock photography companies are agencies selling to buyers the photos
supplied by photographers and taking part of the price as commission. |
LIST
OF STOCK PHOTO AGENCY
 Shutterstock
iStockphoto
Dreamstime
Fotolia
Alamy
123RF
Fotegrafik
Inmagine
StockXpert
PhotoShelter
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HOW
TO SELL STOCK PICTURES
Register
Refer to the list on left side.
Understand
of Technical quality and copyrights
First of all you have to have a few decent pictures (I would say 15-20 as a very minimum) and you need to be able to produce the pictures that will not be considered a "snapshot". "Snapshots" are typical family pictures, party or touristic ones made with automatic cameras without any thinking behind (about composition, lighting, background, etc). If you only made snapshots so far it's better to go and learn a bit more about photography before submitting anything to photo stock.
Technical quality of your pictures must be good. Most stocks don't require very high resolution (typically the minimum is 3-4 megapixels) but your pictures must be clean, sharp, correctly exposed, not having much noise etc. If you use digital camera always shoot in RAW format and never in JPEG.
Right
Subject
You must understand that most of the time stock pictures are used as illustrations. Thus the picture with a clear message will sell better than a generic one. For example a fine-art portrait of a pretty girl will not sell as good as a portrait of a smiling girl talking on her mobile phone. Positive messages sells better than negative. People and objects isolated on white background sell very good. Industrial pictures sell good too.
cobweb In general it's a good idea to shoot specially for stock. However some people don't like that. There are people who like walking in a park and making nature pictures and not photographing anything else. This is understandable and acceptable and such people can still make some money on stock but they will earn less.
Traditional
agencies vs. microstock
Microstock (or Micro Stock) photography
is an offshoot of traditional (macro) stock photography.
What defines a company as a microstock photography company
is that they (1) source their images almost exclusively
via the Internet, (2) do so from a wider range of photographers
than the traditional stock agencies (including a willingness
to accept images from "amateurs" and hobbyists), and (3)
sell their images at a very low rate (anywhere from $.20
- $10) for a royalty-free image. (Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microstock_photography)
Unlike microstock, the value of individual image sale in traditional agencies vary from several tens dollars to several hundred - however direct comparison isn't valid because of the different license types. This will be discussed in more details later.
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