Stock Photo – Who wants to know how to sell online? Learn the business of stock photography
In the past, getting into stock photography was a daunting task. You had to create your own mini agency or register with one of the big agencies. If you set up your own agency, you would be required to do all the legwork of sorting, archiving, and marketing your images. If you signed up with a big agency, you were required to have at least 1,000 images before they would talk to you. With the advent of the Internet and the growth of high-speed broadband connections, these barriers have been removed. Today anyone with a quality digital camera can enter the stock photography market and make money selling their images online.
There are literally hundreds of agencies online that offer photographers a place to sell their images. More photographers have the opportunity to set up their own online mini agency or add an archive page to their portfolio site.
Big agencies have also moved online, but their acceptance requirements have also gotten tougher. Getting your images at Gettys or Corbis is very difficult and for the most part is the domain of well established professional photographers.
Regardless of how you sell your images online, one thing is for sure: you’ll need to adhere to the three basic tenets of the successful stock photographer: quality, quality, quality. Oh, and let’s not forget the quantity.
What photos will be sold?
The first step to selling your images online is understanding which images are selling and which are collecting cyber dust. In truth, there are very few restrictions on what is sold and what is not sold. The key here is to understand what kind of images are selling the most, and in the case of licensed images, most often. As you sell your images online, you’ll need to understand that almost any image can be sold as long as it meets the agency’s technical requirements and you can find a buyer.
A Google search for “stock photography” returns 15,400,000 sites. Larger agencies like Corbis and Getty are of course listed first. These agencies remain the domain of professional photographers with huge libraries and will not accept inquiries from hobbyist photographers. They have huge libraries of images from professional photographers and even hire their own photographers to shoot commissioned material for the agency, which is then owned by the agency. All the regular photos that you would think are really cool and will sell have been taken and are on file with these agencies. These are what are generally known as commercial stock photos and your chances of selling them are not that great.
What you will be able to sell are EDITORIAL shares. Editorial material does not sell for as high a price as commercial material, but you will sell more images more often than when you try to sell commercial material.
The images that you will be able to sell are the ones that no one else has or that no one else has access to that topic. What you need is a niche. What you will be able to sell online are photos of normal people doing normal things, taken in a professional and attractive way.
The photos they sell are the ones that tell a story or as stock photographers like to call them; photographic illustrations. A photographic illustration is a photo that has something to do in it. We’ve all heard the term “A picture is worth a thousand words”, well when you hear this think of a photo illustration. These are the stock photos that sell well.
It’s also important to enjoy your photography, so go out and take photos that interest you; your trip to the fair, grandma doing her chores, dad cooking burgers on a backyard barbecue, and your brother mowing the lawn. If you work in a factory or mill and can get permission from your managers or bosses to take pictures, these types of images have great potential. Industry, commerce and business are areas of high value in stock photography.
Always try to include a person doing something. A picture of a tractor in the field is good, but a picture of a tractor with the farmer sitting on it is much better. (Peasant Painting in the Field). If you insist on taking scenic photos and hope you can sell them, if you include a person who is actively doing something, your chances of selling are greatly increased. For example, a shot of a sunset on the beach is great, but remember there are hundreds of such images already in circulation, take the same shot and add the silhouette of a boy chasing a soccer ball and you have a shot much more sellable.
Also, when taking pictures, try to imagine a theme or mood. By this we mean that you try to imagine a feeling that you want to convey with your photos. Some are cheerful and bright holding hands, while others will be more somber or moody. A photo that has a clear mood or theme will sell well. You can use colors, shapes, and textures to illustrate different moods and themes. Images that convey sentiment have high resale value. Stereotypical images have less. By stereotype we mean things that we have all seen thousands of times in thousands of magazines and other places. While you may think that the silhouette of lovers kissing against the backdrop of a beautiful sunset is a good business image, it has been done ad nauseam and if we searched any of the major stock libraries we would find plenty of examples of it. this exact image. What could be better to show the couple doing something a little less typical, perhaps taking each other’s photo?
Also remember the rules of composition. The law of thirds works well, as do heavily cropped images. The old rule of “keep it simple” applies. This is not a book on how to take good images, there are thousands of references available, what we are teaching you here is how to sell them online. Just remember, the images they sell are the attractive ones with good composition and good exposure.
However, one thing to remember is that as most agency websites display the images on thumbnail pages, having attractive images as thumbnails increases your chances of selling, this stems from composition rules. and clipping already discussed.
Selling images online is the next big thing, something every keen hobbyist is looking to get into. The principles of photography apply, but you need to temper them with some business sense, knowing what photos sell is the best start.