Who Will Buy My Photos?

"Who will buy my Photos?" is the question that many skeptics ask and it's a very valid question for anybody thinking of investing their time and resources in a new business venture. Well that list would have to begin with Web Masters who are constantly looking for images for promoting their online products and promotional materials.

Then you have traditional marketing and advertising agencies that need photos on all kinds of subjects for producing posters, billboards, leaflets and calendars. Basically in today's marketing industry the internet is virtually the only source for finding photographic images which serves millions of people all over the world.

If you want to make money with your photos on the internet you don't have to be technically minded. It really is simple and mainly involves just downloading photos to your computer and then uploading them to our recommended photo money making sites.

The techniques are very interesting and you might be surprised at how they really do work. In order to not scare you off at this point here's what they're NOT about:-

1. You DON'T need fancy or expensive camera equipment.
2. You DON'T need to be a professional photographer!
3. You DON'T need a website or any technical skills!

So bearing that in mind, these are the main reasons why you don't have to be technically gifted to make money with your digital photos:-

1. You can snap photos from anywhere in the world!
2. You get to work from home and choose your own hours!
3. No experience necessary - if you can take an average picture, you can make money with this system!

The reason these techniques are so effective is because they are the basic secrets to turning your photos into an additional cash income. Turning your photos into cash skills will be made so simple with the advice given by these training articles and the fact of the matter is that anybody could do this successfully.

Another great advantage with this online photography business is that you don't need years of training and that you will be making real money from your digital photos in no time at all.

Click here and learn how you can make an extra $200 to $5000 selling digital photos online…..

Take Photos That Sell

If you want to make money with stock photography you'll have to follow some basic guidelines, no matter if you shoot for a micro stock site or a traditional stock photography agency.

Shoot photos that sell

That's by far the most important point. Would you pay for an image of your neighbors mother-in-law? Or of his dog? Of course not! No one would, perhaps not even your neighbor himself.

Likewise professional photo buyers don't care for that kind of images. What they ...






... are looking for are photos that illustrate concepts, like career, relationship or retirement. Business related photos generally sell very well. Photos of handshakes sell well because shaking hands is a universal, widely understood idea that can be used to illustrate negotiations, contracts, treaties and even things like breaking-up or divorce.

Travel photography can sell well if it can be used to illustrate concepts. For example, a photo of the Houses of Parliament in London can be used to illustrate democracy or governmental topics.

Avoid legal pitfalls

Most stock photography agencies have strict rules regarding images of people (if the people in the photo are recognizable), property (if the image of the property can lead to its owner, e.g. a license plate on a car), and trademarked logos or items anywhere in the image. If in doubt, don't submit such images.

If you want to sell images with recognizable people in them, all agencies will require you to provide a so called "model release". A model release is a document with which the photographed person permits you to sell the image without need of compensation. Obtaining a signed model release from ordinary people is next to impossible, so you might be better off to either weed those images out or hire professional models.

Keywording is the key to success, literally

No matter how good your photos are, they won't sell if no one can find them. All stock sites let you tag or keyword your images. A good approach to keywording is to answer six simple questions for each image: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

For example, let's suppose you have a bunch of nice healthcare related images, shot in a hospital. Answering "Who?" you might find "doctor", "nurse", or "patient". Answer "What" to come up with "lancet" or "stethoscope". Answering "Where" yields "hospital", "waiting room" or "theatre", while "When" gives "morning", "afternoon" or any other time of day or year. Ask yourself "Why" to evoke concepts like "sickness", "comfort" or "patience". Finally "How" can refer to the photographic technique involved: It could be "black and white" or "monochrome", it might be "blurred" et cetera.

Keep the noise down

Always keep in mind that the end user of your image may want to print it out eventually. The larger the print size the more noticeable noise will be. Noise is induced by your digital camera's sensor and is something digital photographers have to live with, much like traditional photographers had to live with film grain. Generally speaking the smaller (area wise) the sensor size and the higher the ISO sensitivity the higher the noise will be.

For further info about stock photography, please see my previous post your-digital-camera-is-money-maker, as well as the products below.

P.S. Due to technical 'hitch' my photography store is down at the moment. Will try to sort as soon as possible.




Photo Stock Notes

Photo Stock Notes Photo Stock Notes delivers eight pages each month, packed with information of top priority for the freelance stock photographer, condensed to its essentials. The eight tightly written pages of Photo Stock Notes bring you vital facts, trends, reports, latest strategies, that you can use immediately, in your taking, making, and selling of photographs and in the operation of your stock photography business. Because you have little time for lenghty articles, the reports in Photo Stock Notes are brief, pithy, and give the essence of each issue or subject. Whether you are just starting out or starting over, Photo Stock Notes will be a monthly refresher for you.Renew your current Photo Stock Notes subscription and your existing subscription will be extended by the number of issues you purchase. Order a gift subscription and we'll send a free gift card with your personal message to accompany your Photo Stock Notes gift subscription. You can also select the date to have us send your electronic gift card. You can also order other Photography magazines for yourself, or your business. We've got excellent prices for reception rooms and waiting rooms, professional offices like dentists, doctor offices, health clubs, gyms, beauty and hair salons. Get one bill and make just one payment for all your magazine subscriptions. We will send you a renewal reminder when your subscription is about to run out. Take advantage of our cheap Photo Stock Notes magazine subscription prices today and and have your Photo Stock Notes magazine delivered for a whole year.

Your Digital Camera Is A Money Maker!

Can you imagine anyone paying you good money for your photos? No?

You know, I had all those photos from a recent trip to Rome, Italy, laying around and I thought it should be possible to make a few bucks off of them. First, I couldn't think of a way to market or sell those images but then I discovered micro stock sites.

Micro stock sites are great: You register (it's free) and then upload a few sample images. After your samples passed an initial review you start uploading and making money.

Let's look how this works in detail:

Stock photography

What is stock photography?

Imagine someone is creating a website about healthcare. To beef it up they want a few images of doctors, nurses, operating theaters and the like. Rather than hiring a photographer (sending him on "assignment" as it's called in the business) which can be very expensive the designer decides to use stock photos, i.e. images that are readily available.

Usually stock images are much cheaper than "bespoke" photos. So our designer would visit one of the established stock image sites and browse around a little until she finds some nice healthcare related imagery. After paying up (usually at the tone of $100 per image or higher depending on the use) she downloads the photos, puts them on the website and calls it a day.

Micro stock sites vs. traditional agencies

With a traditional agency our designer likely spent between $500 and $1,000 for half a dozen images of doctors, nurses and stuff like this. That's small change if you are a Fortune 500 company, but what if you are on a budget or doing website design for a friend or a non-profit organization?

Enter micro stock agencies. Micro stock sites have stirred up the traditional market for stock photography over the last three years. What's the idea here? Rather than charging $100 or more for a photo, on many of those sites you can get high quality images for less than $10, sometimes as low as $1!

With a payout of perhaps 25 to 50 cents per image this is not very attractive for professional photographers but an amateur can make decent money this way and should at least be able to finance her hobby. And remember, this is the Internet we are talking about: Make it up on volume. 25 cents per image downloaded may not sound like much but if you have several hundred or even a thousand decent and usable images, all of them submitted to the big micro stock sites even a paltry 25 cents per download can add up nicely.

What you need

Most micro stock agencies have the same requirements: You'll need at least a four Megapixel camera (more is better, although you'll be fine with between six and eight Megapixels), your images should be free of noise, properly keyworded and should picture sought after subjects. For example, good selling images are business or healthcare related or illustrate a concept or an emotion such as love, relationships, carreer and the like.

Here is a few micro stock agencies that you can try out:

Fotolia - Fotolia is a rising star in the field of stock photography. They usually pay more then 50% of the commission to the photographer, and allow you to set your own price. They are one of the fastest to approve photographs. Another nice thing is the way you can get your money. They will allow you to make a paypal cash-out once you've hit the 2 dollar mark.

Bigstockphoto - Yet another great site to sell images at. They pay 50c or 1$ per image downloaded. and they allow to get paid after only 30$ has accumulated. They will approve photos in about three days. They allow FTP upload.

Shutter Stock - Shutterstock is the leading micro stock agency today. Shutterstock’s business model allows a customer to make a subscription and during the subscription period the customer can buy and download 25 pictures a day. This model encourages downloads, and indeed you will get allot of downloads. The photographers earn 25c per image sell, and additional 5c if the customer also requested to burn the image on a CD. There are also broader uses licenses that the client can buy for additional payment. The site is very friendly. It has an FTP upload option and pictures are approved within a day or two.

Dreams Time - A very popular site with the clients, and will get you great sells. The basic price per image is 1$ (or 2$ for full resolution) out of which the photographer gets 50%. The site is very friendly. It has an FTP upload option and pictures are usually approved within a three days. Defiantly an option if you want to sell your images.

Pixmac - Yet another great site to sell images at. They give you 50% commission for non-exclusive rights and 60% commission for exclusive rights.Earning money has never been easier!

CanStockPhoto -They pay 50% for guest/member download and 0.25 USD for subscription download. They are a great agency, with a little cluttered design.

Feature Pics - A very nice agency - they let you set a price for your stock photos or set the percentage that you want to earn.

Photostockplus - Photostockplus gives a great variety of products you can sell. They will not only sell your photos, but put them on mugs, shirts and more. photostockplus also provides great resources for event photographers.

123rf.com - 123rf is a relatively new agency which is doing well. They are still small, so if you are good standing out is easy. They pay 50% of each sale to the photographer - nice. another nice feature is email notification once your images has been approved or rejected.

Crestock Stock - At Crestock Stock Photos you can earn up to 30% commission on every image or photo you sell. With hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month, you're guaranteed incredible exposure for your portfolio. Their fast upload system ensures you won't spend ages just to get your photos and images online.

Stockphotomedia - When an image or photo is downloaded, the individual or entity doing so, the User, pays for the image/photo the Photographer has uploaded and the Photographer’s account, the Account Holder, is automatically credited with 35% for small images, 45% for medium images, 55% for large images And 50% for Illustrations of the revenue generated for every photograph and image downloaded. When the balance on an account exceeds 60 EUR or every 3 months, the Account Holder is entitled to submit a request for payment. We use paypal or Moneybookers.

Shutterpoint - ShutterPoint offers THE highest payout rate on the internet: 85% for Full Royalty-Free License, 70% for Standard Royalty-Free License. Payouts are delivered by check, through PayPal, or MoneyBookers whenever your earnings exceed your minimum payment amount. Minimum payment options start at $50. You also get your own image store-front to showcase and sell your photo albums to the world and your own pro-style sub domain (http://USERNAME.shutterpoint.com).

Fotomind - Fotomind is ideal for Stock Photographers and people looking to sell quality stock photos. Good revenue - 0.3$ per credit (that means 0.9$ per image in most cases). Get up to 27$ per image. Upload pictures via FTP or HTTP. Automatic handling of image metadata. Various payment methods (check, paypal, etc). Payouts are sent every month, minimum payout is 100$. Photo review time: up to 72 hours. Earn more money by referring people to FotoMind.com. Fast and Friendly photographer support.


I wish you the best of success!

Krister