One of the main ways I make a living as a photographer is through stock photography. So if you are a designer, blogger, marketer, artist etc and you see some images on this site (or any of my online folios) you’d like to use in your work, then chances are those shots are available for very reasonable prices as royalty free images. Commercial use is fine and all photos with people in are fully released. I have recommended a couple of the better/cheaper stock agencies over on my sidebar, with links to my folios so if you are interested in some images of mine be sure to check them out.
Stock photography is the process of shooting images to be put into large scale “photo libraries” or stock photo agencies who then pay you a commission when an image you have submitted to their collection is bought by a customer.
When people generally think of royalty free stock photos though they generally think of photography of such subjects suck as business people shaking hands, smug looking executive types lounging around in front of a sales chart going skyward or boring series of objects isolated on a white background.
However shooting microstock photography doesn’t always have to be so boring and indeed one of the reasons I love to make a living as a stock photographer is the freedom to shoot when, how and what I want. Personally I don’t really shoot with a view to sell on stock, instead I shoot whatever I feel like, whatever tickles me at the time and then later on submit any images I think might sell to the various online stock photo agencies.
This tactic has allowed me to not only enjoy my job considerably but also to build up a passive library of images that is mostly responsible for sustaining my travel and work throughout Asia.
If you are just getting into stock as either a buyer or a submitter then I would recommend starting with the following agencies: shutterstock, dreamstime, 123rf, depositphotos & fotolia. All of those agencies have a solid sales record and pay their submitters a decent rate. Whatever you do STAY AWAY FROM ISTOCKPHOTO. I can’t stress this enough as Istock and their parent company Getty have been responsible for pushing photographer commission rates down to record lows(currently they pay a base rate of only 16%!) all the while pushing their prices up, giving shoddy customer service and refusing to fix a clunky and outdated image upload system. Their business plan seems to be to buy up the competition and gain a monopoly so that they can set lower and lower commission rates and photographers have no choice but to accept due to their huge market share.
They are the bully in the stock photo industry. The big greedy expensive agency who try to exploit the little guy. Besides with the amazing quality of imagery you can find in ALL (well most) of the stock photo agencies along with the much cheaper prices and fairer treatment of submitters there really is no longer any reason to keep supporting that particular site.
“Royalty free” is simply a type of image license you can purchase, and the image license that is sold through the microstock market. A royalty free image is one that you can purchase once, for a set amount and then use an unlimited amount of times for different uses so long as they fall inside the original limitations of the license. This is as opposed to a “rights managed’ license which differs from royalty free in that each individual use of the image must be negotiated and purchased separately. Also the prices for rights managed images are typically much higher than for royalty free images as there is a higher level of control and of exclusivity of the images.
Quick links to microstock agencies: Shutterstock Stock Xpert Bigstock Dreamstime 123 RF Fotolia Istock How to kill noise without a ninja Ok so I get occasional emails from other microstock shooters (or those looking to get into it) frustrated about the whole ‘noise’ thing. So I figured I’d put together a bit of a piece on how I personally go about combating it. This piece wont focus on any of the third party... Read More ››
Tips to succeed Here we come to the tips and techniques part of the article. Now bear in mind I’ve only been submitting to stock agencies for about 6 months and even that time could be best described as part time. So I’m no expert, in fact I could well be talking through my ass. Nevertheless I have put some time into it and discovered a few things that just may make your life... Read More ››
Microstock: The players Shutterstock Now if you’ve taken even a cursory glance at the table on the previous page it should be immediately evident that if there is one stock site you want to be on – this is it. There isn’t too much to complain about with shutterstock, sure they are a little more discerning with their content than the other sites (bar Istock & SXP) but when you have the industry... Read More ››
Quick links for photographers: Shutterstock Dreamstime Fotolia 123 RF Bigstock Istock My Introduction to MicroStock Photography A few months back, around the beginning of the year (2007) I decided to do a little experiment and post some shots up on a couple microstock sites. I didn’t expect much out of it as my work was mostly fashion and art nudes, not drops of water, mobile phones or business people shaking hands. Nevertheless my... Read More ››
