Everything But The Weed

Approved by:
Linda Maze, a Wedding photography Gainesville FL in Gainesville Florida

If you would like to make money with stock photography, you will need to follow some basic guidelines, no matter if you shoot for a micro stock site or a traditional stock photography agency.

Shoot photos which sell

That’s by far the most essential point. Would you pay for a picture of your neighbors mother-in-law? Or of his dog? Of course not! Nobody would, maybe not even your neighbor himself.

Likewise professional photo buyers don’t care for that kind of images. What they’re looking for are photos which illustrate concepts, like career, relationship or retirement. Business related photos usually sell very well. Photographs of handshakes sell well simply because shaking hands is a universal, widely understood idea that can be utilized to illustrate negotiations, contracts, treaties as well as things such as breaking-up or divorce.

Travel photography can sell well if it can be used to illustrate concepts. For example, a picture 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 picture of the property can lead to its owner, e.g. a license plate on a car), and trademarked logos or items anywhere in the picture. If in doubt, don’t submit this kind of images. If you want to sell pictures with well-known people in them, all agencies will require you to give what are known as “model releases”. A model release is a document with which the photographed individual allows you to sell the picture without need of compensation. Getting a signed model release from ordinary people is next to impossible, which means you might be better off to either weed those images out or hire professional models.

Keywording is the key to success, literally

Regardless of 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, why don’t we 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”, whereas “When” gives “morning”, “afternoon” or any other time of day or year. Ask yourself “Why” to stimulate concepts such as “sickness”, “comfort” or “patience”. Lastly “How” can focus on the photographic technique involved: It can be “black and white” or “monochrome”, it might be “blurred” et cetera.

Keep the noise down

Always bear in mind that the end user of your image may wish 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 needed 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.

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