Stock Photo Ideas

As most of the people who are involved with stock photography, I’m also working with multiple micro stock agencies. The idea is simple - not always your uploaded pictures are accepted in the first agency and if you are working with multiple agencies, there’s always an option to submit images to the other agencies. Besides that if you upload to multiple agencies - there’s much bigger probability that your image gets downloaded. Today I decided to write a story about my favorite micro stock agency - shutterstock.com and how I started to work with them.

The beginning was very simple - I had a consumer digital camera - Canon PowerShot A70 with maximum resolution of 3Mpix. I read some Latvian photographer’s blog where he described all the various micro stock agencies and decided to give it a try. At the time when I started to work with ShutterStock, they had a rule that the minimum resolution of images should be at least 2.5Mpix and images should not be up sized using software (if I’m correct, they have raised the limit to minimum of 4Mpix images). Although my camera was good enough to produce the required images it was still quite hard - if the image framing was not perfect, there was actually no space to crop out a better composition. However I managed to get 10 decent images to submit and I succeeded with the first time.

If you browse the shutterstock forums, you can see that a lot of people fail in their first attempts and then they have to wait for 3 months to get another chance to submit a new first batch of images. If I remember correctly, 8 out of 10 my images were accepted and the minimum to get approved is 7. Afterwards you have to email them your driver’s license photocopy in order to validate your identity.

After getting approved I thought it would be easy to get the first downloads and reach the payout within first couple of months. Actually it went quite a different way. I got a couple of downloads in the first month an that’s it - nothing more but $0.40. It seemed like way too few to put in some serious work in it. However after a couple of months without any downloads I decided to give it a try and took some more pictures. A couple of days after submission, the number of downloads increased but in the following months it was back down to nothing.

At the beginning of this year I got a chance to visit Thailand and took some great landscape pictures. After uploading them to shutterstock, the number of downloads increased to a decent number (compared to previous numbers), some days there were 10 downloads, some days, even up to 20. Although it’s still quite few in cash value, it still gives you the reason to take more and more quality pictures.

The interesting part of ShutterStock is enhanced licence sales - for an usual download you get $0.25 per image or $0.30 per image if you have earned at least $500. If you get an enhanced licence sale, you get $20 per image. I must say that’s quite nice reward for an image of a non-professional photographer. I had been reading the forums where people were talking about their enhanced license sold images and they looked to me just like regular images, nothing special. And then some day I got my first enhanced license sale - what a surprise! The funniest thing was that the image that was downloaded using enhanced license was one of the least popular images in my profile.

The best part of working with micro stock agencies is that you can take your pictures whenever you have time and enjoy the downloads for the rest of your life. I submitted the last images in my gallery some 3 or even 4 months ago (the ones I took in Thailand) and I’m still enjoying downloads of these pictures. This month has been quite successful with 2 enhanced license sales I’ve made a total of $51.30 and the month is still not over. I guess this month I will request my first payout and buy some new photo gear for the earned money. That’s a simple rule - at the beginning of your business you should re-invest every cent you have earned.

If I compare ShutterStock to other micro stock agencies, I must say the number of downloads and earnings are the biggest from all agencies and I guess that’s the reason why I’m working with them and calling my favorite micro stock agency.

If you have already read my “About” page, you should know that I’m a web programmer in my day job. When I first started doing stock photography and joined the ShutterStock.com agency, I spent quite a lot of time checking my statistics, if any of my images had been downloaded. Some day a bright idea came to my mind - why not create a simple tool that will do the job for me. Couple of minutes of thinking and the development was started - I decided to create a Firefox browser extension that would display the number of image downloads in status bar.

I’m not going to dive into the details of programming, but the extension was successfully created and named ShutterStockBar.

Afterwards I started a thread about this extension on the official shutterstock.com forums and got a lot of great response. Now after more than a year, when I’ve decided to create a stock photography oriented blog, I’m also moving the ShutterStockBar extension page to this blog. If this is the first time you hear about this extension and you are working with ShutterStock.com, you should check out the extension page.

I’ve been writing a blog in my native language for a couple of years and now I’ve decided to go international, at least I will try.

The most of this blog will be dedicated to one of my hobbies - digital photography. I’m mostly a technical person, not an artist, so I’ve decided to go the stock photography way. Despite the fact that stock photography results in less artistic quality, it is still interesting for us non-artists. One of the reasons of this blog is to collect various photo techniques and DIY setups for creating interesting pictures. At the same time I’ll post my experience in various micro stock agencies.

I guess that’s enough for the first post. Stay tuned!