Stock Photo Ideas

Most of the serious photographers are laughing at people doing stock photography just because of the low prices of the photos. Despite the fact that the prices are actually very low and you need at least some 50 downloads for each image to make a reasonable amount of money, there is one interesting thing about licenses - the low price of image still makes some limitations on the usage. If the buyer is serious and needs the image for some project that does not fit in the low price limits, he has to buy the image with a more expensive licence. The price of enhanced licenes varies in the agencies. In this post I’ll show you my first three (at the moment the only three) enhanced licence sales that I got on ShutterStock.com.

Drained football field

The first one is a picture taken in a country school stadium during summer vacation - the football field was completely dry and burnt in the sun. I thought of this as an image that could be used as an illustration for government cutting the budget to some national football team after a bad start in world championships. The interesting part is that this image has only seven downloads to date, one of which is enhanced license sale for $20. So it does not matter how many downloads an image has - the next download could be an enhanced license sale!

Jungle waterfall in Thailand

The second image I took in my vacation in Thailand it was a very beautiful waterfall in some national park (I don’t remember the name) and I took the photo after swimming in this waterfall. The image is a little bit improved with Photoshop to get a bit more green water and a bit darker trees. The image is being downloaded almost daily and since February when I posted it on shutterstock, it has been downloaded more than 100 times one of which was an enhanced license sale, making a total of $46. Not bad for a simple vacation image!

Leonardo bay, Thailand

The third image is also from my vacation in Thailand and also taken after swimming in this bay. The hard part of taking this image was to get a decent composition and avoid getting any people in the image. This is the bay where “The Beach” movie was filmed and a lot of people are coming here to see it, get some sunbath, do snorkeling and other things. Finally after a couple shots I managed to get an image free from people. After getting home from vacation and looking at this image I thought - if some image gets an enhanced license sale, then it should be this one. The fact is that this image got the last of the three enhanced license sales. Now this image has already made me $66 on ShutterStock alone - also not bad for a vacation image.

If we are looking at the ratio of enhanced license sales vs regular sales, the ratio is different for every photographer. For me it’s 3/820 or around 0.36% of all sales. For some people it’s higher, for some - lower. I hope to continue this topic with more enhanced license sales when I get some.

Some of the pictures in my gallery are just “quick and crazy” ideas. This is one of them. I was visiting my brother at his apartment and then I saw a syringe on his table. He was using it for some computer related things like blowing away dust from places where he could not get inside with his fingers. The idea was simple - to take a picture of a drug addict. I got into his kitchen, got some cranberry juice in the syringe and we did the picture.

This image is definitely not a bestseller, however it has already made $8 which is quite ok.

If something interesting comes to your mind, just shoot it and you will get the results.

Whenever you are running out of ideas on subjects to shoot, you can shoot backgrounds. If you take this into account you can easily get a decent portfolio of various backgrounds that could sell quite well. I tried to collect a couple of background images as the very beginning when I started to work with micro stock agencies. The first shots were quite simple - just a brick wall, water background, sand background, etc. The interesting thing is that these images are selling quite well.

My favorite background image is the desert sand background image:

To be honest, it’s not a desert. I live near a forest with this type of sand and some day I just went outside to take some photos and this was one of the series. In fact this image is my backgrounds bestseller. It does not sell so well on ShutterStock (only 11 downloads and $2.75 made), but it does sell quite good on Dreamstime.com (total made $24.50).

If you do a search on the micro stock agencies then you will see that many people are doing backgrounds. No matter how many backgrounds there are on agencies, there will always be space for some more. If I look at my stats, I must say that a decent part of my earnings are coming from background sales. Be a bit creative on this and you can get a good niche.

After a very long period of counting every download I get on shutterstock.com, I’ve finally received my first payout of $249.10. It was a great feeling as this is the first payment I’ve ever got from taking photos.

As I live in a country where you are not allowed to receive money by PayPal (they will add this option in a near future), I chose moneybookers as a payment option and afterwards transfered the money from my moneybookers.com account directly to my bank account. If I would have chosen check as a payment option it would take about a month to get the money and the commissions would also be much higher. Here’s the screenshot from moneybookers.com:

As most of the photographers I spent all the earned money on new gear. I bought a bit longer zoom lens Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 APO DG MACRO to replace my old Sigma 70-210mm 1:4.0-5.6 UCII zoom lens, which I’m going to sell in the next few days. The new lens is just avesome, now I can get closer to some wildlife, take some even better macro shots and what I love the most - shoot people from a distance, so they don’t get disturbed by me and feel natural. If you still have no tele zoom lens with this range, you should get one!

Despite the fact that I’ve created this blog about specific stock photo ideas, I haven’t managed to post any reasonable posts on this topic. It’s time to change that. Today I’ll give you some very simple ideas on what to shoot at home.

The idea is simple - everybody of us have their home plans, appartment plans or whatever other projects printed. Just try to find an interesting angle, be creative with DOF and shoot a couple of images. Afterwards upload them to stock photo agencies and watch the downloads. Maybe that’s not the most popular subject in stock photo agencies, but why not add some fresh images to your portfolio?

To better understand what I mean, here’s my sample, that I submitted to ShutterStock:

I did another image with shallow DOF, but it was accepted only on DreamsTime.

How much have I made with these images? Nothing special - a total of $18.50. However, you should notice how simple it is to shoot images like this one.