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.