Stock Photo Ideas

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail about a new photo stock website - PhotoShelter. At the moment I’m only doing microstock photography, so I thought I’m being offered “just another wannabe successful” microstock site, which is looking for a startup bunch of photographers to get a decent number of images in stock. I was wrong. Actually I was being offered a normal photography stock site, which is not selling images for $1, but for a reasonable amount of money set by photographers themselves.

Being too busy to investigate the site right after the e-mail receiving, I put it aside and almost forgot about it. Until I noticed the banners of PhotoShelter in Strobist and some other photography resources. That was enough to give this site a try. Read on.

Registration

The registration was straight-forward and didn’t take more than 2 minutes. Enter your e-mail, name, surname, city you live, choose country and you’re done. Afterwards choose the type of your photographs and choose the amount of photos you are going to submit. As I’m not that active photographer, I chose to submit up to 10 images per month. I know that’s quite few, but that’s the way I take it - if I have some good shots, I post them, if not - then I’m waiting for the good ones.

Image submission

To complete the registration and become a normal member you have to submit first 3 up to 10 images for review. So far so good - every microstock photographer has a decent number of images, so selecting 3 up to 10 images should not be a problem. The tricky part is that the technical guidelines for photos are quite different from the microstock sites. Ok, let’s get through the basic things step by step:

• Submission formats - JPG, JPEG, TIF, TIFF. (minimum JPEG level 10). If we compare this to microstock, there’s no place for vectors, which sell quite well in microstock agencies.
• File size 11-100MB. If most of the microstock sites limit the file size to let’s say 5 or 10MB, then this stock site raises the bottom limit to 11MB. When I looked at my images that I’ve submitted to microstock sites, I didn’t find any processed image over 10MB. The things are not as bad as they seem to be, the same rule is continued by “If your images are not large enough, you can use professional interpolation software (e.g. Genuine Fractals) to meet the minimum size“. Microstock sites never let you up-size your images, because they do this for you and sell clients the up-sized versions of your photos. This time you can do it yourself.
• Image sharpening is not allowed. I must say I’ve been sharpening ALL the images I’ve submitted to microstock, so if you’re planning to join PhotoShelter it’s time to re-process your stock images.
• Image pricing. Most of the microstock sites decide the price for you. This time you’re the one who says how much your images are worth. However there’s one rule - you can not sell your images for less than $50. The reason of the bottom limit of pricing is simple - you have to pay photographers a decent money for the work they do.
• Just to mention the payment options are quite standard - PayPal, check, etc. Minimum payout balance - $100.

What’s next? I’m going to review my stock submitted images and try to get some of my re-processed microstock images in PhotoShelter. Who knows, maybe at least some of my images are already that level and the payout is just 3 sales away. If you’re interested in PhotoShelter, join now, as they are running a campaign and offering an 85% commission (70% afterwards) on all images submitted before 5th of November.

I’ll post the images I submitted and the submission results in one of the next posts. Hang on.