Stock Photo Ideas

The time has come. I’ve finally sold enough photos to make my first Dreamstime payout. I know it took quite a long time, but still the border has been crossed. The best thing about this payout was it’s speed. I requested a payout and in a 3 days time the money was already on my PayPal account. Nice service!

If you remember the first post in this series, then I don’t have to repeat the idea of this post. I’m just showing off the images I’ve bought from dreamstime.com and explaining the reasons why I bought these images. Let’s start.

This image was actually not used at all, I just had one free credit after registering at dreamstime and decided to download an image to see what quality other photographers offer.

The next few images were used for a website of company that specializes in aero-photography. When I was searching for appropriate photographs, there was quite a big problem with this - there are really few aero-photographs. So if you have a chance to fly and take a picture outside the plane window, don’t hesitate to do so. There’s really a niche for these images. As about the rest images for the website - they are just beautiful images chosen by my client.

Finally the last image I have downloaded is a vector image that I used for a poster. My girlfriend created a fairytale line dance musical and she needed a poster. I did a quick search on dreamstime for appropriate backgrounds and this was one of the best I found.

The thing I love the most - the image was in vectors, so I could resize it to any size. Despite the fact that I didn’t need the background to be larger than A4 size, I still had an option to create huge posters. If we get back to things I’ve mentioned already quite a lot of times - if you don’t have anything to do, you can create some backgrounds - they are quite useful from time to time. And if you know how to draw vectors, even better for you! Vectors always sell quite good.

That’s it. I haven’t bought any other images at the moment, however when I’ll buy some, I’ll let you know and show them off.

In the previous post in this series I shared my experience about the first 3 of my enhanced license sales on shutterstock.com. Now it’s time to share some more experience. This month I got one more enhanced license sale, which was from the same set as 2 of the previous images sold with this license. Here it is:

That’s again a shot from my trip to Thailand at the beginning of this year. The image was taken in the same national park as the waterfall shot which you can find in the previous post about enhanced license sales. Actually this shot was not intended to be a bestseller. We were walking through the park and on one of the bridges I just stopped and took this image. After coming home I did some adjustments in Photoshop and uploaded it to shutterstock. I never thought it would sell well and never thought it could get me an enhanced license sale.

If we are talking about the statistics on regular sales vs enhanced license sales, I’m at just about the same level as I was while writing the previous post - 0.43% of all sales are enhanced license sales for me.

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.

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!

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!