Stock Photo Ideas

Being a web developer takes you to a point where you have to get some images for the website you are creating. When I was just starting to create web pages for some clients, I was just taking images from Google image search and putting them in my designs.

Nobody ever told me that the images are stolen and nobody actually cared. Since I’m doing micro-stock photography, I’ve also changed my attitude to images. If I want somebody to buy my images for let’s say a travel agency website, then I should buy images in micro-stock when I design a site for my client.

Despite the fact that designing sites for individual clients is not my daily work, I would like you to show the images that I’ve bought for these purposes from Dreamstime. Why Dreamstime? Because they have an excellent option to buy as much credits as I need without spending over $100 for a subscription that lasts for whole month. You can buy let’s say 20 credits for $20 (I don’t remember the exact prices and thus might be wrong) and spend the credits whenever you want. At the moment I’ve downloaded a total of 18 images for 2 designed websites. In this post I will show you the first 10 images I used for a forestry website.

The website is for a company specializing in forestry, planting forests, lumbering, buying and selling forests. One of their main ideas was to have nice looking wildlife and forest pictures on their website to show that they care about nature. The interesting thing was that I was too lazy and busy to do the searching for them and I have bad experience with customers who think that the pictures I have chosen are not as good as they should be. I just gave the Dreamstime link to my client and let them search the images. At the evening of the same day they sent me back a list of links to images they would like to see on the web page. Excellent! After paying for the credits via PayPal I immediately downloaded the images and put them in page design. The best part was that while talking with client about the page design, there was no discussion about images at all and the client quite soon accepted the final version of the page design. Maybe that’s some kind of psychology - the client felt like he has participated in the design process.

After this great experience I’ve decided to continue this way of working whenever I will need some images for some design jobs. Besides that - client also sees that the images are bought and there can be no copyright problems.

Ok, enough talking, here are the 10 images used for this website:

And finally here’s the screen shot of the website.:

Probably some of you might think - hey, but you are a hobbyist photographer! Why didn’t you go outside and shoot some great landscape pictures yourself? You would have saved a couple of bucks! The answer is simple - it’s easier to work with clients this way - they can choose the pictures they like from a huge database. The odds that you will shoot the images the way they like are quite minimal. Besides that - they see your expenses and you can easily include the price of images in the final bill.

The rest 8 used images are still to come in one of the next posts, otherwise including around 20 images in a single post would be too much.

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.