Stock Photo Ideas

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.

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.

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!