By far the most profitable way to sell photos online – stock photography

by – Yuri Arcurs… the world’s top selling stock photographer – the “sell photos online” post

Stock photography is about selling photos online. More specifically, you do not sell stock photos entirely. You are only selling the license to use a photo once. Stock photos end up in magazines, books, on online web pages, as wallpapers, on web ads, etc. With stock photography, a photo can be sold many times. This means the sale price can be relatively low but the quantity of sales high. Typically, the stock agency takes the bulk of the sale price and the photographer collects a royalty for letting them sell the photos online on their website. As for why you should care – as a photographer’s collection of photos gets bigger and bigger, this can turn into a full-time job. For some people like me, selling stock photography can turn into a thriving business that employs over 40 staff members. When you sell photos online you earn money in royalties… earnings day out and day in… royalties ROCKS.

In this article I’ll give you the details about how you can sell photo stock and enter the stock photography business and be a success in it. I’ll also warn you of some potential pitfalls you’ll want to watch out for and that can be a real hinderance to selling photos online.



————————————————————————–

1. Sell your photos online – How does it work?

To sell stock photography online, the first barrier to pass once you have some photos created is to sign up and actually get accepted as a contributing photographer at the most important agencies (list later). You may ask “hey, can’t I just sell the photos on my own?” The answer is no. Not if you really want to make some good money. You will want to submit to a number of great agencies that are out there. However, is isn’t always easy to get past their front door, because these agencies are strict. They don’t just let you fill up their servers with bad photos, they want to make sure you are serious. They do that in two ways:

1. They give you an entry exam. You have to submit test photos and/or pass a quiz.

2. Once you’re in, they give you upload limits detailing how many files you may upload based on your approval rating or sales.

The hardest entry tests to get through are on Shutterstock or on iStock. The iStock entry test you often have to try more than once. Tests on other sites are easier.



————————————————————————–

2. Passing the entry test:

Digital mistakes that most often cause people to fail

Step one: passing that entry test! Here is where I urge you to have patience and take time to be sure you are creating technically correct photos. There are a number of common technical problems an image will be rejected for. I describe each of these in detail below.



Digital Don’ts (aka. “things that will make you fail your entry test, accumulate rejections, get super-frustrated, and eventually give up)
 


Many people fail their entry test, and it’s usually for the same basic technical reasons. If you make the mistakes I describe below, to a reviewer, it looks like you’ve been careless. If you are a professional photographer, especially a journalist, this is where you often fail. My tip?  Don’t just go crazy on the forums and scream about how stupid stock photography is. Read this first and learn why you were rejected. Work smarter, not harder. Learn from your rejections, and give the agencies what they want. Then you get what you want. Money and sales!

Fringing

Fringing problems as a result of chromatic aberration are very common. Chromatic abberation is a fancy way of saying the lens didn’t focus all colors to the same point. When this leads to a fringe, you’ll see slight lines of color (often purple or blue) on the borders of elements in your photo. Fringing problems are most visible when you push lenses and optics to extremes, for example, when using an ultra wide angle lens below 25mm or an ultra low F-stop below 2.0. Even great lenses will show signs of fringing when shooting high contrast, such as shooting against a very bright background. Always look for fringing signs before submitting photos to stock, because even the slightest fringe is reason enough for a rejection. There is a zero tolerance policy on this matter. Fringing is best removed by using a combination of the color replacement tool in photoshop or simply by desaturating the problem area. Fringe is not only blue or purple, but can also be green, red and sometimes bright yellow. Do a Google image search on “fringing examples” and you can get a visual of what I’m talking about.

Moiré

Moiré is form of chromatic aberration that appears on textures. Moiré appears when the digital camera has to interpret the real word into square pixels, because the real world does not consist of small squares we do not see moiré problems in the world around us, but when we have to see the world through a sensor, patterns will appear much more readily between these squares. (Have you ever been reading the newspaper and seen an image that has a tiny pattern of dots throughout it? This is moiré and it is quite irritating.) Moiré is a serious threat to selling photos online, but can be avoided by choosing the right kind of clothes for your models. This is a matter of fabric type and the way that the light hits it. Often small amounts of fringe will be visible where the moiré is, making the problem even bigger. The best way to handle it in photoshop is to de-saturate the whole fabric and then artificially re-color it with a couple of color balance layers. Some cases of moiré are too strong and cannot be saved. Moiré is a clear-cut rejection reason.

Compression mistakes and artefacts

Artifacts appear as a result of compression and over-sharpening. When editing a photo in photoshop, if that photo is a Jpg and not a Tiff file compression will appear every time you save the file. If you save and re-save too much, you will get artifacts on that file. When trying to sell photos online, artifacts are not accepted. Edit in Tiff 8bit and only save to Jpg 12-11 just before uploading to a stock agency. Some cameras of low quality will create artifacts straight from the camera and these cameras should be avoided. The older versions of Camera RAW for photoshop also created artifacts when developed from RAW and into Tiff. It is highly problematic if your developing software creates artifacts even before the file is saved. This was the case for the older versions of Camera RAW and lightRoom. Artifacts can be blurred down with a gaussian blur of 0.3. If the artifacts are still visible after the blur, then do another 0,3 blur again, but don’t go to 0.4 or 0.5 because then the image will look like it was out of focus.

Banding problems

Banding is another definitive rejection reason and one that even professional stock photographers often simply forget about. I just recently had a file rejected for banding because it slipped my mind. When a photo with banding problems goes online and is viewed on a computer monitor, it can look really bad. Banding happens when there is not enough color information in the photo to create a smooth gradient between two colors. Banding problems are only visible on simple (non-texture, not-in-focus) areas. Some colors are better at creating banding problems than others: orange to red, bright blue to white, bright blue to darker blue, and dark green to green are all trouble maker color gradients and it’s with those color combinations that you’ll find 80% of your banding problems. Banding is a huge problem for a digital photograph. There really is no fix for it. Even for a person like me who has spent four to six hours per day in photoshop for the last four years it is not easy to fix banding. Normally my assistant and I will try to do a photoshop replace of the problem area with a similar area from another photo, so it’s quite a big operation. Banding is normally avoided completely if you do not over saturate and do not overuse color balance. If you use the “levels” tool this will create enormous banding problems, so don’t do that.

Unsharp or shaken files

Now it really comes down to skill. There is a reason why I always shoot on a monopod and that is because of focus. I have a reputation in the stock industry of being insanely obsessed with focus and I really go to extremes to create super crisp files. Here are the rules for a how a photo should be in focus: Focal point should be on the front eyelid, not the eyebrow and not the back eye. Focus is ok if you can separately count eyelid hairs and distinguish them from each other. Remember some lenses will simply not be as sharp as others. The golden rule is if you can separate eyelid hairs from each other, you’re in business. On photos of people that are far away this is not possible so just try to execute good judgement. If the photo shows the least bit of shaking, this is not acceptable. A shaken photo is a photographer mistake and will be rejected. Some photos are intentionally motion-blurred to illustrate action and speed and are ok for selling online, but I would not send such files for your test- evaluation (entry exam). Forget about trying to rescue a photo with adding sharpening afterwards. A good inspector can spot it a mile away and your photo will be rejected for the reason of being “overfiltred” or “oversharpend”.

Trademarks

You cannot have any trademarks (company brands) in your photos, period. None. Zero. Finito. Think of this for a second: you are selling photos to companies and big industries, of course they do not want to see the trademarks and logos of their competitors in the photo they plan to use in their advertising. There are also serious legal issues involved in re-selling images with visible trademarks. To avoid these issues retouch logos and trademarks away or shoot differently. The thoughtful reader will be thinking “well how about photos of Times Square or Tokyo’s Shibuya?” Well guess what, there really are no photos of such places in stock, they are simply showing too many trademarks.

Visible Photoshop filters

(aka Flickr style over-photoshopping, deviant looking images. We are professionals. Please, back away from the crazy artsy photoshop tricks.. )

Our buyers want photos that are perfect and can be printed right away without any problems. This means no fancy flickr filters and deviant “baby retouching”. You should know that 99% percent of all photos on flickr and deviant art would be rejected if they were submitted to a stock agency. They are simply what we call “baby photoshopped”; they show too many signs of too many ambitious tricks and retouching efforts. The most overused effects would be diffusion glow or hard light blending option on a desaturated background layer. Yuck. Upload plain photos. The inspectors will see an overly retouched or filtered image as an attempt to hide insufficient photography skills. Don’t do it. This aspect is where most people get their rejections and also where they become the angriest. Just try to remember, this is the big league, harder than traditional stock (Getty images), harder than photography school, harder than what your mentor used to say and definitely harder than Flickr and DeviantArt.

Boring content

Make sure you think about what good stock photography is. Uninteresting content includes photos of pigeons, pets, trees, house utensils, fancy arty photos in black and white, statues, public buildings, animals from a zoo, sunsets, waterlines, things around the house, and computers. The inspectors have seen it all.
 Do them a favour and present something great.

A note on quality

Why you should be careful with your submissions

Remember that selling stock photography is not easy, but should be no problem to the average photographer that follows the rules presented here. When Getty bought Flickr, only 6000 photos were transferred to be put for sale on Getty and this was out of millions and millions of photos. 6000 photos is less than one fifth of my own private collection of stock photos so obviously, it is not easy to get images online on stock agencies. The good news is that once you know about the technical mistakes and how to fix them, not only have you become a much better technical photographer but you can also produce digital photos that no art director in the world can criticize. You will be able to produce perfect photos that no client can push back for technical reasons. All the photos in my portfolio are created following the above rules, and this puts a lot of limitations on what I can do. I can’t go crazy and photoshop an image to the sky, because that would not be a stock image and it would get rejected.

After you have passed the entry exam the rest is not so hard and basically looks like this:

Produce content – Upload and Submit for review – Watch the sales

————————————————————————–

3. Producing content

The hardest part about shooting stock photography is coming up with creative ideas that will sell. I often get the question: “So how do you decide what to shoot?”, “Do you just go out and shoot something?”. The answer to this actually id, yes. However, I never go out and “just” shoot without some idea in the back of my head of what kind of imagery I plan to bring home. In the old days I would work with what we call a “shoot plan” or a “shotlist” with exact ideas that I would try to portray. Today my shoot plan is almost empty and I shoot much more freely. I use the environment around me to get inspiration. If the location I am at has a chimney I include that in the shoot, if the model is a gymnast I include acrobatics in the shoot. I simply take “in” the environment and use it. The big advantage of shooting like this is that it pays much better because I find myself not just duplicating what others have done before me (and probably have done better too).
So here is how I prepare: I work with storyboard (a script basically) and plan props, locations and models around the script. Then when I arrive on set, I use the storyboard to keep track of time, sets, ideas, concepts, but other than that, I freestyle my way out of it. This style of shooting only works if you are highly productive. If you freestyle and take your time, you will not go home with a lot of shots. This freestyle requires knowledge about what sells and how to shoot it.
 Here are two articles about shooting style that my readers really liked:
Here are two articles about shooting style that my readers really liked:
The I-Spy Method
Stock buyers are Geeks – Are you?



————————————————————————–

4. What to shoot, what sells

Once you start selling you will also start to see some patterns in what people like to buy. To make a very long story short, people buy photos within the big industries of the world. For example, medical photos sell generally well and that is because the medical industry is big and needs a lot of photos. Photos of wellness and spa related shoots also sell well because they are in demand by another big industry. Keep this in mind when you are planning your shoots and try to include photos that are targeted to an industry instead of just shooting blindly.
This article describes what sell and niches of selling photos:
Microstock agencies overview
What Should I Shoot and What Sells



————————————————————————–

5. Uploading and submitting standards

Each agency has a unique uploading system and online submission form. To be honest with you, it is a pain to upload photos. I wrote this article about how long it takes to upload to each agency and the income you get from them. Non-exclusivity (as in not exclusive to Istockphoto.com) probably pays a little better than exclusivity but on the other hand it takes long time to manage uploading to so many agencies. As soon as you start getting income you should invest in an assistant that can do this for you because your time is better spent taking more images than tediously submitting and uploading your photos to 10 different agencies.

Industry standards

There are a couple of industry standards that have finally arrived in regards to digital photos and submitting stock content. It was not like this 3 years ago, but today there seems to be some degree of consensus:

• Photos with identifiable humans need a model release. You can download and use my generic model release that all agencies accept here on this site
• Photos need to be saved as jpg 11-12 with no layers or paths. Native resolution – as in not upsized. Downsizing to get an image sharper is ok. Nothing else is accepted.

Tagging/keywording rules

• Max 50 keywords/tag
• Title cannot be longer than 50 characters
• Description must be different from the title and include at least six words

Tagging directly into the IPTC data of the image


Here is how you put the title into IPTC data so you are sure it will be read by the agencies. Tagging your photos directly into the ITPC data fields on the jpg is by far the easiest way to go. Consider using my photo photo keywording tool here on this site. About 50% of all photographers in microstock use it.

• Title goes into the Title field and the headline IPTC field
• The description goes into the description IPTC field
• Keywords goes into the keywords IPTC field
• Copyright notice: Some agencies will include your details and don’t want you to do that yourself

————————————————————————–

6. Sales and statistics

When you start selling photos it is a good idea to keep track of some statistics such as: what shots were the most profitable, what models sell well and what locations were good sellers. Do this and it becomes easy to optimize for greater success. Be careful that you do not over analyze or spend too much time on tracking statistics. I made this mistake and realized that every day I spent sitting at my studio looking into my numbers and statistics was a day not shooting and a day not being productive. It’s easy to get so caught up in the sales that one forgets to actually shoot.
 


Most new stock photographers get what we pros call the “F5 syndrome”, which basically means that new photographers will constantly sit and hit the F5 button for “page refresh” in their statistics page to look for new sales. Checking your stats five times per day is normal when you start out. You simply get excited to see people use your photos.



————————————————————————–

7. Why microstock is the best choice.

Low entry level on skill required and potentially the highest earnings

Despite all the warnings and potential pitfalls just described above, microstock has a relatively low “entry level”. Consider this if you were a professional soccer player: you would certainly have played soccer all your life and you would probably be training 8 times per week. Now consider microstock photography: without much prior knowledge and without having done this all your life at all, you are actually able to enter this profession and earn a living from it, with no prior education, no real skills and no high-end camera gear. This is great. Think of it that way instead of thinking “Damn… A rejected file again.”



————————————————————————–

8. Gear

You do not need a super big expensive camera. A Canon 7D is plenty, or even a Canon Powershot G11 will do. Spend your money and time educating yourself in digital standards instead of on expensive gear, because this is how you will overcome rejections. The quality of your camera does not improve your acceptance rate. The cameras today are so good, that a middle class/high-end camera from each of the major brands will do just fine. Photographers love gear and can get completely caught up in the great thing instead of focussing on the real obstacles in selling photos. To the surprise of many people I bring a Nikon D3X and only two lenses on vacation: the 85mm 1.4 and the 50mm 1.4. That’s it.



————————————————————————–

9. What agencies to submit to:

This part of the post will always be the most popular and is about which agencies to submit to. Check out my earnings yourself and do your estimates on which agencies to submit to. By far, the biggest mistake a new microstock photographer can make is to think “no, I will focus on these two or three agencies”. If you do that, you will NOT be successful and will not make a living from stock photography. Forget about this strategy. Submit to all the agencies on this list and have a small collection at the rest so you know if they suddenly do well and are worthy of your photos.

Istock

The most popular stock agency in the world and a strong income generator. The drawbacks with this agency is a very low non-exclusive commission of only 20% to the photographer. Also the uploading system for submitting content is extremely time-consuming and they have zero tolerance for an “open forum”. Any discussions they dislike will result in consequences. This agency is very strict on digital quality. You have upload limits of between 15-35 files per week.
——————————————————–

Fotolia

A very popular site especially in Europe. Medium to very time-consuming uploading system for submitting content depending on content type (model released vs non-model released) This agency is fair on digital quality. No upload limits.
——————————————————–

Shutterstock

The most popular subscription based stock agency in the world. This agency pays well for beginners in stock photography, but does not pay well for full-time or high end stock photographers like myself. The uploading system is medium time-consuming and their rejections are fair in regards to digital quality. No upload limits.
——————————————————–

StockXpert

Getty owned site. Does ok. Income goes a little up and down, but it is certainly worth submitting to. Uploading system is medium easy. Hardly any upload limits.
——————————————————–

Dreamstime

Stable sales, medium time-consuming uploading system, high commission to the photographer.
——————————————————–

123RF

Low income site, but worth it. Easy uploading system makes it worthwhile. Ok photographer commission. Inspections are fair. The site is stable in income, but only if you keep submitting.
——————————————————–

Bigstockphoto

Low income site. Relatively easy uploading system. Ok photographer commission. Inspections are fair. Excellent CEO. No upload limits and good organization of online file management.
——————————————————–

Crestock

Low income site. Extremely easy uploading system makes it worth while. Low photographer commission. Very strict Inspections.



——————————————————–

10. Getting nerdy

I have written a lot about stock photography and below are the related articles that are worth reading if you liked this one. This is technical stuff and very nerdy stock photography theory so don’t worry if you do not understand it. Perhaps 50 people in the world will go “aha….I get this – right on”

Basic Stock Theory
Advanced Stock Theory