Selling Your Photos Online

There are many, many places where you can sell your digital photography online. iStockPhoto, Shutterstock, and Fotolia are just a few. These sites specialize in collecting and cataloging photographs from both professional and amateur photographers. It is easy to join, and upload your images to these microstock sites. But ideally, you want your photos to be the ones that people will purchase.

All kinds of people, in all kinds of positions are always looking for good pictures. Just think about how many photos you see everyday, like websites, brochures, magazines, screensavers, packaging, etc. It would be impossible to provide a large selection of such a variety of images. So it is better to focus (punny : ) on a few categories:
- Seasonal
- Business
- Emotions
- Sports
- Foods/Products (sans the names)
- Concepts like wealth, happiness, contentment

Keep in mind that technology has revolutionized photography in just a few short years. Challenges like selecting the right film, and determining available light are much simpler to tackle. With a little practice and organization, even compact digital cameras can produce quality images. Still, sooner or later you will probably want to consider acquiring a DSLR, or Digital Single Lens Reflex. Traditional SLRs have through the lens viewing, and make that classic sound as the mirror flips up when the shutter opens. Digital SLRs capture images with sensors rather than film. When you are ready for ultimate control, you will want a DSLR.

Either way, you don't need to spend a lot to money to get started. There are many ways to substitute common tools and objects for more expensive equipment.

The success of microstock photography depends on multiple purchases or downloads. Checking today on one of the sites, a very popular image has been downloaded more than 1800 times in the last 90 days.

Microstock's popularity is based on making good images available to everyone at a very affordable price. Often as low as $1.00. So success for the photographer results from photographs being sold over and over again. In the case above, the photographer has earned over $1800 on that one image alone. Also consider that the image might be selling as well on several other sites, and you get the picture (pun-da-da-dum : )

So the earning potential is certainly substantial and depends largely on how much you want to put in to it. For some photographers stock and microstock is a lucrative single source of income. Others just enjoy a little extra spending money.