Beginner's guide to shooting stock images

Micro, specialty and traditional stock sales

For many years, professional photographers would take extra pictures during their photo shoots which they would give to an agency to sell on their behalf. These were "stock" images - lower priced than an assignment photo, but made up for in bulk.

The big agencies still exist, but some new forms of this business have been created over the years.

Thanks to the internet, there are two other approaches to selling your images as stock.

Create your own site to sell images, or sell them as "micro stock."

So, these days, which is the best way for you to sell images by? That depends on your temperament and how much time, effort and money you're willing to put into creating and selling your images. As it has always been, every form of stock photography is a game of numbers. The more images you create and make available, the more money you're likely to make.

Micro stock

The quickest, easiest and cheapest to get into. These are the "$1" per photo download sites, whether by subscription or per image purchase. Prices actually seem to range upwards from $1 - depending on size of image downloaded by the end customer. There is the opportunity to actually make money. You have to shoot a lot. The best example I know of is Yuri Arcurs who reportedly makes well into six figures a month, has a large studio and a staff of assistants to create thousands of images a month.

Most photographers make far less than that, but a regular monthly income of $500 to maybe $2000 seems to be attainable by dedicated photographers. The photographers tend to have low end to medium professional equipment. Many start out with point and shoot digital cameras, then move up as they make money at it.

Downside of micro stock includes being only paid about 25% or maybe slightly more for each sale - and when each sales is $1 or $2, you need to make a LOT of sales to make money.

As well - not to put too fine a point on it - many professional photographers will look down on you as scum for "ruining" the industry. That particular viewpoint is a whole other debate, but if you go into micro stock - be aware of that sentiment.

Specialty / own site stock

Having your own site and selling images from it seems to be best done by photographers with a very specialized photography niche. Rohn Engh's books really go into this end of stock photography. This can make a minor to major amount of money. You might shoot pictures of moose, are the best at shooting moose, and have 10,000 moose images. Then you have to find customers who want moose pictures. Much more work on the sales side, but you keep pretty much all the profit. Also, right or wrong - you can sell pretty much any photo you want and not be rejected by "editors" of stock sites. Doesn't mean you'll make more money though.

Traditional stock agencies

The big agencies include Getty, Corbis, Veer and many others. This industry has been a wild ride for many as smaller agencies (and sometimes bigger ones) get swallowed up in acquisitions.

Photographers generally make 50 per cent of the sale price and the prices for the photography range from $200 up to thousands per image - so profits tend to be much higher. The creativity of these images can quite often be more interesting as the micro stock agencies tend not to use false colored or creatively "blurry" images.

But, to make the images for the major stock agencies, you need to invest a lot more in gear and time, and produce a higher level of images.

Royalty Free vs Royalty Managed

As a rule, Royalty Free images - where the customer can reuse the image and is much freer in how the image is used - pays much less to the photographer, but gets sold to more people because of the affordability.

Royalty Managed images - where use is restricted and images can not be reused without additional fees - makes more money per image, but sold less often.

The debate about photographic usage rages on - usually by professionals trying to protect their assets and keep the level of professionalism higher in the industry as a whole. That debate is unfortunately beyond the scope of this lens. I just hope people make informed decisions from here.

The best selling images tend to be people images, especially when in a business setting.

Lifestyle images for people of all walks of life, ages, genders and races also sell very well.

Any photos shot for a commercial purpose that shows a recognizable person requires a "Model Release" - which essentially says the person photographed knows the images were made and that they will be sold. There is, of course, much more to it than that. If the subject was under 18, then the parents also need to be involved in signing the release.

Animals do well - everyone loves a puppy, there are many industries that are based on agriculture and pets - and they need images as well. They generally don't need model releases unless it is a very famous animal (and probably not even then, although you might not want to chance it with some "commercially known" animals.

Objects have sold well, especially when either close cropped to a white background - or in a very artful setting.

Landscapes are also used on a daily basis, but because so many photographers feel the most comfortable shooting landscapes (as opposed to people) there is huge amount of competition. If you want to sell stock images of landscapes and such, they have to be really, really good. Get up very early for the best shots which seem to be at dawn.

First, you have to shoot the images. Seems obvious - but make sure your camera is up to the requirements of the type of images you want to sell.

A 3mp camera doesn't cut it. These days 6mp dSLR is the minimum. From what I've been seeing the last couple of years, shooting film is going to cost a lot of money because you'll wind up paying for scanning as well - and if you're shooting 35mm, you're way off the back now.

If you're going to spend extra money anywhere, make sure its the lenses. Even average dSLRs take pretty good images - but a bad lens will create soft looking images with chromatic aberrations (mis-colored edges.)

If you're shooting inside as opposed to outdoors, you'll also need professional level lighting and lots of it. On camera flash won't create salable images (excluding the odd exception.)

Then, you need to shoot a lot of images. Thousands and thousands of images. Don't worry about that because that is the fun part of the job.

Best practices

Make sure your knowledge of composition is well founded - don't be cutting people's legs off at the bottom of the image, with their head in the middle of the image.

You want to keep your ISO as low as possible to cut down noise. Noise in images leads to a lot of rejected images.

Keep the exposure as bright as possible without blowing out your highlights. This will give you the most detail without introducing noise.

Shoot RAW format. You'll likely want to do some adjustments to your images - contrast, brightness, saturation, etc. If you shoot JPEG you'll be degrading the images just opening them up to work on them and then saving again. RAW format also gives you a lot more information to play with so you'll have higher quality images in the end.

Make sure the focus is absolutely correct - if there's a person, the focus is on the eyes. If you really want to have an object in front of a person in focus instead, make sure the person is obviously out of focus on purpose. If there's any question, toss it and get on with your editing.

Noise can be reduced with programs like Noise Ninja - and that can be a great file saver. But try not to rely only on that - get the cleanest image that you can to start.

Toss anything that shows purple fringing. Some programs - like Lightroom - can reduce it to a usable level, but if it still shows up, don't waste time, move on to the next image. The fringing usually shows up where there's a bright line or edge next to a darker area.

Keywording

You want to embed the title, description and keywords - and probably your name too - right into the image. This saves everyone time, makes the images more salable and protects your investment. Many sorting and editing programs will include the ability to add this information to your image while you have it open to make adjustments.

Thesaurus.com is your friend when it comes to keywords. Don't use blatantly false keywords - you'll be penalized for it. But do include every possible aspect of the image and every synonym to increase the likelihood of your image being found by prospective buyers.

Sorting and editing

I've been using Adobe Lightroom for awhile - I was even one of the many many beta testers for it. The RAW converter is very good, the editing - though basic - works quite well, and it has some automated keywording that is very handy.

But also, you can sort and eliminate images very quickly. As with many programs of this type - ACDSee, Apple Aperture, Lightroom, Etc - you can view the image and make an initial decision on keep or toss, then rank according to quality. When dealing with hundreds of images from a single shoot, the time this saves is invaluable.

Conclusion

Continue learning - see the books and links below for a starting point.

And shoot lots. Nothing will improve your images more than just getting out and shooting.