Stock Photography
As a photography graduate myself I found myself lost when I graduated, 'where do I go now?' I thought. I had found myself a part time retail job to fund myself, but its just not what I love. How do I keep taking photographs and what should I do with them?
I started my photography blog which you can see here. I post there on a Wednesday and Sunday at 10am UK time. But that still just wasn't enough, it kept me shooting new work so I had something to share, but I felt my work was slipping as I was doing it just so I didn't miss an upload slot.
Then I thought, what about stock photography? It wasn't something that was mentioned that greatly in classes, although it was mentioned briefly how you could earn a fair amount if your work was ideal for say a book cover, but generally, you only make around 12p per download.
I looked into it and joined a few websites which I will write about below, but first I want to tell you about the payments, as I mentioned above, most payments will be small and around 12p per download of your photograph, these are generally from 'subscription' downloads where the buyer has a membership with the website and pays to get x-amount of downloads per month at a lower rate. Next you can get £1+ from a regular download from a non-subscription user, but these seem to be a lot rarer as anyone who is buying from a stock site generally needs a higher amount of images so the subscription deal would be better for them.
Payouts are generally after you've hit around £50 in sales.
The most time consuming part of stock photography is adding the keywords, don't rush through this as thats where you'll get your sales. If someone wants to find your photograph but you didn't keyword what they're searching for, they won't find your image.
These are the websites I have used:
Veer
Veer was the first website that accepted me and the first where I made a sale - also the highest sale I made at around £5 - but the website has stopped working as well and i've not made a sale since. I've had images 'uploading' after their approval for over a year now. I've pretty much abandoned this account.
Shutterstock
This is the second website that accepted me and the best i've used so far. You can upload more than one image at once and its a popular site so this is probably where you'll get the most downloads.
iStock
iStock is another big website, but I found it slow to upload images and have only made a small amount of sales on this website.
Dreamstime
I've not really used this one yet but the reviews were pretty good so if you're already into joining stock sites and giving it a go, try this one out.
Fotolia
This is the most recent stock site I joined, I made a few sales pretty quickly after uploading some halloween photographs last year. This one is definitely worth joining!
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