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  #1  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2007, 1:16 AM
Kngkyle Kngkyle is offline
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Microstock Guide - Earn $$$ with your Photos!

This topic has been reviewed and approved by Jasonhouse.
Royalty-Free Stock Photography is the new buzz in Stock Photography. Instead of designers paying thousands of dollars for photos from professionals, they pay a couple bucks(don't be turned off just yet) for photos from everyday people like you and me. When someone buys one of your photos, that doesn't mean it is no longer for sale. They just bought the right to use your photo. There are different licenses for different uses. Some licenses can make you $50 or more and the photo still be for sale. For those of you who enjoy photography (or illustrating) this is a great opportunity to make money while having fun. In my first month of selling illustrations, (I am saving up for a good SLR) I have made roughly $150 this month. As of March 25th my earnings come from: 68% Shutterstock, 17% Fotolia, 9% Dreamstime, 6% Other. (Note: Still not on Istockphoto yet)

Tip:
Business related photos sell the best. Skyscrapers and urban areas fall under that category.

Below are the TOP 5 Royalty-Free Stock Photography websites. There are many more out there and I hope to write guides for other large ones in the future. The following are in no particular order.
















The following are examples of some top sellers from Shutterstock and Dreamstime:









As for illustrations, these are some of the top sellers:




If you have any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them to the best of my ability. (I am not an employee for any of these sites, so I can only give you what I have personally experienced as a submitter.)

Last edited by Kngkyle; Apr 20, 2007 at 10:11 PM.
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  #2  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2007, 12:18 AM
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...interesting. seems like a fairly easy way to make a couple bucks.
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  #3  
Old Posted Mar 30, 2007, 12:53 AM
Kngkyle Kngkyle is offline
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Originally Posted by Urban Sky View Post
...interesting. seems like a fairly easy way to make a couple bucks.
Especially if you enjoy Photography. It's a good way to fund new lenses and other improvements for your camera. I know one referral I got from SSC has made over $55 this month and he has only 31 images in his gallery. I don't know the guys forum name.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2007, 6:02 AM
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All those photos look to be really touched up, though. I don't have Photoshop so I doubt I could make them look like that.
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  #5  
Old Posted Mar 30, 2007, 6:37 PM
Kngkyle Kngkyle is offline
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Originally Posted by KevinFromTexas View Post
All those photos look to be really touched up, though. I don't have Photoshop so I doubt I could make them look like that.
Those are the top selling photographs. Of course 95% of the photographs on those sites are not as good. My submissions are likely not even in the top 1,000. And I've made over $150 this month.
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  #6  
Old Posted Mar 30, 2007, 6:58 PM
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Originally Posted by KevinFromTexas View Post
All those photos look to be really touched up, though. I don't have Photoshop so I doubt I could make them look like that.
I think you take decent enough photos to make something Kevin. If you're looking for some free after-processing stuff I can pass you a couple of samples from Gimp and Picassa which are both free. I've been working a bit with Photoshop Elements too and I need a serious tutorial/beating or something.

Kngkyle2, do you know how this stuff works if you're outside the US? I'd probably give it a try if it's okay from Canada when I move again this summer.
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  #7  
Old Posted Mar 30, 2007, 7:00 PM
Kngkyle Kngkyle is offline
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Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes View Post
I think you take decent enough photos to make something Kevin. If you're looking for some free after-processing stuff I can pass you a couple of samples from Gimp and Picassa which are both free. I've been working a bit with Photoshop Elements too and I need a serious tutorial/beating or something.

Kngkyle2, do you know how this stuff works if you're outside the US? I'd probably give it a try if it's okay from Canada when I move again this summer.
Yes, all the sites I posted above are international.
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  #8  
Old Posted Apr 1, 2007, 4:10 PM
Kngkyle Kngkyle is offline
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My march earnings came from:

Shutterstock - 68%
Fotolia - 15%
Dreamstime - 11%
Bigstockphoto - 3%
Other - 3%

*Not on Istockphoto still.

I got 456 downloads in March from all of the sites together.
Also three extended licenses which got me over $30 combined.

--
I see many of you are signing up, and some are not getting accepted (most likely because your photos have noise), resize them to the minimum 4 megapixels if that is the problem and try some noise reducing software. (www.neatimage.com)

Put an extra 10 minutes into it, it is worth it. Also remember, Shutterstock is not the only site. Fotolia and Dreamstime do not have applications you have to pass. You can begin uploading straight away. Also Fotolia has a minimum of 2 megapixels, and Dreamstime is 3 megapixels. So if you are having noise problems at 4 megapixels, maybe you can get away with it at 2 or 3.
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Old Posted Apr 20, 2007, 10:12 PM
Kngkyle Kngkyle is offline
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I have added StockXpert. Another site that I am on that has really picked up lately. 300% increase in sales over last month so far.
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  #10  
Old Posted May 7, 2007, 5:43 PM
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Thanks Kngkyle2 for listing all these sites... now if I can just pass the iStockphoto test
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  #11  
Old Posted May 7, 2007, 11:31 PM
Kngkyle Kngkyle is offline
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Thanks Kngkyle2 for listing all these sites... now if I can just pass the iStockphoto test
Good luck! Istockphoto is a pain, not as much as Shutterstock though. But Shutterstock is more rewarding, at least for most. This month Shutterstock introduced a 20% (5 cent) raise for submitters once they hit the $500 mark. I am about $180 away, so possibly by the end of this month.

Here are how my April earnings broke down:

Site - % of profit - % change - avg $ per dl
Shutterstock - 59% - +17% - $0.27
Dreamstime - 14% - +77% - $0.79
StockXpert - 13% - +786% - $1.11
Fotolia - 12% - -7% - $0.50

Other - 1%

I had over 600 downloads in April, up from 456 in March.
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Old Posted May 8, 2007, 4:15 AM
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Can you show us what the photos you're selling look like so we can get a peek at what quality equates what sales?
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  #13  
Old Posted May 8, 2007, 10:44 AM
Kngkyle Kngkyle is offline
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Originally Posted by Matty View Post
Can you show us what the photos you're selling look like so we can get a peek at what quality equates what sales?
I don't have any photos yet. My camera is just a cheap little thing. I will be able to buy a Digital Rebel XTi in a month or so.
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Old Posted May 9, 2007, 10:24 PM
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On a related note:

We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers


Andrew Brown
Thursday May 3, 2007
The Guardian

Half a dozen lurid and splodgy pictures in the local paper brought home to me the death of an honourable profession this week. I took them. I am in my small way responsible for impoverishing an old friend, because he, not me, is a professional photographer, and his living has been more or less abolished by the changing world. Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs. The changes are partly technological and partly economic, but the final blow to his profession has come from Flickr and similar Web 2.0 sites.

Article continues
Twenty-one years ago, when he and I started together on the Independent newspaper - then famous for the quality of its photographs - the pictures that could sell newspapers could only be produced by professionals. Not only did photographers need the cunning, determination and eye for a story that journalists admire, they needed quite simple equipment and considerable technical skills. It took years for them to learn to see the world in black and white, and to get the best out of their cameras. It took years, too, to learn how to develop film and print it so as to bring the best out in every picture.

The first blow to this world was the adoption of colour photography. Colour film is so much harder to develop that it is all done by specialists. There is no longer room for the individual photographer to refine his own style. And colour requires a much less specialised way of looking at the world. To make a striking black and white picture, you need an eye; to make a striking colour picture, all you need is a patch of striking colour. Black and white photography makes the world look strange, and new; colour makes it look vivid and familiar, so colour photographs of much lower technical accomplishment became acceptable in newspapers.

As the demand for technically accomplished photos was shrinking, technology was making them easier to take. You now have to pay quite a lot to find a digital camera that will even allow the photographer to make any of the decisions once demanded for every photograph. And the digital camera, left to itself, will get these tricky decisions right. It will adjust itself, focus and even search out the face in a picture. My mobile phone takes better pictures than a snapshot camera would when the Independent started.

These developments may have diminished the value of a professional photographer's skills. But they couldn't eliminate the need for professionalism: the difference between a professional and an amateur is not that the amateur never takes really good pictures. It is that the professional will always come up with usable ones. A talented, hardworking and lucky amateur can produce wonderful pictures on the best days. But that will be one picture in a hundred. A professional can produce something that is nearly as good as their best 50 times in a hundred. That's why they are worth employing.

News photographs don't have to be technically accomplished. They sell on their captions. But many professionals make their money from photographs that are no longer news - the stock images sold by picture libraries. This is the market that the web will devastate. It is already damaging it: when I went round to see my friend, he was looking at a pile of 4,500 stock transparencies returned to him by a well-respected agency that had just gone bankrupt.

A picture-sharing site like Flickr contains the work of tens of thousands of talented amateurs, all of them capable of producing one or two photographs a year that could be published anywhere. A British photographers' site, EPUK, has calculated that if only 1% of the pictures on Flickr are publishable, that would mean 1.5m usable pictures uploaded there every year. Most of the drudgery of identifying good, relevant pictures is also done here - by the photographers themselves, who tag them, and by the other users, who notice them and have their interest recorded by the software.

Perhaps none of these people could make a living as a photographer, but few want to. Any money they make is gravy for them - and bread taken from the mouths of professionals.

LINK:

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...070571,00.html

=====

My thought is, professionals will just have to work harder and find better topics... not a crisis as I see it.

I found this via http://www.shorpy.com to http://www.cameramentor.com/ --which also posts a link to a blog post on the Guardian story: http://newsbusters.org/node/12623
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  #15  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2007, 5:03 AM
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so lets say i submit photos to Shutterstock, can i still sell those photos on my own? What is to stop this company from selling my images to someone who makes prints of them, etc? I guess i want to know that my work is still mine.
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