kaitoo212 Loc: From CA living in NYC

I am interested in knowing more about shooting stock photography to break into this field.
Anyone submitting photos out there? To which sites?
How and when did you get started?
I'm thinking more along the lines of product, any advise?
Thank you UHH family...
k a i t o o/Daniel

sandiegosteve Loc: San Diego, CA

There is a lot of information on google if you do a search, but it is too much. I do know that Adobe Stock has an insights page as to what people are looking for to help guide what you shoot (http://www.adobe.com/go/VisualTrends).

There are people who do this for a living. It doesn't cost anything to upload to a few sites and most let you retain rights. Most people want lifestyle shots that are not classic photography shots (think background image in an ad that doesn't take away from the ad's message).

picsman Loc: Scotland

I used to submit to istock but the rewards were cents per sale instead of the dollars per sale they used to offer. To make money you need to be operating at an industrial scale. Check which sites off a higher percentage of sale, they do exist but I don't know who they are.

RKL349 Loc: Connecticut

To bad you are not a little closer to the Hartford, Ct area. There is a photographer who teaches a class in stock photography, which lasts about three hours.

GENorkus Loc: Washington Twp, Michigan

After submitting to several of the more popular stock sites, I found that I was like a dog chasing my tail. Everything was great for the previous year but not the present year. The only way to meet the standards was to purchase the most modern camera each year. For the small amount of income they payed, that "ain't gonna happen!"

Presently I see that many stock companies are now letting anyone submit stuff, cell phones included. Become a full time stock photographer if you want. I feel I'm a bit more creative than assembly line photo work.

stanperry Loc: Spring Hill, Florida

I do stock photography, in addition to my other camera work. I thought it might be helpful to give you my perspective. At the moment, I have more than 500 pics uploaded to 5 sites. My average monthly income buys me dinner, once (only mine. Not my wife's). Before you decide to get started, you really need to understand that there is no money in it. None.
Your uploads will be reviewed by other contributors. You should expect a 30-40% rejection rate at first. Rejections for focus, noise, etc, will be a startling revelation. Each of your submissions must be technically perfect. Other submissions will be rejected for a plethora of CYA rules, such as model releases, artwork releases, visible logos/trademarks, etc. Reviews are consistently inconsistent both inter- and intra- agency submissions. Monday a picture of a vase and flowers will be rejected for lack of an "artwork" release (they cannot define artwork. I seriously have had pics of common, everyday items rejected for this reason). If you had waited until Tuesday, however, it would have been accepted without hesitation. I often wonder if the reviewers bias their rejections in favor of their personal areas of interest. By the way, don't bother using the contact us button for a reason. The little guy who answers these lives in the Philippines and doesn't own a camera. And the company doesn't care. They have thousands of daily contributors, and millions upon millions of photos. Btw, the Phillipino dude, or Taiwanese or Pakistani either don't habla Ingles, or barely do. No 50 cent words in your emails, please.
10's of thousands of photographers are competing for the 25 cent royalties paid for a download. Submitters are from every walk of life. Housewives, students, pro's, and now, apparently, you. You must understand the enormity of your task. You hope/think that your images will be selected by Coca Cola for an upcoming ad campaign. Coca Cola sets their ad team to work finding just the right image. They then review 120,000 images. And they pick yours. Really??? But, they did. They then pay $1.25 to shutterstock for the unlimited use of your photo. Shutterstock the sends you .17, if you're a newbie. If you've uploaded 1000 images and sold some ambiguous number of them, your rate may be higher, and your direct deposit will be $.25. If you have questions about that, go to a stock website and do a search for any subject no matter how obscure (I.e., lady bugs in April in the Catskills, etc). Then review the 500 pages of images. Get it? Take the dollars that you need/want to make and divide that by 25 cents. To get $300 you have to sell ??.?? images per month. The only upside to that is that after you have uploaded enough images to actually make money, that income will continue in perpetuity. The royalties are paid forever.
Your photoshop skills need to be good. Your images need to be perfect (I spent a few weeks trying to resolve a noise issue that really wasn't an issue EXCEPT at this level of review. ANY noise will get you a rejection notice. Wedding photos for printing are less picky). Your subject matter must be relevant and sought after (relevancy changes daily). You will spend a lot of time and effort to make a quarter. The people who make a living at it must be submitting 100 images/week, and have, for years. YOU on the other hand, haven't and won't. I submit images when the Real Estate, Advertising and crime scene business is slow. I expect to surpass 1000 uploads by the end of October. I'm also semi retired, so I don't need the money. Thank God.
So.......if you want to do it just to say you did, go ahead. If there's any other reason, just don't. You will spend more time keeping up with which images were uploaded to which sites,,which sites rejected which image and why, than its worth. You'd be better served to print and frame your best work and shop them to professional galleries. The stock photo rejection rate alone will depress you.
On the upside, you will get professional level reviews of your images. Pay attention, and the quality of your photos will be greatly improved. You can make money, if you blast images to multiple sites consistently over a long period of time. Also, the Royalties paid forever is attractive, if you jump in with both feet and upload tons of pics. Getting those quarters when you're retired would be nice.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Hi Daniel,

In addition to online resources that have been mentioned, there are also many books and occasional seminars regarding stock photography.

There are actually a number of different types of stock. The major categories are:

- Microstock are often "Royalty Free" and are sold very cheaply... a few dollars per image for unrestricted use. The profit to the photographer is pennies on the dollar, so you need to make thousands of sales per month for it to be worthwhile. Microstock agencies are not very restrictive about what's offered, leaving it up to the photographer to do all the work.

- Midstock... Rights managed, licensed images that typically cost between $50 to $1000 per use, varying depending upon the type of use. Higher quality images are required, as well as signed model/property releases to indemnify the user. There may be some specialization among agencies offering this type of stock. They usually screen photographers initially, as well as screening and approving images

- Macrostock.... Similar business model and requirements as midstock, but these are the highest paid licensed usage. It can run hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars or more for a very unique, top-quality, fully released image. Agencies offering this type of stock tend to be highly specialized and very restrictive about whose images they'll handle. Usually it is only very well established and "known" photographers who will be handled by these agencies.

Some stock agencies offer all three types of stock. Others have a narrower focus. Within some of the above major types, there also can be a lot of specialization... such as an agency that only offers images related to a particular kind of subject or geographic locale. There are advantages and disadvantages to both types.

Agencies split profits with their participating photographers. The photographer's share is smallest with high volume microstock, and usually considerably better with mid and macrostock. Midstock profit splits are often not negotiable. Macrostock is more likely to be negotiable and offer the best profit splits... but also will be the most difficult to sign up with.

Some stock agencies are huge, with many millions of image and a bit of everything (Getty is about the biggest). This puts them at the top of many buyers' list when shopping for an image.... But that large buyer audience attracts a lot of photographers and it's easy to get lost in the crowd. Plus, due to their "clout" the agency in the position where they can dictate reduced profit splits to photographers who want to sell through their agency. (Note: So big they can get away with it, Getty also "competes" with their own photographers, in a couple ways. They buy the copyright estates of images. They also sometimes hire photographers to go out an take images that customers are requesting. That's "work for hire" so Getty owns the copyright. Many other agencies regularly send their participating photographers "want lists" to go out and shoot, so both can profit from the images.)

The most successful "stock photographers" usually are not "stock photographers". What I means is that stock is not their primary business. It's a secondary sideline... an additional revenue stream being generated from the images they're already making for other purposes. For example, Bill Bachmann was an assignment/location/advertising commercial photographer first... but one of the top five stock photographers in the world, second. Sadly, he passed away about a year ago... but his legacy lives on in a lifetime's worth of photographs taken in some 130 or more different countries, many of which you've probably seen used in ads. His website is https://www.billbachmann.com/entryPage.html

Several years ago I had the good fortune to attend a seminar on stock photography that Bill conducted. It was pretty eye-opening! He also was kind enough to respond to a few questions I emailed him later.

While he wasn't specific, I know Bachmann sold some seven figures worth of stock photography each year. Enough so that he employed two people full time, just to handle it!

Some of Bill's general guidelines:

- When you're out shooting on assignment or conducting a photo tour, keep the possibility of selling images as stock in the back of your mind all the time.

- 90% of the best selling and most valuable stock images are photos of PEOPLE. Those are the vast majority of what's wanted and used... images showing people doing something (i.e., not animals or scenes or flowers or bugs or ?).

- ALWAYS get a model/property release signed. An unreleased photo is nearly worthless (has very limited, low-paying uses that aren't risky for the user and the photographer). A properly released photo is worth 10X, 100X, 1000X as much as an unreleased one!

- Never EVER surrender your copyright. Learn how photo licensing works and use that instead. Years ago I worked with Bob Jackson. He took the photo of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station, right after the Kennedy assassination. Bob was on the staff at the Dallas Morning News at the time, so the newspaper owned the copyright... and they sold it over and over. When Bob retired from the newspaper, they gifted the copyright of that image to him... Considered one of the 100 most iconic images of the 20th century, it continued to sell regularly (saw particularly wide usage on the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, in 2013), put Bob's kids through college and far more. I bet it's generated millions in licensing fees, over the years.

- Never EVER sell your best and newest work too cheaply... as microstock, say. That establishes it's value for ALL future sales. Likewise, once an image is offered Royalty Free, you can never go back.

- A quality image can be sold over and over and over. Some of Bill's images have been licensed dozens of times and generated $100,000+ in sales over the image's lifetime.

- You constantly need to be generating new work... Some images are timeless or have a long "shelf life". But others are not because styles, attitudes and concerns change over time, in turn causing images of those things to have a limited lifespan. The lower paying types of stock especially call for a high volume of work. People who have modest success with low-paying microstock usually have 25,000 to 30,000 or more images uploaded at any given time, and are regularly making and adding 250, 500 or 1000 or more new images per month. That's what it takes to generate enough money to make microstock worthwhile. The number of images needed is significantly less with the higher paying mid and macrostock (but the images have to be better and more unique).

- Also don't "shoot yourself in the foot" by glaringly dating images... such as with a watermark or signature that includes the year the image was made. (It's been unnecessary to do that for 20 years. Copyright regulations changed in the late 1990s. Since then, ANY unique mark can serve as copyright protection. It's no longer necessary to include the date, the © symbol, the words "copyright" or "all rights reserved", etc. on images.) The date an image was made is in the image EXIF anyway, if people really want to look, so it's not necessary to advertise it further.

- Register the copyright of your images. While you own the copyright of every image you make (unless you're a staff photographer or doing a "work for hire" job), the protections of it are relatively few and limited until it's been properly registered (see the details at the copyright office). Become familiar with the registration process and start doing it. Timing is important... registration must be done within 90 days after "first publication", to have full recourse and maximum levels of protection. A delayed registration limits what you can be awarded in the event of misuse, but it's still much better than unregistered.

- An image can have wildly different values, depending upon the usage. Photographer and author George Lepp told me he licensed an image to Kodak for $20,000 to be used worldwide in advertising. He also sold the same image for use in a text book, for $250.

- Think in terms of multiple outlets (Bill sold through up to six different stock agencies, as well as selling stock directly). HOWEVER, you probably will not be able to offer the same image through multiple outlets... it will need to be different shots for each. For example, when an images has slowed selling at one agency, you might remove it and put it up at another. Maybe an image will start out as macrostock, eventually be sold for midstock, then some years later end up selling as microstock.

- Compose your images for publication: Leave blank space for text, ad copy and headlines. Shoot vertically for full page usage (which pays more). OR shoot horizontally for even larger & higher paying, double truck usage (facing pages). Best of all, whenever possible shoot BOTH!

- Shoot what you know best... whatever that may be. For example, Bill was born and raised in Pittsburgh PA and often visited and photographed there.... especially knew and made images of the non-touristy areas. In spite of the worldliness of his work (130+ countries) and iconic images he made in virtually every major city on the planet, his best selling location of all was his home town! You also might specialize in subject matter or in style of image that you make. Bill's images are renowned for their saturated colors (when he shot film, he used a lot of Velvia). Another example, Thomas Mangelsen, wildlife photographer, has a degree in biology. For that matter, George Lepp's early training was in wildlife/wild lands management... it was later he earned a bachelor degree in photographic arts and was awarded an honorary masters degree.

- Unique images sell best. Bill told a story how he'd photographed the Arc de Triomphe ten or more times on different trips to Paris. He'd made any number of carefully composed and deliberate images of it from all the usual angles... Just like a million other photographers. But by far his best selling image of the monument is a blur of lights and movement shot from the sunroof of a car... which he admitted was taken after a few glasses of wine over dinner at a nearby restaurant. That image is totally different from all the usual views we see of the Arc de Triomphe. The monument is recognizable in the photo, but the image is a totally unique and timeless view of it!

The Internet and digital photography have hugely changed the stock photography marketplace. Where there used to be only a few thousand people shooting stock... today there are many millions who are trying to make a little money that way. And an awful lot of them don't take a very well-planned approach to it, sell their work too cheaply and handle it very sloppily. The market is absolutely flooded with a lot of not-very-good images, poorly processed and inaccurately keyworded. (I once searched Getty using a particular equestrian-related term and found 100 images... 94 of which were NOT representative of the search term I'd used!) Bill Bachmann mentioned that he'd seen significant drop in stock sales in later years, as the market has become flooded with photographers and their images.

There are a lot of books about making and selling stock photography. Books regarding pricing, image licensing and the legalities of copyright are also useful. And there are resources such as "The Photographer's Marketplace" (published annually, includes a section about stock photography). There's a good deal of organization and advanced planning needed to be successful at stock sales.

It's a great time for stock photography BUYERS.... a really tough and challenging time for stock PHOTOGRAPHERS. I just hope it's not your primary or only photo business!

EDIT: I haven't got or read it, but the title of this book is interesting! https://brutallyhonestmicrostock.com/2017/06/04/new-guide-for-beginners-brutally-honest-guide-to-microstock-photography/

Spirit Vision Photography Loc: Behind a Camera.

You do not need the latest gear to make Professional caliber images. I still shoot with older film cameras, and it is not uncommon for my work to be purchased or published. Your present gear is more than sufficient. Spend your time on honing your vision, shooting and marketing.

Russ

venneman Loc: Denver

Does he stream or record his classes?

Van Gogh Loc: Lansdale, Pa.

Check out this site, this photographer makes some good money selling and teaching stock photography: BackyardSilver.com

stanperry Loc: Spring Hill, Florida

Also be aware that many of the sites, such as Getty, will have the exclusive right to sell your work. That means you can ONLY publish that photo on their site. Most of the other sites aren't exclusive so you can publish to shutterstock, adobe, and as many others as you like. And the comments above are incorrect in that. You can publish the exact same image over and over to the sites. You don't have to have multiple views or change them in any way. So then you are faced with a choice......publish your photo on Getty (exclusive rights sites), which pay much better per image sold (the key word is "sold") or take a smaller pay check from other sites, with the additional opportunity to sell across multiple platforms. Keep I'm mind that Getty also charges significantly more for images to their buyers, and buyers are also shoppers. An image on Getty may cost $100. A similar image on shutterstock will cost $10. Personally, I won't publish to an exclusive rights type clearing house. I prefer to spread my opportunities to sell something across a larger audience.

kaitoo212 Loc: From CA living in NYC

sandiegosteve,
Thank you for sharing and.posting.
k a I t o o/ Daniel

kaitoo212 Loc: From CA living in NYC

picsman,
Thank you for your insight and sharing!
k a i t o o/Daniel

kaitoo212 Loc: From CA living in NYC

RKL349,
Thank you and I wished I did too. Sounds very interesting.
k a I t o o/daniel

Spirit Vision Photography Loc: Behind a Camera.

Do some research on Getty before committing to them. 😬