CaptainC wrote:
The micro stock image have ruined the market. Images can be purchased for quite literally pennies - a few dollars for large images. Since everybody and his brother wants to sell images, they are flush with inventory.
You CAN make money with stock, but you have to find that niche, have superb images and have a few hundred or more.
It is NOT easy to make REAL money, but then it is easy to enter and who knows - you might have just THE image that someone will pay $10.00 for !
What the Captain said. I got into the mix with iStockphoto many years ago, expecting to make a few hundred a year at a minimum. BUT. You cannot simply upload an image and begin selling royalty-free rights to it. First, the image has to get past iStock's ln-house monitors and they can be extremely picky, and your image's aceeptability is subjective and very dependent upon who looks at it. One person might pass it and another will reject it. There are ways to appeal a rejection, but they're time-consuming
Beyond that iStockphoto was once a start-up begun by a guy who wanted a place for photographers to share their work, but it has been bought by Getty Images and now it's more akin to one of the larger stock agencies.
You go into it thinking you'll be seen by all these high-powered image buyers and then one day the realization hits that while people who put together school projects, small brochures and other such low-profile projects will buy from these micro-stock agencies, no art director who's tasked with a super-expensive project for an advertiser or high-end magazine is gonna use micro-stock, knowing that several other people, perhaps dozens of other people, may well be using the same image.
And then there's my experience with iStock's forums. They claim to be there for the same reason as is UHH - for iStock contributors to have a place to exchange ideas and techniques and to seek help with problems. BUT, again, there's a big asterisk. The people who'll be of the most help are those with large iStock portfolios. Many of these folk have made stock photography their full-time business and while some have been helpful, most see you as competition and they just do not want to help their competition get a leg up. You ask a question about lighting or about how to get grocery stores and other businesses to let you shoot on their property, you will probably not get an answer at all, or else you'll get a one sentence and very useless answer, or at worst, a snotty one, basically a not-so-subtle way of saying "Go Away!!"
I have encountered some irritating and snotty folks on those forums, and not just from the large-portfolio crowd. IStock's forums were over-populated with trolls who apparently live to piss others off.
Um. We don't have any of those here, do we??
At any rate, I was serious about this stock photo thing for a coupla years, but I could never make more than $125 a year at it. Finally, I grew tired of it all and stopped uploading new images. Haven't uploaded anything since 2006. I dropped out of those forums even before that, having grown weary of swimming through a sewer to find one nugget of useful information.
Just left my existing portfolio in place. Aside from that, I've expended no effort at at on iStock since late 2006 - and I still get about $100-$125 a year from royalties generated by the portfolio I have on-ine there.
You can make money with stock photography - IF you jump in with both feet, are prepared to devote lots of time to uploading and maintaining a portfolio and are prepared to drop lotsa bucks on lighting, models, and so on.
My basic problem lies with the concept of stock photography. Stock images are intended to serve as pieces and parts of someone else's project. A stock photo agency is akin to a hardware store. You go there to buy nails and lumber and paint with which to build a house. Maybe you'll be able to see your particular two-by-four in the finished product and maybe not.
Me, I prefer to shoot imagery which will stand on its own. Some might say I'm into fine art photography. I leave it up to others to decide whether my work is either fine or art, but it ain't stock.
Stock can be fun, if you don''t mind the level of work it requires to be any good at it, AND if you don't mind your work being used by someone who may or may not credit you for it.
All that said, iStockphoto, as I mentioned, was bought by Getty Images some time ago and it ain't what it was at the outset. Things could have improved for the photographer there - they do now accept editorial imagery, illustrations, audio and video and so on - but I haven't the interest to find out. Not my cuppa.