A try at stock photography

By Jacques Bron on Thursday, May 01 2008

Recently, I have been looking at stock photography sites. More precisely, I have set up accounts at dreamstime.com  and fotolia.com. It seems that more and more people are trying to sell their photos on these image database sites and some (well...a few) people are making money with this activity. Even if you are talented and have an important activity on these sites, I don't think the income you may get from these sites can replace a "regular" job. But it can be fun, I guess, and it gives an opportunity to index and classify your photos more accurately.

Interestingly, both dreamstime.com and fotolia.com allow you to both sell and buys photos under the same account. This is how I got the idea to try to upload and sell a few of my photographs: I had to purchase some illustration photos for a website I'm working on and after browsing and browsing, I said to myself : why not try?

Your photos have to be carefully prepared in order to be uploaded and accepted by the site. You need to have at least 3 MB files (more is better as people will be able to make larger prints if needed). You need to check contrast, exposition, color and global image quality. Images have to be conceptual or informative. If you want to have a chance to have your photos accepted and be able to sell them, they need to be easily associated with ideas, concepts, etc. The more specific you can get, the better.

I will wait a little bit and see how all this goes.