I'm thinking about submitting photos to Shutterstock, or maybe some other stock photo site. Not trying to earn a living -- I shoot mainly for fun and occasionally get the opportunity to do it at my day job. If you have any experience with stock images, lemme know what you think. Thanks.
Never even though thought of that for some reason! Seems like it might be a few bucks here and there.
I glanced into it once a while back. My takeaways were: many people think they're a photographer because they spent $1000+ on a camera; many people take pictures that look exactly alike; and if somehow you manage to take a good, distinctive photo and someone is convinced to pay for and use it, it's a pittance. I'm happy to be proven wrong here, believe me, but it seemed a futile effort to me.
A suggestion I would give, based on someone who uses the services sometimes. If you want you photos to sell:
- Business related
- Photos that demonstrate or represent a concept / idea / process (e.g. meetings, confusion, efficiency). The more difficult to represent the better.
- Photos of landscapes, barns etc. are not likely to sell unless they are spectacular or are of a particular city or represent a concept (e.g long road home)
That's good advice - thanks. I poked about the web a bit and saw several forum posts by people who were frustrated that their landscape shots weren't selling. It's businesses that are buying photos, not people looking to hang lovely sweeping vistas on their wall.
aircooled said:A suggestion I would give, based on someone who uses the services sometimes. If you want you photos to sell:
- Business related
- Photos that demonstrate or represent a concept / idea / process (e.g. meetings, confusion, efficiency). The more difficult to represent the better.
- Photos of landscapes, barns etc. are not likely to sell unless they are spectacular or are of a particular city or represent a concept (e.g long road home)
This seems accurate to me since those are the types of things I've searched for when needing a stock photo.
You'll need to log in to post.
