That has got your attention, you often see these headlines in the popular press and photography magazines
Reading these articles make it sound so easy, everyone loves your images so just upload your snaps and wait for the money to roll in?
What these articles fail to tell you is that not many Photographers earn a living contributing to stock imaging sites, so what about just supplementing your income with earnings from your snaps?
Before deciding if it will of benefit you need to do some research, 75% of contributors to stock imaging sites never make a payment, there are a lot of do’s and don'ts with the images you want to contribute, and lots of Photographers already contributing.
Lets look as some aspects of the decision to contribute or not:
Your Images that people say are fantastic may not be suitable for selling stock licences, firstly there are lots of technical reasons an image may fail submission, lets look at the technical failure reasons.
The image could be blurred or soft and lacking definition this could be because the camera moved when the picture was taken, some artistic images are accepted where the Photographer made a part of the image soft on purpose to emphasize the main subject.
Chromatic aberration or what is often phrased as ‘Blue or Purple coloured fringing’ is shown in the photograph where the contrast changes dramatically, often seen in images like a backlit tree, aeroplane taken against a pale sky, magenta/green or red/cyan fringing can be corrected in Photoshop, but is sometimes due to the camera sensor, or a wide open aperture.
Colour cast is where a Photograph tinted with an unwanted colour, this is caused by incorrect white balance on your camera, if you have the RAW files then this can sometimes be corrected.
The image has a blocky or patchy appearance known as Compression artefacts which when viewed at 100% is often noticeable in areas of flat colour, these can also appear like bubbles around the edges of the image, each time you edit and save a jpg image it will be compressed, work with RAW of TIFF format until you have finished editing
Some images may shows areas of pixilation this is data loss corruption, often where an image was burned to CD at a High Speed.
Many Compact Cameras and some DSLR’s are not suitable for Stock Photography, although the Compact may have the same megapixels as a DSLR, but the sensor size is much smaller resulting in general data loss, check the stock sites for entry level cameras.
Dirt and scratches appear as blotches when you view the image at 100%, keep the camera clean and free from dust
These are just a few, there are others like under and overexposed, we hope to have some Articles posted with more detail soon.
Now we come to the image content, most stock image sites licence images for commercial use so images need to be generic without any branded items (Property), if the model in your image is wearing clothing with a brand logo or design this will cause a rejection if you do not have a property release, other items will also get a rejection the background on the back of a pack of playing cards, Rubik's Cube, London Transport Signs, Eiffel Tower at night, images taken inside some zoo’s.
You are often allowed to shoot images for personal use at many places but not for commercial use so you need to research by looking on the stock sites to see what is acceptable, any Image with a person or people, this includes and body parts and silhouette even a finger will get a rejection without a signed Model Release
When you start to contribute you will have to submit initial submission images, as you can see it is not as simple as shoot, upload and wait for the money to roll in.
