subject: Stock Sites Could Be The Answer If You Want To Make Money From Selling Your Photographs! [print this page] Stock Sites Could Be The Answer If You Want To Make Money From Selling Your Photographs!
Stock photography can be most profitable, and can be done with a compact camera (if necessary). If you are committed to putting in the time and effort you may even find yourself retiring earlier than planned. A stock photography website is simply an immense catalogue of thousands of photographs that can be acquired for a small fee by anyone that needs them. If you are looking at ways of making money from selling photographs, this could be the vehicle for you.For example, let's say I need a picture of a person playing chess for a poster. I know I can go to a stock site and find the picture I need, acquiring the rights for a few dollars. Those stock photography websites do not take the photographs themselves as there are simply too many photos needed. What they do is let photographers upload pictures to their site, and when someone buys the rights to that image, the photographer is paid the bulk of the money.Stock photography is everywhere you look - although you may not have realised, or even thought about it. When you're out shopping and see display pictures in the windows, these are primarily stock images. Someone may give you a flyer for a latest business in your locality. Images on the brochure will most likely have come from stock photographs. MSN or Yahoo news pictures are nearly always stock images used to complement their stories. For example, a story about the credit crunch (yawn - not the recession again!) may use a close-up picture of a financial newspaper with a BlackBerry and expensive fountain pen on it - this will inevitably have been acquired from a stock photography site. And when people design websites on any subject you can imagine, they will invariably visit stock sites for their images - and you could sell photographs that people need.Why not just copy and paste images to your website - i.e. why do people bother to buy them? Well, someone setting up a website is usually hoping for their site to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of world-wide users. For the sake of a few dollars spent obtaining rights to use an image, it's really not worth taking the risk of being sued for using photographs without permission.Now when you consider how big the Internet is, and that all of those websites are looking for pictures to use, you start to appreciate just how big the demand is. Provided you can supply a constant stream of things that someone somewhere needs, you can make a great living doing this. The photographs generally need to be 10 megapixels minimum because many use the stock photographs for posters etc. and as such the quality needs to be great even when the photos have been blown up to A3 size or larger.This should not be a problem, as most modern cameras are in the higher megapixels bracket, regardless of whether they are Digital SLR or compact. Provided you are willing to take a few pictures a day and upload them, you really can sell photographs to generate additional income.
