More on Photo Organisation

As I mentioned before, I have tried several different programs. ACDSee ran out of steam at around 4000 images, but Smartpix was much better. I had some issues with running it, but their technical support is excellent. I think that your emails are answered by one of the developers, so if there is a problem they really know what they're talking about and can actually fix it.
I'd rate it at about 4 out of 5, but that's based on an early version. I will download and try the current version and let you know how I fare.
Why use any of these products?
Photo managers allow you to attach tags (sometimes called keywords) to your images. You can then easily find all of the photos that have the tags you specify. In the wedding example I used last time, each photo could have the names of the bride and groom, venue, type of car, location and many more tags attached to it.
I just file my photos by year and month taken, selecting the appropriate tags allows me to find exactly the photos I need. It is also extremely useful if you want to sell your photographs as your customers can search on the tags.
Note that both of these programs keep the tags separate from the photos. They maintain databases, which link each photo to its tags. If you can try to ensure that the tags are also written to the jpeg, as this makes searching and posting photos on websites easier.

More on Stock Photography

I've now had a few digital photographs accepted by Dreamstime and it's interesting to see what's acceptable and what isn't.
Public buildings and other architecture seems to be unacceptable, together with arty photographs. Though they did accept some images that I feel fell into the latter category. For example this photograph of our little pony and one of our kitten.
So far the jury's out. I know vaguely what art directors are looking for, but have not yet matched this to the photographs I've taken.
Fotolia is another stock photography site and interestingly their requirements are slightly different. They have accepted a few images that Dreamstime rejected. So it's a bit like Decca rejecting the Beatles, if at first you're rejected, try somewhere else.
That's just about it for today, if you would like to see some of my work, you can search on either of these libraries for my user name SteveF48. I also have some images on Flickr, which I don't think are suitable for stock libraries (SteveF1948).

Stock Photography

The thing that I had not fully realised was that stock photography libraries are not looking for artistic photographs.
They want photographs that are interesting to their buyers. I've now submitted around 50 photographs to Dreamstime and only had 4 accepted. Some of them were frankly not up to my usual quality, but most were rejected because Dreamstime already have more than enough images of that particular subject.
It just goes to show that to make money from Digital Photography you need to know what your customers want. Equally you can save a lot of time and effort by not photographing subjects that are not going to sell.

Making money

The simplest way to make money from your photographs is to sell them via a photographic library.
Yes and no. There are several pitfalls as I've been discovering:

• Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. You may love an image that the library hates;
• There's no publicity... Some libraries will not accept images that have logos, or show trademarks;
• Model releases. If your photograph shows a recognisable person you must ask them to complete a model release. This is just a simple statement that they won't sue the shirt off your back;
• Most libraries have a minimum size limit, typically 3 megapixels.

The beauty of photo libraries is that it doesn't cost you anything to join.

The downside of this is that millions of people know this, so you have lots of competition.

I've submitted my photos to Dreamstime and Fotalia, please click on one of these links to see what they can offer. Images submitted to both Dreamstime and Fotalia have to be approved by one of their editors, which can take over a week.

It's therefore not a quick way to make your work available for sale.

Getting Started

The title of this blog is 'Digital Photography for Everyone', so I will assume that your only experience of photography is saying cheese when Uncle Fred pointed his camera at you.
Digital Photography is very similar to any other form of photography, you need:

• Something to register an image; film in a traditional camera, a chip in a digital camera;
• A way of controlling the amount of light captured; a shutter;
• A lense to focus the image.

The simplest cameras are lightproof boxes with a simple lens and fixed shutter like this one from Samsung:

They are described as point and click, because that's all you have to do. This one is fine, if you will only be taking holiday snaps, but don't expect to get good pictures in all conditions.
As far as I know all digital cameras have automatic exposure. This means that they will adjust the shutter to allow the right amount of light to hit the sensor to ensure that you end up with an image. It may not be art, but you will see something.
This is an example of what can go wrong:
There are a number of things wrong with this photo, even though my camera has more features than the one above.
It is not the camera's fault, but the photographer's - me.
The faults include:
It's blurred, parts of it are too dark and some are too light, the composition is terrible.
Later I'll dig deeper into the basics, but for now you need to know that buying the camera is not enough. You should also buy at least one memory card, a spare battery and a case.