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.