There's more to selling to stock agencies than meets the eye. I have a friend who's business is photography, full time - he sells prints direct to customers, that sometimes have had to reach 48" on the long end, but in the years of selling through stock agency as another alternative, he's maybe made a couple of hundred pounds over the years. And this guy is a professional. His income doesnt come from stock agencies
The problem ? There are millions of pro toggers out there who's work is every bit as good as my pro friend. He's competing with them all. No offence but lots of amateurs think they're pretty good, and hear about stock photography, and open an account - and some may even get lucky, but be prepared. If its just for the kudos of saying you sold a photo on a stock agency, then you wont be disappointed. If you think you're going to get an income from it, then prepare yourself.
Someone like Alamy ( amongst others ) have very stringent rules. Firstly, you have to send in 4 photos to see if you're good enough, and they'll want to inspect these at 100%. If one fails any of the criteria below, they all fail
FAILURES:
- Camera shake
- Chromatic aberration
- Colour cast
- Compression artifacts
- Data loss or corruption
- Digital camera not suitable for Alamy
- Blemishes - Dust, scratches or sensor dust
- Excessive sharpening
- Excessive similars
- Film rebate or border
- High contrast
- Interpolation artifacts
- Newton’s rings or interference patterns
- Noise
- Noticeable retouching
- Orientation
- Out of focus
- Over manipulated
- Poor exposure
- Scanning artifacts
- Size
- Soft due to size
- Soft or lacking definition
- Unsuitable material
Alamy have over 30,000,000 photos available. Thats 30 million. There's one of the other big problems. But you have to try it for yourself, because i guess you never know. You just may have that one unusual photo ..
