It’s nice for someone, like myself, to get advice from an experienced stock photographer once in a while and thanks to photopreneur’s post on What it takes to become a successful stock photographer, I now have a place to get that advice.

OK, so it’s not actually one to one advice, I can’t just phone up and ask questions, but Ron Chapple has been shooting stock photography for a good few years and has his own blog passing on his experiences.

Just check out his post about one image that sold almost 100 licenses in 10 days. That’s around 10 sales a day! Talk about motivation. Get the right image and you can make quick sales, and lots of them. Getting the right image is the key though. Looks like I’ll be reading his blog for a while to try and pick up enough tips to get the right image.

Anyway, both sites are now regular reads for me. Let’s hope I can make some sort of contribution that makes this site a regular read for them.

I decided on giving stock photography a try knowing full well that it wasn’t going to bring in oodles of cash quickly, unless you get lucky with your early submissions you are likely to get a bit disheartened by the whole process.

For example, the lengthy QC process (at least with Alamy) can mean that it will take up to 25 days to get your images accepted and ready to sell. There are no guarantees that your images will be accepted either, and if one fails QC, the whole batch fails QC. This means that if you’ve been a bit lazy you might be waiting 25 days only to find that another few minutes spent checking your images would have meant you didn’t have to wait another 25 days after resubmitting your work.

So, not only can the whole submission process take a while, you then have to keyword your images. This again needs some thought and effort to make sure your keywords are accurate and not too generic.

Then there is the fact that you are up against so many other, and in my case, more talented, photographers producing some great images with plenty of experience in the stock industry. So how are your images going to be the ones that people want?

Well, that’s what I’m hoping to work out over the coming months and make some decent sales.

So, the message of this post is that if you are serious about stock photography, you have to stick at it because once you have a decent collection of images you will start to generate a passive income, meaning that your images will continue to sell without you having to do anything, therefore making you money for doing nothing. The holy grail!!

I happened upon a great blog today all about making money and marketing your photos. It got bookmarked straight away and I’ll be checking back regularly to see what’s new. It’s called Photopreneur, great name, and one post in particular is worth a read. They give you 52 ways to make money from your photos. Some are easier or more lucrative than others, but there were a few ideas that I hadn’t thought about. Number 17 is one that I will be trying on another of my sites.

So check it out. Can you suggest any other ways to make money from photography… that’s legal?

Since joining Alamy I’ve been trying to think of ways I can promote my images and increase my chances of getting sales.

I have read a few things people have done, some have success, some don’t. It looks like Alamy Rank is the key factor and trying to figure out how to make the most of it is the way forward.

Every contributor to Alamy has a rank, so if someone types in a keyword to look for an image and two people are using that keyword for their image, then the contributor who has the highest rank will get their image displayed nearer the top than the other person.

So how does someone new to Alamy get higher in the rankings?

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Unfortunately, modern cameras and accessories such as flash guns all need power, and power comes from batteries. Most people will be using rechargeable batteries so I was wondering what I could do while my batteries were charging. Can I find something productive to do to use up the time, or is the washing up, or some other domestic job going to use up that all important charging time.

Read on to find out the 5 things I found to do while my batteries were charging.

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I was flicking around a few sites today, following links just to see if I could pick up a few photography tips and I noticed a link on the stockvault blog that took me to Denver Wang’s 6 tips for landscape photography and I found it quite useful, so I thought I’d share it.

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The holy grail of a stock photographer. Find out exactly which images sell best and you are in the money.

If only it was that simple eh?

Well, the guys over at Crestock have blogged about their Top Ten Bestselling Images. Well worth a look.

You’ll notice that not all the images are photos, so if you are a creative type who’s good with a Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop then you might consider submitting artwork too to those libraries who allow it.

I am talking from experience here when I say “don’t be lazy”.

Before submitting any images to a stock library, make sure they are the highest quality images you can produce.  By this, I mean examine your images closely for things like dust spots (my nemesis), burnt out highlights, distracting details that draw the eye away from the main subject, poor composition and all the other things that may put someone off buying your image.

It can take just a few seconds to correct these problems in a software package like Adobe Lightroom, or Adobe Photoshop, so there really isn’t any excuse for submitting sub standard work.

Here are 3 simple things you should check for and tips on how to cure any problems.

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Alamy.com has gone from 0 to 10 million images in just 8 years, that’s 1.25 million images a year (it took me a few seconds to work that out!) which is impressive.

In an already highly competitive market, with new stock photography web sites springing up all the time, for Alamy to have reached 10 million images, that is quite a milestone and puts them head and shoulders, in terms of quantity, above most other stock image suppliers. Digital photography has gone a long way to make stock photography a more viable option to the amateur photographer wanting to take the next step and perhaps earn a bit of money. The range of digital cameras that are available now that give you the image size and quality to submit your work for stock is also making it a lot easier to enter into the world of stock photography.

So, if you are a stock photographer, have you found it harder to make a living, or a reasonable income, from stock over the last few years, or are you thinking about giving stock a go? Let me know your thoughts.

Well, the site has launched, so I thought I better start it off with the standard ‘welcome to my site’ post as I really couldn’t think of a better way to start it off.

So, welcome to my site.

Not a very spectacular launch was it…