Chicago, Illinois – July 16, 2012: A man checks his phone while standing in front of the famous Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Chicago, Illinois.
I’ve really stepped up my stock photography game in the past few months.
Several years ago I uploaded a few images to iStockPhoto and had minimal success. At the time, iStockPhoto only allowed truly stock images, with no recognizable features, faces, buildings, etc. While I understand the whole purpose of “stock photography” was generic images for use anywhere, I don’t have much desire to spend time in Photoshop masking out logos and other identifiable features. Eventually my interest waned and I forgot my login information. Fast forward to October of 2017 and I decided to give it another whirl.
This time, however, I really kept my eyes open to see who was selling images and where. In nearly every travel book, magazine and website I looked at I saw Shutterstock’s content. If I flipped through a magazine in the seat-back pocket of a plane, the article was something like “36 Hours in St. Louis” with a handful of images downloaded from Shutterstock. I did some reading on content rules, specifically if I’d have to spend hours altering my images to qualify for listing. Fortunately, as long as I listed the image as “editorial,” I could post most anything. This opened up a whole new world of potential uploads for me.
With the amount of traveling for work I’ve done lately, I’ve been able to get out and take a few spectacularly generic images of beautiful places. From Seattle, Washington to Miami, Florida; State College, Pennsylvania to Tucson, Arizona, I’ve brought my camera all along the way. Taking pictures has let me really enjoy each city I travel to, versus meandering down to the hotel’s bar and then calling it a night.
The images don’t fetch much money — anywhere from $0.25 to $1.88 per image — so it isn’t anything to retire on. My goal is to clear ten dollars a month which, at the end of the year, is enough money to take my family out to a nice dinner. Plus, I’ve already made more money selling my images via Shutterstock than I have via any other method. I sold very little on Fine Art America, to the point I canceled my membership since I was actually losing money there. Plus, its nice to get my pictures off of my hard-drive and into somebody else’s hands. I always feel honored when someone buys an image of mine, and to know its accompanying an article of some sort, well, that’s fine too.
The final note I’ve learned about selling images via stock, is my general surprise of what actually sells. I’ve often maintained selling images is always a surprise. The pictures I think that will be a gold mine usually produce very little movement, yet a random image of a well-known bar I grab on my bike ride home does surprisingly well. But, like I said, I’m just happy someone liked my image enough to spend money on it.
Even if it is only twenty-five cents.
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