What Should I do to Start a Successful Photography Business? – Everything you want to know from A to Z.
Where Should I Sell My Photos?
Sooner or later it would have happened: thinking about entering the stock photography business. Before even looking for a reseller of your photos, make sure you have the right gear for high quality photos: the minimum accepted is 6MP, 2700×1800 resolution. Some may ask for at least an entry lever SLR.
First I looked over at http://www.stockphoto.net/ in order to find a website (or laboratory) willing to accept me as a photographer. But… the big well-known iStockPhoto, and StockExpert delayed too much in responding. Fotolia was the most responsive and yet it has the same quality of the database as the other two. After the immediate validation of you account, your uploaded photos will be reviewed in 24 hours. Most of them will probably be rejected because it appears to me that Fotolia team is very strength in sorting and accepting images, but I don’t blame them: it’s not a bad thing to encourage photographers to get better and think more about costumers demands.
Learn to Think Commercial
Stock photography is definably commercial and while browsing thru my archive, I realized that I don’t have such photos yet. Changing the perspective from an artistic angle to a commercial one is not as easy as I thought.
In order to redefine my thinking when looking at the world around me, I found this blog called Photopreneur who draw my attention because of the clean writing and plenty of good advise on this matter. The site has reasonably good photography business advice adapted for the brains of todays forward-thinking youth and covered in a simple design.
How To Lose A Client In One Day – this gives you advises on how to relationate with your clients so that they will go on asking for your service. It not only applies for stock agencies, but also it’s very useful when shooting at a weeding or other social events.
11 Signs That Your Photo Is Going To Be A Big Seller - is an article that will help you self critique your own work in order to send the stock agencies only the best you got for them (if you don’t send the best from the begging, they won’t look at you).
Keywording Secrets For Big Photo Sales – even if your photo is accepted by quality and relevance, if it doesn’t show up at the costumers search, it’s like it wasn’t even there, so read this article.
Rasmus Rasmussen also has a must read article on the matter of “pay attention to what you upload”: 10 Common Mistakes by New Stock Photographers. This gives tips on how to process the image in order to keep the high quality and don’t loose it at compression. Read more of this guy’s articles to learn how to obtain great quality of your images. Later on I will write about creating a studio for this type of photography.
Go read part II of the article.
Tags: stock photography, photography business, photographers market, selling photos, commercial photography
My Name is Lau, I'm 23 and I'm from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Nature Photography is my passion, and secondary, Abstract Photography, but other kind of photographic challenges please me as well.
September 26th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
[...] at Digital Photography Tutorials « What Should I do to Start a Successful Photogrpahy Business? – Part I [...]
September 26th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
To be honest, I have never thought of making money from my photos. For me, it’s a hobby that brings a lot of happiness – I’d rather not go commercial. But hey – that’s just me. Good tips for those who want to go pro.