Photography Tips Guide

Posts Tagged ‘Stock’

So you want to make a living from your freelance digital photography. A way to earn extra income that has been showing a lot of promise is selling your freelance photos to stock photography sites like Fotolia. Say you love shooting pictures with your digital camera but never considered making a good amount of money from it. You couldn’t describe this as a job quiting opportunity just yet, but if you dedicate enough time who knows. Doesn’t matter what age you are just as long as you have some extra time to shoot and upload photos. This is just a way to distribute your freelance photography onto a stock photo site that will sell the pictures for you. If someone buys your freelance photos you will get paid, it is a pretty simple concept. Although the concept is simple enough there is a few methods that need to be learned in order to ensure successful picture sales.

Taking good digital pictures is obviously an aspect of getting good conversions. You don’t have to use all the most expensive equipment or know the trade secrets of taking great digital photos. Buyers of stock photography need pictures of almost anything, and that’s what you can give them pictures of anything and everything. The colors in your digital photos have to be neat, balanced and not too dull. You cannot have any signatures, logos or marks on the pictures to define there ownership. Your photos have to be in focus and not have any noise. Lastly it should not look like you were a tourist and you had a more creative outlook.

To help your photos sell you need to photograph things that are useful to buyers. You really have to think like a buyer, because the people who are buying stock photography are marketers, advertisers, website makers, magazines, and graphic designers (to name a few). You need to attract your buyers with keywords or proper picture categorizing. Learning to pick the popular, low competitive keywords will improve your sales dramatically. And will bring a large amount of traffic to your freelance work.

Here are the things you need (or) need to do to get started-Have an Internet Connection-Buy a Digital Camera-Learn about proper keywords, conversion, uploading, stock photography companies (read an Ebook)-Sign up with Stock photo companies-Take hundreds of digital photos-Upload you pictures, make conversions/sales and make a profit-Repeat what you are doing correctly in order to start make double, triple and yeah you got it

If selling your digital photography to stock photo sites something that interest you, learn more about how to get started at my site Freelance Digital Photography Careers and Job Choices

Selling digital photography to stock photo sites or selling photos over the internet can be a very profitable business if you know all the nuances that will get you a good amount of sales. Learning the technical aspects is very important, and really paints the fine line between making money and wasting your time. I don’t mean to discourage anyone, because it should be conveyed that anyone with a digital camera, an internet connection and a little spare time can do quite well. A lot of people sell their freelance photos through stock photography sites or through their own page/web host without a particular theme and do fairly well, but I will take more time and effort. A better battle plan is to find a particular type or subject of digital photography that you can easily focus on.

To explain further what picking a theme really does for photography sales, it helps consumers easily find what they are looking for when they type in specific descriptions or set of keywords. This benefits you because if a consumer types in your specific subject there is a good chance that it will bring them directly to your freelance photography. If you don’t already have the program called Camera Dollars, then labeling and specifying keywords is something you have to learn, but this tool will help you. And after you read the Camera Dollars lessons, you need to sign up with these companies and do a bit of research in order to figure out a profitable theme to pick for your photography.

Here are are several different types of freelance photography themes and short descriptions of each.

The method of taking pictures as a Theme:

Some examples of this would be macro, scenery, black and white, geometric, architecture, abstract, micro, motion, portrait, or panoramic.

These are usually recognized by simple types of photography and aren’t usually profitable on their own. Usually you want to combine this with other themes, like instead of “50′s Television” you could use the theme “Black and white 50′s televisions.”

Nominal Themes:

Simply put these themes based on any object, person, or place. Examples are Dvd, chair, cookware, doorknobs, Bahamas, Britney Spears and so on.

Themes Based off of Photo Utility:

Instead of think of what to take pictures of think of what the person buying the photo is using it for. You can base your theme off of a particular job or usage for the photo. To give an example a lot of graphic designers buy digital photos off the internet, do some research and try to sell particularly to them.

Intangible Themes:

Intangible digital photography themes are based off of ideas, emotions and other ambiguous images. Here are some examples: Love, hope, existentialism, correction, trust, triumphant, justice.

Your digital photography doesn’t have to be specified by just one form. Any of these three types of subjects can be put together to make an even more specific category of photos. An example of mixing two themes would be like Motion and friendship, which can be a picture of two friends doing some activity together or otherwise being in the state of “motion.” You could have hundreds of themes by the time your done, but it is better to focus on a few at a time. Do your research and in order to learn about how to sign up or start your own business check out Jobs in Digital Photography