P#4 Q1a: Where Do I Start If I Want To Sell Stock Photos?

Understanding what stock photos are

Scott Stulberg: That's a multiple part question. You really have to understand what stock photography is.

Basically, if you're halfway decent with a camera, stock photography is being able to take pictures that would probably sell to stock agencies looking to use them for advertising. Or greeting cards, or calendars, or posters. They also use them for articles -- I just had an image in an article in Newsweek. But mostly, stock photos are used for advertising.

If you can think and conceive of ideas that might be good -- posing people, shooting elephants in Africa, whatever it is -- those are images you can send into the agencies.

If they like your images then they will take your images. They will not take the ones that they don't want,.

The smaller agencies, like microstock agencies, will take a lot of your images, but that doesn't mean that you're going to make any money on them.

Stock photography is pretty confusing but it's one very good way to make money with your photography.

Audri Lanford: What types of agencies are there?

Scott Stulberg: There are big stock agencies like Getty Images and Corbis. I'm with both of those and I'm really happy to be with them because those are what you want to go after.

I teach a stock photography course at BetterPhoto.com. The course is designed to get you into the better stock agencies.

I would think that's a goal for anyone who wants to be a stock photographer rather than someone who just wants to shoot occasionally and see if they can make money with their images.

Those are the ones that the top people around the world looking for great images go to first.

Then, you have your midrange agencies. A lot of them deal with royalty free, even though the big ones deal with royalty free also.

Royalty free means a buyer can buy your image and use it unlimited for anything they want: in their brochures, in their ads on their Kleenex boxes, wherever they want -- forever.

It's a little disconcerting to us as photographers because we would rather our images sell as rights managed. That's what stock photography started out as.

Rights managed means the buyer would pay the photographer a certain amount of money and they would use that image for say a month on the back of a cereal box or in a magazine or something, and you got paid for that usage. If the buyer wanted to use the image again, they had to buy it again.

You got the big bucks for that.

With royalty free, that means unlimited usage, anywhere they want it, as long as they want. What they could also do is share it with friends, kind of unethically. It didn't make us photographers feel good.

In conclusion

Your ultimate goal should be representation by the big stock agencies currently buying stock photos. But don't limit yourself to these. Both midrange and microstock agencies buy a lot of stock photos. Understanding the differences between the agencies opens opportunities that help you to be more successful selling your stock photos.