How to Sell Freelance Photographs
Two popular ways to sell freelance photographs are microstock submissions and public events or tourism shots. Generating an income from microstock submissions requires a willingness to learn and apply technical standards to your photos. The microstock market taps into the global photography market that is expected to reach $10.5 billion by 2015. Microstock tends to be lucrative for photographers who learn the system, but there is global commercial competition, and it may require substantial persistence. Photographing people at public events and tourism destinations requires a willingness to approach strangers who may reject your offer, but does not require mastery of technical standards and may yield substantial income more immediately than microstock.
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Instructions
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Microstock
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Apply to microstock agencies as a contributor by going to an agency website and completing the contributor application. Fotolia and Dreamstime have higher acceptance rates, and may have easier acceptance standards. The application requests sample images that are evaluated by quality control moderators. Contributors are accepted based on the quality of the images. Quality is determined by the presence or absence of elements such as digital fringing, chromatic aberration, compression artifacts, banding problems, sharpness, trademarks, visible post-processing, boring content and good composition.
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Research the most popular keyword searches and the most popular images downloaded from the microstock agency. All microstock agencies provide this information to contributors to stimulate production of images that the agency desires.
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Shoot and upload the photos that are most like the most popular images or keywords on the site. You may discover niches of popular keywords that have relatively few images. Pickniche.com is a web tool dedicated to helping users find keyword niches among the most popular microstock agencies. Enter a keyword combination on Pickniche, and it reveals stats about the size of the niche for that particular keyword combo.
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Keyword the photos that you upload with as many relevant keyword and keyword combinations as possible. Some agencies require one-word keywords only, so check the keywording standards for each agency that you contribute to. Only use keywords that are relevant to the picture. Low relevance keywords may get penalized and reduce the overall performance of the image.
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Evaluate the images that get the most views and most downloads. Photos with low views and low downloads may indicate boring subject matter, saturated subject matter or bad keywording. Photos with many views but few downloads may indicate a high volume of irrelevant keywords. A photo with a low views-to-downloads ratio indicates a high performing image.
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Submit the highest performing images to microstock agencies with higher acceptance standards such as iStockphoto. Microstock agencies with higher acceptance standards tend to generate higher income. iStockphoto is the strongest income generator for many microstock contributors. Submitting only high performing shots is beneficial because each image affects the overall quality of your library on each agency. High quality image libraries tend to generate more traffic and more income than mixed quality libraries, and may produce a more stable source of future income.
Public Events and Tourism
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Publish a basic website that showcases some of your best photos of people and gives information about your interest in photography. Specifically, the website should indicate a passion for photographing people enjoying themselves, or “lifestyle” photography. These themes harmonize with subject matter of the photos that you are selling.
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Sign up with an online photo vendor such as dotphoto.com or fototime.com. These vendors process print orders for photos that photographers upload to the site’s servers. Selling directly to customers may require a business license and resale license, but sites like dotphoto and fototime eliminate the need for freelancers to sell photos directly to customers. The services on these websites process the orders. The photographer earns a commission from sales.
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Photograph people having fun at public events or popular tourism destinations such as beaches, parks and festivals; or request permission from a restaurant or night club manager to shoot people at those locations. Hand out business cards with your website URL to the people who are interested in seeing the photograph. Tell them to check the site in the next few days when you will post a link to a gallery of shots from that location.
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Upload the photo files to the print vendor’s servers and organize the galleries based on date and location. Create a link to the gallery. The link should state the location and date.
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Tips & Warnings
Photograph people for microstock submissisons. Pictures of people are among the most popular images downloaded from microstock.
Get model releases from people that you photography. Microstock agencies will not accept images of people without model releases.
Syndicate your submissions after you are comfortable with your ability to consistently generate images that perform well and are accepted by more prestigious agencies like istockphoto. Syndication is a pay service currently offered by iSyndica that enables photographers to submit photos to multiple agencies with a single upload.
Use off-camera flash for indoor and low-light photography to create more professional and saleable images.
Consider using a photo printer to process prints on site or in your car.
Ask permission to shoot people that you do not know to avoid negative and potentially dangerous responses from people.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit money image by Horticulture from Fotolia.com
