So today I’m finally getting the time to add a Gallery section to the website and it got me back thinking about how I could sell my images again.  This whole website project started because of a conversation between me and one of my friends. We work together and she has an interest in photography and she has taken some great photos.  She’s a very keen diver and takes a lot of underwater stuff, which I admit there’s a pang of jealously when she shows me photos of Compass Jellyfish which she’s taken, she’s got a lot of really good photos of all sorts of subjects.  I haven’t said it to her face but she’s partly the reason I’ve got back into photography, for the simple reason I saw her pictures and thought “I wonder if I could be that good”.

So, selling images….my friend and I where having a chat over coffee (on a break of course) and I asked her if she’d thought about selling her photos on an image stock website.  You see, we (the company I work for) had bought some the previous year for a wall planner we’d put together as a marketing tool.  This ended up sparking a bit of friendly competition between us, to see who could get images listed first and who could sell the most.  Well, it’s currently a draw, I got myself listed first but only because my friend signed up using the shortened version of her name which didn’t match her driving licence; so I was technically listed first and now she’s had a sale of one of her images…. a whole 0.25 USD!! But a sale is a sale and there was a pang of jealously again and a massive chunk of pride in what I’d help her achieve.

What amazed me about these stock sites (which I will list on page on the site shortly) was the sheer volume of images for sale and the variations in the way the sites approve images and pay out.  I’m currently listed (only a few images so far) on ShutterStock and Fotolia and tried to list on Alamy.  I say tried, because I’ve had images rejected as has my friend, that’s for a post another time.  These sites work by selling your images for you, and splitting the sale.  The percentage varies from site to site, Alamy is on the highest paying and there are sites such as iStockPhoto which offer a better percentage if you only list the image with them.

Are these sites any good? In my limited experience with them, if you have a lot of images which cover a lot of topics, then yes these sites could provide you with an income to get a new lens once a year or so.  For me,  I like that my images are technically good enough (the right size, number of pixels and not blurry) to get listed and that when I search on the sites for the locations or topics of the photos I’ve taken that I don’t see many that are the same as mine.  This, for me, is the best bit.  I don’t want to be taking the same photos as everyone else, I’m unique and I’d hope that some of that rubs off on my photos.  Everyone is different and everyone likes different things, so if one other person sees what I’ve done and likes it then that’s great, but at the same time, as long I’m enjoying the process and the results, then I’m happy.