Trying The Stock Photography Route

When planning to sell your photography, stockphostography seems to offer a really good opportunity. After all you take good photographs and there must be people out there looking for your photograph. Warnings that its low paid and handwork are frequent but probably not well understood.

So I set up my first stock photo account at Shutterstock, but it was no walk in the park. I had to submit 10 different photos three times to meet their qualification criteria of 7 of 10 photos approved in one submission.

Screenshot of my first batch of images accepted by Shutterstock

Admittedly a bit of a "motley" bunch but I had to drop three classes of photos I had planned to use for technical reasons and there was no opportunity to experiment and discuss.

Having been accepted as a contributor submission is now more open and I hope to get some of the other photos in. There are a number of constraints on photos of people, buildings and trademarked things which limit the use of existing photographs. But we will see.

The user forum on Shutterstock discussed difficulties and complaints about the approval process and I must admit to feeling aggrieved at times. For example this image of hadeda ibises eating was rejected for "excessive noise, grain, artifacts and/or is poorly rasterized".

Two hadeda ibises searching for worms in a lawn in Brummeria in Pretoria
© 2013 Dave Harcourt.  All rights reserved

So follow what happens here if you are interested to hear how it goes and pick up on anything I learn. Of course I would appreciate hearing of your experience and getting you ideas.