Simple Tips For Microstock Photography Or How to Blag Your Way To Your First Microstock Sales - Part 1

There is money to be made selling photographs over the Internet through Microstock Agencies.

How much depends on:

1. How good your eye for a saleable stock image is.
2. How many individual images that you have the time to submit.
3. How good a photographer you are.
   

All of the above come with experience and if you are already producing top selling images then this article is not for you. To be honest if you are consistently getting your images accepted and have modest sales, you probably do not need this article either.

If however, you are just starting out and would like a few tips to enhance your chances of getting your images accepted and sold, read on. But please do not expect an explanation of F-stops and ISO ranges, this is a blaggers guide and while you do need to know about that stuff (if you are keen on photography you probably already do) my intention here is to assist with your success in Microstock not your overall skill as a photographer (believe it or not the two are not necessarily the same).

Obviously the Stock Agencies and more importantly, the Stock Buyers, are not interested in the same sort of photographs that you would normally take as a record of your life. A photograph of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with your significant other/traveling companion/random stranger; pretending to push it back into alignment, might bring back hilarious memories of a trip to Italy, but that does not make for a good stock image (and it would also need a signed model release).
Conversely an artfully shot image of a bird in flight; part blurred, part in focus, might be very difficult to achieve and have great aesthetic value, but it would probably be rejected by the Agency's Inspector with the dreaded 'LVC' acronym (Low Commercial Value)

Keep looking at what sells on the Agency Websites and try and emulate the best seller in the categories that you are interested in.

A general rule of thumb is that a photograph taken for Stock needs to be just that; a photograph taken for Stock and not a snapshot that might or might not work or a piece of high art.

At the most basic level you need to consider the target and get everything in shot. It might seem a bit obvious; but you can always crop stuff out afterwards, but you cannot add things in that you missed.

After getting your target in focus, light is probably the most important thing that you should think about. Agency inspectors do not like shadows.
This might seem a bit unreasonable as all light casts shadows, but that is just the way it is. A lot of contrast between light and dark areas in a photograph, is likely to get your image rejected. Given the right software it is possible to process some of the problems away, but it is always worth looking at a potential shot first and avoiding shadow where possible.

If you dip into the contributor forums on the Agency websites (and I recommend that you do, because you will get a lot of very good advice from actual photographers,not just blagging tips such as I am imparting here). Anyway, if you do, you will often see people being quite irate that after they have taken the care to produce a photograph that they feel proud of, someone will say:
"You must have a good camera to have taken that."
The good photographer will at this point shout:
"It's not about how good the camera is, it about how good the photographer is!"

Well, yes that is true, but perhaps I should say this quietly;

A good camera can make a very big difference to an inexperienced Stock Photographer.

Regardless of the camera quality it must be able to take at least a 4 MegaPixel photograph, as this is the average minimum image size accepted by the various Agencies and as I am sure you can imagine size does matter. The bigger image capability of the camera the more scope for down size cropping and sharpening. (Subjects that will be dealt with in Part 2 and 3)

This is especially so with respect to the amount of light available. In less than perfect conditions, the poorer the camera the more likely it is to produce graining and digital artifacts (another topic for Part 2) As I said, I am not going to get in to ISO levels and camera settings, but generally the better your lens and camera the better the results. An SLR will almost always beat a fixed lens compact, and an expensive SLR by one of the big names is likely to be better than a cheap unknown.

Aways remember that, while I am certainly not advocating that you over expose, when considering the conditions of a shoot; it is easier to cope with the effects of a lot of light than with too little.

There are a growing number of things that are considered copyright and therefore not acceptable unless accompanied by a signed release form. All of the Agencies have their own rules for what they will accept without a release, but two things are always rejected; people and logos.

The best way to avoid unwanted people is to shoot a location at unpopular times, get up early, often the light is better then anyway. Otherwise always consider that if you have a recognisable person in your shot (even from behind people are recognisable) it will be rejected unless accompanied by a release form.

It should be fairly obvious when you are framing a shot if it contains people, but logos are not always that easy to spot. A logo is anything that might be copyrighted, but it is also any text that advertises or names a business or even an owned object.
For instance; if you take a photograph of a marina, try and keep the names of the boats out of shot. In this case, if there are any name boards visible; to get the image accepted, you will have to use software to blur or clone them into an unreadable mess of pixels and unless you are quite good at photo editing this in itself might cause the image to be rejected.

Logos can be so integral to an object that it is not worth taking as a stock image. While on holiday I took a particularily good photograph (although I say this myself and I am not about to post it here so that you can disagree) of a pair of bicycles propped up against a wall in the sun. This is a perennial favourite with stock buyers for all sorts of reasons; positive connotations of both exercise and resting at the same time, suggesting a relaxing vacation etc. However these were modern bikes and had the makers logo and model name all over them in fancy writing. The image was rejected and it would have been impossible to clone out the Logo's with out effectively repainting the bikes.(It was after this that I realised why most stock images of bicycles were of old decrepit vintage models with baskets on the front.)

Part 2 will concentrate how to spot an image that is likely to be rejected and Part 3 will give some advise on strategies for correcting these problems in software.