To become a stock photographer you need to be capable of producing a continuous flow of salable pictures of professional quality. It isn’t enough that you have taken 10 photos you regard as saleable and of professional quality.

When you start to engage in stock photography you need to have hundreds of really good pictures – as good as the ones you see published in magazines of many kinds. In fact you will need thousands of saleable photos to do well in stock photography – but all coming stock photographers have to start from somewhere – so don’t feel turned down by this statement.

The most important is that you are capable of shooting some kinds of photos that are of commercial use and of a competitive quality and creativity.

Saleable photos are the kind that can be used as an illustration for something. It can be very concrete things, but illustrations of conceptual character or moods are often doing better. Lifestyle stock photos are in high demand these years, too.

Each photo should be describable with a rather few labels or keywords to be found in a picture search engine that picks the photos from the picture database and display the results to customers.

Nowadays there exist a lot of smaller picture agencies and rather few really big agencies. In addition to the professional picture agencies you will find a growing number of so-called micro-stock agencies or micro-stock websites. These are offering photos for very small fees and most of the people who offer their photos through micro stock sites are amateur photographers, though some are very capable photographers.

How stock photography works

The mechanism in stock photography is to deliver your best and most salable photos to be stored in a picture database at a picture agency. You will keep your copyright to your pictures, but you commission the picture agency to give their customers the right to use the pictures after some specific conditions, including paying a fee to the picture agency.

A typical agreement between the photographer and the picture agency will imply that the photographer receives 50% of each ‘sold’ picture. A better wording would be ‘each rented picture ’ as the customer will only buy the full right to a picture in very seldom occasions.

In the stock photography world the payment to the picture agency and finally to the photographer is called the royalty. This is the classic model for use of stock photography.

Being accepted by a picture agency

Your first big challenge will be to be accepted by a stock photo agency. Some picture agencies are general picture agencies – covering all kinds of commercial valuable pictures. Other agencies are specialist agencies – from regional agencies, e.g. Antarctica, to highly specific agencies covering just one topic like car race, birds, wine or business.

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