Hey guys, welcome to my blog. In this blog I'm going to tell you how you can start your passive income even today by doing stock photography.
This is my top selling category from the last year, so you can see how much did I earn for this single category. Well, I know, it's not much, but I spent only few hours a month submitting images to stock agencies.
And the best part is, you put your work out there once, and as long as it stays on the servers of agencies, it will generate you income for a lifetime. Even if you decide to quit photography one day. Isn't that great? This blog is for those of you, guys, who are passionate about photography.
If you are like me that you're taking your camera with you everywhere, whether it's the there is a solid chance you already have a ton of great travel or lifestyle images, which are in great demand by stock agencies now days.
Those images silently resting on your hard drives can become your gold mine for starting passive income this year. During next few minutes I will take you through the process of becoming stock contributor, what gear and software do I recommend, and most importantly how much will you earn. S let's get into it.
[MUSIC] With stock photography it's like with any other investing. But instead of money you're giving your skills and time upfront. In return, you get paid royalties every time your media sells as long as it lives on the servers. So let's have a look at what do you need when you are first starting out.
We will review the entire process. First, you need a camera. This is the most obvious one. You can use everything you have by your hand. And the kit lens will be just fine. Even the older cameras will make you a great service when you're first starting out. However, I would not recommend to shoot stock photos on smartphones.
Despite today's smartphones have pretty good image quality, they are not suitable for this kind of use. Brand of the camera you will be using doesn’t play a role most of the time here. You can use your kit lens in the beginning, and when you're ready, you can upgrade to a prime lens. like for example this small and cheap Canon 50mm.
Prime lenses usually have better low light performance and shallower depth of field, which you can use to your creative advantage. However, the most important thing here is to know your gear and to set up it correctly. to have the correct exposure and framing right in camera.
This way you will be sure, you're not losing any resolution or details in post production. - It's good, when your camera can shoot RAW files. It's very helpful especially in those situations when you have for example that image of beautiful sunrise over Moroccan desert and it's a bit under exposed.
If this was JPG, probably the only destiny of this particular shot would be to end in trash. But when you have the editing power of RAW,you can tweak exposure and colors a little bit without loss of quality. Do you see that dramatic difference? - Now, let's move to the next important part of the stock photography work flow and that is software. You can use any software which is capable of editing camera RAW files.
But on top of this functionality, there's another thing to consider with stock photography in mind. And that is organizing features of the software and ability to write keywords and titles as meta data into the exported files. Such an all-in-one solution is for example Adobe Lightroom.
Let's say you're uploading to five agencies and each agency wants you to write the Title and keywords to each of your shots. This means that you have to enter the title of each photo five times and write let's say 40 keywords also five times. That makes 5 titles and 400 keywords for just one photo. In that moment, I would quit this Fortunately enough, there's also an easier way to do this! When you start utilizing Lightroom and meta data features to your advantage, you can save yourself from lot of headaches.
I wish I knew this when I first started out. - And we're getting close to the third and also very important commodity you are putting into the Stock Photography. And that is your time. So let's have a look at how much time does it take to put one image on sale: After you downloaded all images from your card to the computer, you need to select only the best sharp shots from your shoot.
You don’t want to include noisy or blurry images, because those will be rejected by agencies anyways. Second step is to edit those shots to make them look good without loss of quality. I'll show you the rest of the process on this particular image.let's start The editing process can be done in few simple steps if you are using Presets in Lightroom.
Third step is to add metadata to the images- and this is the most time consuming activity in the process. Each image needs to have very unique Title and should contain also unique and precisely chosen keywords. This is what is most important when it comes to sales - great image with garbage and misleading keywords will most probably not be selling.
When you put great keywords and descriptive title to your images you rapidly increase your discoverability. After this keywording procedure is finished,you need to export your photos and here we're getting to the final step - submit them to agencies. Each agency uses it's own front end. Most of the interfaces are user friendly and all you have to do there is just choose the right category of the photos.
For example this mountain goat belongs to Animals/Wildlife. So let's select that and click Submit. After the shot is approved, you can start earning. If you want to know more about keywording and captioning your images, please let me know in the comments below, maybe I'll make some kind of tutorial on this topic in the future.
Now, when you have the basic information about what do you need when you're first starting out, let's have a look at the agencies and earning rates. I personally contribute to these four photo agencies ata time, but you can choose any of them depending on your liking. - In my opinion, these four are the easiest to deal with and they have massive exposure around the world.
This means that by putting images into those databases, you are able to show your work to all those potential clients around the globe. And that's what you want. I sold my images to Karachi in Pakistan, Sevilla, Spain, Lyon, France, or Buenos Aires, Argentina. And these are just a few examples. - When you're first starting out, you need to apply individually for each agency you want to contribute to.
Usually, you create a profile on their site,send them a few images for review, and then you're waiting for approval. Just make sure to send them only the highest quality images which will be also representing your future portfolio. - Now let's see what you're all interested about the most.
The Royalties. Or how much you can earn. To understand the earnings, you have to first understand the basic scheme of how micro stock works. Stock agencies offer their customers multiple ways to buy the content. The most common around the globe are buyers who pay monthly subscription. Based on this subscription, they are able to download exact amount of images every month.
For you as a contributor that means the lowest price per image - from 0.15 USD 0.6 USD. Then there are On demand downloads which are priced higher depending on the resolution in which the customer buys your image. This can vary from 0.6 USD to about 6 USD per image depending on the agency. Another types are Standard and Enhanced licenses according to Shutterstock. Here you can make from 15 to 50 dollars per single image. Here you can see how complex is the pricing of images.
Every agency has its own rules. From these numbers it's clear that to achieve a solid income, you will need to have hundreds or thousands of images in your portfolio. However, this will not happen overnight. It's the long term process in which the consistent uploading is the key. When you upload more often, the agencies are more likely to show your work to more customers. The more you train, the more you'll learn And the faster you will become in submitting your work.
There is also another advantage of being stock contributor, it will also make you a better photographer. So you can answer to yourself whether it's it worth it or not. So this the end of the first part of this stock photography. If you stayed with me up to this point, than big thank you. In the second part, I will share with you which photos sells the best for me, for how much usually sells an image and what are my strategies in writing effective keywords.
If you liked this article. Your support is highly appreciated! Thanks for reading and have a great day! [MUSIC]
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