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 I have been thinking of joining a stock agency and am trying to shoot more photos accordingly. If any of you have experience in this area and have any suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. Posted by Gaja at June 8, 2005 10:24 PM © All images are copyrighted. Please contact me for permission or licensing. Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsNice shot! Posted by: Oscense at June 27, 2005 6:39 PM Very beautiful! I really like the reflections! Posted by: Marina at June 25, 2005 8:15 AM That's beautiful, I love your work. Posted by: pierre at June 15, 2005 3:20 PM I like the way the photo is almost monochromatic, except for the golden mouthpiece, and the music looks like is coming out from it. Posted by: Massimo at June 11, 2005 1:27 PM I too have been thinking about this lately, but as a newspaper and magazine photographer I have a bit of a different look at this I guess. The problem with stock agencies is that they tend to buy all rights for pathetic amounts of money. They may pay you 20 cents and buy all rights whereas a magazine might pay as much as $2000 for the same shot. And once you have sold all rights, the photo is no longer yours. You can never sell it again. Ever. You won't know where it was used and you won't make any further money from it. Two sites that may interest you are: http://www.editorialphoto.com/ and http://www.photosource.com/index.php. Especially the last one, which is specifically for stock photographers, etc. You may also glean some useful information from Ron Engh's book, Sell and Re-Sell Your Photos. I strongly urge you to retain rights to whatever you sell as it will pay off more handsomely in the long run. Your work appears to be quite good. You can do better than the measly sums some of these places pay. If you can build up to a library of 2500 to 5000 images, you might approach some of the bigger stock houses. You can find them in the 2005 Photographer's Market available at Amazon. Good luck. I would be interested in any information you think sounds good as I am still somewhat tempted by this myself, even after that cautionary tale :-) Posted by: picturegrl at June 9, 2005 8:00 PM I tried, I submitted, half of them were rejected because they 'had enough of that subject' even though most of the ones they had of the subject were far worse than mine (as in some of them were literally 35mm snapshots).. the ones that got accepted don't earn you all that much money. Depends whether you want to whore you photos away at the end of the day for pitiful amounts. Conversley I know a girl who works full time for a stock agency and she loves it, but theres a huge difference between shooting stock in your free time (shutterstock, istock, corbis, allamy) and shooting stock as part of an agency fulltime. Its up to you at the end of the day but never sell your best photos for $0.20 when you could be making $150 from selling a large print. Good luck with it, check this out: http://amateurphotomoney.blogspot.com/ Posted by: luke at June 9, 2005 2:28 PM Your recent black & white work is quite striking! In regards to stock photos...a good place to try out your images to see if they sell is iStockphotos.com (http://www.istockphoto.com). You can upload them and make a very small profit for every download. Posted by: Diane Varner at June 9, 2005 11:41 AM ~that slight bit of relfex in the flute is what caught my eye immediately...once again a fine shot~ Posted by: btezra at June 9, 2005 9:27 AM Beautiful shot. Nice composition. Posted by: Sean at June 9, 2005 8:23 AM Good Idea, I'm working as a designer and usefull stock photos are: 1. good associations (e.g. "blow","flute" is not that good :-) , a violine would be better) 2. White background 3. Just hit one margin (sorry for my english) or display complete. Imagine: you have to display a claim or a product on the photo. That's it. Good luck. Posted by: Martin at June 9, 2005 6:53 AM I can only comment on the picture..... I like it. You gave me an idea and I will try to make this kind of shots soon.... thanks for that. Posted by: Chantal at June 9, 2005 5:38 AM Post a comment |