I have some photos in the stock photography world. It's quite easy to get into, see below for a quick guide on what you should consider before you get into stock photography.
Stock Sites
For photographers and for photo buyers, you can sign up to the sites that I have, by clicking the following links:
Mini Stock Photography Guide
My mini guide on Stock Photography before you get going:
- Have a look at all the stock sites listed above or use the search boxes above to see what kind of photo makes a stock photo. You may already have taken a stock photo and not realised it! You don't have to go out specially to take a stock photo, nor set up professional shoots to be a stock photographer.
- For copyright reasons, a lot of these sites will request you upload a scan of your passport or driving license for identification. Don't be scared by this, I was to start with, but from my experience, it's all very normal.
- Before you can start to make money off your photos, you have to be approved by many of these sites. Just sign up, then find an upload images link, and the different approval processes will be explained.
- On the same point, a lot of these stock sites have 'tutorials' and 'tests' before you can sign up. Take heed of all the advice given if you want to make some money. The best one I found was from iStockPhoto.
- Be patient! Keywording, titling and describing your work can take time and get tedious, stick at it. Also, it can take time for your photos to be approved and indexed on the websites.
Now a bit more advice on the major things to consider in stock photography.
Noise
The biggest thing I have noticed with all of these stock sites is that if you have any kind of noise in your photo what so ever, it will be rejected. This can include artifacting and other such things. Make sure you shoot in as low an ISO as possible and shoot in RAW if you can so that if you ever want to improve a photo, you do it introducing as little noise as possible. For more info, read this.
Keyword
Another of the key (pun intended) things about stock photography is keywording. It is really important to choose your keywords carefully, so your image is found in a search. However, it is a bad idea to keyword 'spam', as this will cause annoyance to photo buyers when your image keeps coming up in a search where it doesn't belong, and it is also actively discouraged on all stock photo sites. For more info, read this.
File > File Info
Make life easy for yourself! If you are going to submit the same image to multiple sites, wouldn't it be easier to title, describe and keyword that one file once, instead of many times? Make sure you use something like Photoshop's File > File Info tool to enter the appropriate information in for your file. When you upload your image to a stock site, it will then find all the info automatically and all you have to do is choose the category your image fits in. For more info, read this.