The five chapters in your adventure:
1. an introduction to stock photography
2. taking the photos
3. nitty-gritty editing
4. how to pitch a model release
5. building effective keywords
— 1: an introduction to stock photography —Stock photography is not art photography. If you’re looking to express your creative spirit while making a comfortable living, this is not the place for you. You can do the latter with work, but not the former, because stock images are boring as salt.
Curiously, the best stock photos are interesting. Crafting a photo that is not boring yet appeals to advertisers is a lot harder than creating a whole bunch of boring photos and making it on volume. I don’t know how to do the interesting, successful ones, but they usually involve people shaking hands or flying kites at the beach. In this article, I’ll be introducing you to the technical details that will help you to create boring stock photos. Then you can move up to better ones later. If you don’t learn these basics, your great ones will look slightly imperfect and won’t sell (read: won’t be accepted by your microstock agency), which we can’t have.
Most people elbowing their way into the stock world start with the microstock networks, because they’re the only shot for an average Joe to make any sort of money. Ones like iStockphoto, Shutterstock, fotolia, and Big Stock Photo. These websites let up upload your photos, which they then sell to their customers, taking much of the profits but giving you a commission (something like twenty-five cents per sale). They’ll only take stuff they think will sell, and only if the image is “perfect”: grain-free and plastic looking, six or more megapixels, no artifacts (if you have a cheap camera, this is …
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I wrote this for a fellow photographer and photo-blogger named Nokao, since he asked what plugins I’m using for this site. As you may know, Brilliant Photography is powered by Wordpress: Wordpress MU to be specific, since I’m in the same database as the Thripp.com network with many other bloggers. I’ve been able to leverage all the great plugins people have created; I haven’t had to do any original coding yet.
You can look up any of these plugins in the Wordpress repository:
Alakhnor’s Post Thumb Revisited creates the thumbnails for all the images, the JavaScript pop-up effects (Highslide), and the gallery pages (PHP code calling the plugin). I just post photos as normal Wordpress posts (just an img src HTML code), and it does the rest. I use it for the random photos in the header and the random stock photo in the sidebar. You can have it just show thumbnails from a particular category, which is what I do.
The category feeds are included in Wordpress, but not linked anywhere. You can see them on your site; just add “/feed” to the end of a category’s URI. You can link to these in your template if you want. For the RSS feeds and email newsletters, I outsource to FeedBurner.com, but there are Wordpress plugins too (I’d prefer to keep the load off my server).
I use Exec-PHP to put Post Thumb’s PHP code in pages and posts, and Text Control to keep Wordpress’ filtering from putting line breaks between thumbnails on gallery pages, by setting it to “No Formatting.” On those posts and pages, I just add HTML myself (paragraph and line break tags).
I use WP-Sticky to keep an introductory post at the top of the home page.
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