How to Break into Stock Photography

The five chapters in your adventure:

1. an introduction to stock photography [1]
2. taking the photos [2]
3. nitty-gritty editing [3]
4. how to pitch a model release [4]
5. building effective keywords [5]

iStockphoto [6], Shutterstock [7], fotolia [8], and Big Stock Photo [9]. 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 impossible), and other requirements. If you’ve tried going out on your own, you know how hard it is to get viewers, let alone customers (I have enough trouble giving my photos way [10]), but you’ll get guaranteed traffic at these sites, just as you’ll get more visitors to your MySpace page than to your Geocities page (sorry for the outdated examples).

In microstock, you have to make it on volume, because you’re giving non-exclusive, royalty-free rights cheaply. The good thing is you have the potential to build a passive income, if people continue to buy your photos after you’ve posted them. If you’re fairly good, you can expect to make a few dollars a year per photo, which will snowball with your tireless work and hundreds of contributions.

top fifty at Shutterstock [11], and you’ll see flower compositions like this [12], which will no doubt be dropped right in to advertisements or presentations. I don’t imagine any users will be whiting out the background or warping the perspective on one of the flowers. It also violates the rules by having an artistic rather than practical title, but images sometimes are the most salable. It’s hit and miss to figure out, so start off with the boring stuff and work your way up.

For normal stock images, you want your subject to be sharply in focus with a small aperture, on a solid white or black background, with studio lighting, and with loose cropping. Go rent a studio, or set up a white sheet, a white table, and some spotlights in your bedroom. Then, start taking uncreative yet useful pictures of generic objects like fruits (nice fruits), unidentifiable candies (turn those Skittles upside-down), staplers, thumbtacks, and other colorful objects. Make sure every step along the way you’re using the lowest ISO speed, a high F number (you’ll need bright lights), focusing on your subjects sharply, and leaving enough space around them for your users to crop or add text.

Soon, you can move up to more unusual objects. Then, go out into the world and take uniquely beautiful nature shots. If you have an unusual job, like working in a steel mill, or on a farm, or at the top of the Empire State building, you have an even better place to take valuable stock photos from, because you have a different angle to work with from the start. Stock photography does have a certain creative edge to it, of finding the most valuable image for your customers. Watch for scenes that represent concepts, like solitude [13], inspiration [14], or bravery [15], because if they hit, they’ll be your greatest photos ever.

this [16] as a stock image, for example, but the edited version of Simplicity [17] could make money (if it wasn’t free).

You have to do a darn good job at editing, though. I like Noiseware [18] for noise removal; there’s a free version way down at the bottom here [19], which is still pretty good. You should do your noise removal first, as when you add contrast, the noise gets amplified, and it won’t remove smoothly after a lot of editing. I like to edit destructively, so my workflow is cloning and spot removal -> save a copy -> convert to 16-bit PhotoRGB -> noise removal -> curves and contrast improvements -> save another copy -> save a separate 8-bit JPEG. This means I need to estimate how aggressive I should be with noise removal, before adding the finishing touches. I do this intuitively from years of experience. You can use trial and error till you get it, or figure out how to use masks or layers or whatever the young ones do nowadays.

16-bit PhotoRGB is great because you’ll avoid rounding errors that cause color banding. It takes up lots of space, though. Expect to use 75MB with your two copies of each photo. It doesn’t matter though, because if you take 20,000 photos in a year, you’ll only be doing this for the 500 best ones, and that’s 38GB, which is cheaper than ever to store.

Back to the editing. You need to remove specks of dirt from your roses, or acne and blemishes from your models, or the black specks you know to be birds in your skies, even if you’re fundamentally against it. I do this on all my work, because my goal as a photographer is to present a realistic ideal of the world. This means my photos (should) look perfect, but believably so. You must do the same with your stock work. Use Photoshop’s spot healing brush for blemishes and dirt, but look closely so you’re doing a good job. Zoom in to 400% if you have to. Hit Ctrl + Shift + Z and try again if it turns out ugly, which it often will. If that fails, switch to the clone stamp to copy one part of the image to another. This is more tricky, but you can get it right with practice, by picking an area of similar shape and brightness, Alt + clicking, and then clicking over the bad part. After two years and 1000 photos, this’ll be second nature and you’ll be getting through a photo with hundreds of specks in fifteen minutes flat, and making it look believable.

After you get done in this stage, use the levels tool (Ctrl + L) to brighten and darken the image a lot. You can undo it right afterward. If you’ve done your job well, nothing will look suspicious. But in the beginning, you’ll get bad results all the time. Here’s an example. Say the floating antenna is all the rage now, so you dutifully use your spot healing brush to produce this:

[20]

It looks fine, right? You might not even zoom in past 25%, because you’re working on a huge ten megapixel file. Then you add your wonderful contrast, and something seems astray. You might chock it up to your imagination and post your photo anyway, but little did you know the problems you’d created:

Obviously, I skipped noise reduction here for effect. But nevertheless, this is what will happen if you don’t pay attention. Blue skies are tough to edit. Everyone who tells you you can reshape bodies and clear power lines out of skies easily has no idea what they’re talking about. It’s tough work, especially if you want to get it right.

So at this point, what do you do? Go back and try it again. For blue skies, use the cloning brush with a higher hardness setting; perhaps 90%. You can see the shortcomings of the healing brush right here; it makes everything into a blurry mess, not matching the surroundings. This image has been effectively ruined for stock use. In time, you’ll learn these limitations, and working around them will be a breeze. Even then, try to avoid spot-editing by getting it right in-camera. The floating antenna wasn’t such a hot idea after all.

Even if your image looks fine on your calibrated, CRT monitor [21], it might look awful on your customers’ overly bright, uncalibrated LCD monitor, because these defects will be revealed. This is the reason to use the levels tool to over and under-expose the image: you can quickly and easily check for the invisible problems you missed.

When you edit for contrast, do whatever it takes to make the image the most appealing to your customers. This will most likely involve contrast adjustments with Curves (Ctrl + M), perhaps with a reduction in saturation (Ctrl + U). If you’re editing in an RGB color space, curves pushes the color channels as far as luminosity, which is not ideal. I’ll often reduce the saturation by 30% before using curves to counter-act this. Activate your histogram (Window > Histogram), and watch all four windows (brightness and the RGB channels). If any of them trail off to the right, you need to scale back because that channel is clipping. When the color clips, there is no detail, because it’s as saturated as it can be. While it can be artsy, for stock work, you must avoid this. The histogram in Photoshop is just as important as the histogram in your camera.

Try Image > Adjustments > Auto Contrast too. It stretches the brightness histogram across the gamut automatically, and often works quite well. Do not be afraid of automatic tools. (We were afraid of autofocus, remember?)

I recommend against sharpening, because it adds too many artifacts. If you need to sharpen, you might not be dealing with such a good image to start with. If you want to submit it anyway, you may have more luck scaling it down from twelve megapixels to six, as you’ll be more likely to escape auditing. This is wrong, because you’re actually giving a lower quality image, but it’s how the review process works.

my best work [22] (I carry them with me). Then I say they’re worth $1.95 each; they would be if I didn’t give them away. This puts the compensation I provide above $10, which seems like a good place to be, and obviously the prints don’t cost me nearly that (nor does a copy of a music CD cost $20 to produce). Here’s an example [23] of a completed form.

Other than that, you’re good to go. Tell your model, jokingly, that she should read what she’s signing, because she’s signing all her rights away. Most people don’t even care. The 10% that raise a ruckus aren’t worth your time. I try to get a witness for signings, but if there’s none around I’ll just scribble down “N/A.” Then again, I’m not playing the stock game, so the big microstocks may not put up with that. Check with the stock agency you’re looking to work for. Many of them will provide their own model release forms for you to use, which are more convenient, though not personalized.

[24]

When I started out keywording my images on my deviantART gallery [25], the only thing I’d be able to think of for this photo is “water” and “fountain.” I’ve since given up keywording (so boring), but if you’re wanting to sell stock, it’s a necessary evil that you will become better at over a long, arduous journey. So what can I think of for this photo now?

water, fountain, wishing, well, wells, wish, droplets, drops, raindrops, raindrop, liquid, park, day, outdoors, splash, splashes, summer, fun, coquina, rock, rocks, pattern, texture, yellow, aqua, clean, clear, fresh, refresh, refreshing, refreshment, cool, cold, clarity, frozen, movement, fast, float, floating, speed, stream, streaming, light, bright, geyser, geiser, gush, gushing, spring, springs, burst, flow, life, wet, h2o, drink, taste, nature, shine, shiny, reflections, spatter, splatter, purity, pure

Yeah, that’s it, spam the heck out of them. Give them so many keywords, there’s no way your image won’t be seen by thousands of people, 1% of which will buy it. It’s the only way to do it.

If you’ve noticed, there is some stuff I left out. I could’ve used these:

tree, trees, forest, forests, sky, cloud, clouds, cloudy, sunshine, sun, bright, blue, skies, white, green, shade, dark, shady, grass, vivid

The reason to leave those keywords out is because they’re all describing background elements; the stuff that’s out-of-focus behind the fountain. It’s of no interest to searchers, because they can’t use the photo for those elements anyway (they’re blurry and obstructed). You never want to keyword like that, even if the off-topic stuff takes up a large section of the photo, because it’s irrelevant and of no use to your customers. Recognizing this and developing keywords, like all things in stock photography, takes time and practice. You can even pay $3 an image [26] to have a person assign photos to your keywords (I also offer this service upon special request ). However, the point of breaking into stock photography is to make money, not to waste money, so you need to do your keywords yourself, because it’s a skill that will serve you well; I’m using them even in the tags for this blog post (editing, guides, metadata, model releases, passive income, photoshop, stock photography).

Stock photography is hard work like all else, but if you enjoy it, I can see it becoming painless and rewarding. Plus, it’s nice not to have a traditional job for once. Have fun out there.