In the past six hours, I’ve released 53 of my photos as royalty-free stock. Check out the stock gallery to see them all. This means that every photo I’ve published is free for anyone to use. Quite a milestone, I must admit.

All the photos in the portfolio (about page 2 of the stock gallery at the moment) have source images now. I’ve linked to them in each post. So you can get right to the source of things, be it a JPEG (stuff with my older cameras) or .cr2 RAW (from my Canon Rebel XTi). This is great for digital artists. I can’t think of anyone who is doing what I do: putting countless hours into crafting beautiful and artistic photos (hopefully), and then releasing both the edited and original versions for free to all. Even if you just want to see what kinds of files the cameras I use produce, it’s a great resource.

Anyway, I didn’t post source images for the 53 photos I just posted… because my FTP client keeps timing out on the uploads. Maybe it’s SYN Hosting’s fault; I’m not sure. But I’ll come back to that. The source files should roll in at about 400MB, because RAW files are big. Update: I uploaded them overnight and added links to each post. Every stock photo that’s edited has a source image now!

I’ve already noticed that traffic, particularly bandwidth usage, has spiked. Check out these stats:

That’s how much bandwidth Thripp.com has been using in megabytes per day over the past week. That’s a tenfold increase on the 15th compared to the 14th. Granted, this isn’t drilled down to this particular blog, but I’ve been the most visited one on the Thripp.com network as of late, so it’s safe …

... continue reading

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

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 …

... continue reading