The image count on my digital has just gone round the clock, meaning I have snapped over 10,000 images since 2008. 10,000! Imagine the cost of processing 10,000 film images - that's 277 36exp rolls of Kodak's finest and assuming £4.50 per roll and 5.99 for developing, thats a grand total of £2905.73 compared to the cost of my kit, approx £1300 worth. Hmm, I think I can justify a Canon EOS 5D MkII now ;)
Anyhow, I digress. I must confess, I did look at stock about 18 months ago but didn't follow up the initial application on iStockPhoto. This time round though, I did a little more research and found microstockgroup.com, a community of photo contributors and buyers of microstock.
My research showed that while i is possible to make money from microstock, don't expect to get all of your images accepted first time every time, not every image sells and to get any kind of decent return, assuming you have saleable images, you need to have a substantial collection.
Undaunted by this, I ploughed on and joined Dreamstime. Why? Simple, they came top of my search results everytime, so I figured I wouldn't be doing myself a disservice - besides they are one of the top microstock agencies. I also submitted to Alamy.
Of the four initial images, only one passed, but as they were uploaded in batch, the batch failed, so no images on Alamy. See if you can tell which one did not get rejected...
#1...
#2
#3
#4
So which one? Well, if you guessed #1 then you're wrong, it was actually #2.
#4
So which one? Well, if you guessed #1 then you're wrong, it was actually #2.
I have submitted a further four images, using their rejection reasons as a guide, and when they decide that they are good or bad, I will post them here for you to judge for yourself.
Undeterred, I submitted a larger batch to both Dreamstime and Fotolia which had about 50% success rate. Seeing what they refused and why has been an excellent guide as to what I should submit in the future. Although they both refused the same sunset, they both accepted another sunset called Cooling Iron which you can find on my flickr photostream http://flic.kr/p/7zJH8Q; at Dreamstime http://www.dreamstime.com/-rimage15242202-resi2491495 and Fotolia http://www.fotolia.com/id/24501239
