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Becoming a professional photographer opens you up to a whole array of different avenues towards earning a living and making some serious dough. Not only can you sell your services as a photographer, but you can also sell your images on the internet to a whole bunch of different stock image companies; knowing how to submit stock photography can be somewhat confusing, even for the seasoned pro-photographer, see below for three of the most popular stock image companies:
Each of these offer a very detailed and somewhat confusing image submission guideline, some offer advice on how to submit stock photography, others don’t. Nevertheless, there are many to be found on the internet, each offering their own unique services and set of guidelines for submissions.
Getting it right
The director of Getty images said in an interview recently;
“We get thousands upon thousands of photographers going through our online submission process every week, most don’t know how to submit stock photography sites. Less than 5% of these photographers get picked. Not reading the guidelines correctly is the main factor for this”
Getty and all of the other image houses ask for relatively the same elements and just as what explained above, many excellent photographers get turned away because they didn’t follow the guidelines to the letter.
Below I have listed a step by step guide on how to prepare your images for stock submission. Each website and company will have very particular guidelines that you MUST follow when submitting your work. Otherwise you’re going to find it rather frustrating when each and every one of the stock companies that you approach keep turning you away.
Step 1 – Make a list
To begin with, have a look at your photographs that you’ve prepared to submit to stock and assess each of them with the company’s guidelines and see which ones work and are best to submit.
Then write down a list of each company that you want to target, print off their guidelines and have a good read through them.
Top Tip: make sure that you understand their submission process.
Step 2 – One at a time
Pick the company at the top of the list and begin their submission process. What you don’t want to do is submit to a whole array of them all at once, as it’s better to do one at a time, that way you don’t lose where you are and can move onto the next one as and when you’re ready.
If you do it this way you have a far greater chance of being accepted as it enables you to take your time with each individual process.
Step 3 – Shoot RAW
Shooting in RAW and having your images saved as raw files, is the best way to submit as so many of these companies ask for their images to be submitted at a very large size, simply make sure that you read the guidelines, as if just one of the photographs is even slightly out they won’t accept your application.
Step 4 – Take heed of the absolute blacks and brilliant whites rule
Almost every one of the companies will ask for non-total blacks in shadows and non-total whites in highlights, so make sure that in post processing that you tone down/up each of the extreme dark or extreme white areas.
In some cases you may notice that your image is unable to adjust the highlight or shadow due to incorrect exposure. DO NOT submit this image as they won’t accept any of yours despite how good particular photograph is.
Step 5 – Lower expectations
If you manage to get accepted, it may take a while until the money starts to flow in. this is to be expected, many of my photography friends sell on stock sites and do very well from them, however if you have a particular style that you love, try to avoid using them as photography is all about creativity and having that creativity celebrated, if you just want to make money from your images you may have to sacrifice the creativity, Which personally I think is a real shame.
Be true to your style
As I mentioned above, in order to make money you will have to change your style of photography, unless of course you enjoy taking photographs of USB sticks, pencils and people hanging up clothes then fine, stock submission is clearly for you.
There are however, a number of agencies that lesser known that hunt for highly creative images. These are harder to find on the internet.
Top Tip: Go to a book store and have a look at each cover, on those covers you’ll find various interesting photographs all of which have been brought from a creative stock photography agency.
If this is what you want, then contact them! Avoid the generic unimaginative ones! Besides, this will also give your images a far larger platform, gaining access to a large audience, and giving you the photographer, some rather awesome kudos in the process!
