Digital photography enjoys a brilliant synergy with PCs and the web. Millions of us enjoy uploading pictures to photo sites such as Flickr, or sharing images with friends on Facebook and Twitter.
That's not all you can do, though – with a little extra work, you could be earning cash with your camera taking stock photographs and selling them online.
There are two markets in stock photography. At the high end are images produced by professionals. These include shots of news events, celebrities and difficult setups. Usage rights for these sell for hundreds.
Your entry point is through microstock – where royalty-free images are licensed for commercial use at very low prices, from which you take a percentage cut.
Like many other online enterprises, this is a volume business, with pennies per sale rather than pounds. The key is to create popular images that lots of people will want to use.
Handily, several microstock sites publish guidelines revealing exactly what kinds of image they're after and what they don't want. iStockPhoto for example, reveals that seasonal themes and corporate imagery are big sellers, while shots of fruit on white backgrounds are passé.
However, the main requirement is that your shots should be well composed, at a sufficiently high resolution, well lit and in focus. Basic photography skills will serve you well here.
Other potential markets include Shutterpoint. This is a community-orientated stock repository, with a 'stack 'em high, sell it low' ethos that works well if you can produce popular images that will sell in volume.
Another particularly good bet is Shutterstock, a more formal and established presence that enables you to make up to $30 for each image sold – and images can be sold for use multiple times.
If you'd rather go straight for the higher end of the market, you can sell your photography direct to users from your own site. PhotoShelter offers a set of tools that enable you to do so, taking care of digital photo storage and payment systems, while you have control over what you sell. The catch is a fixed fee, from $9.99 a month.
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