You Can Sell Photographs To Stock Sites If You Want To Earn Extra Cash!

Stock photography is one of the most profitable types of photography there is, and not only can you do it with a compact camera (if you need to), but if you put in the time and effort you may be able to retire sooner than you hoped. A stock photography website is like a giant catalogue of photographs that can be used for a small fee by anyone that needs them, thereby giving you the perfect vehicle to sell photographs.

For example, let's say I need a picture of a person playing chess for a poster. I know I can go to a stock photography website and find a picture like that, and for a reasonable fee I can buy the rights to use that picture. Those stock photography websites do not take the photographs themselves as there are simply too many photos needed. What they do is let photographers upload pictures to their site, and when someone buys the rights to that image, the photographer is paid the bulk of the money.

Stock photography is everywhere you look - although you may not have realised, or even thought about it. When you're out shopping and see display pictures in the windows, these are primarily stock images. Someone may hand you a flyer for a latest business venture. Images on the brochure will most likely have come from stock photographs. MSN or Yahoo news pictures are nearly always stock images used to complement their stories.

For example, a story about the credit crunch (yawn - not the recession again!) may use a close-up picture of a financial newspaper with a BlackBerry and expensive fountain pen on it - this will inevitably have been acquired from a stock photography site. And when people design websites on any subject you can imagine, they will invariably visit stock sites for their images - and you could sell photographs that people need.

Why not just copy and paste images to your website - i.e. why do people bother to buy them? Well, someone setting up a website is usually hoping for their site to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of world-wide users. For the sake of a few dollars spent obtaining rights to use an image, it's really not worth taking the risk of being sued for using photographs without permission.

Now when you consider how big the Internet is, and that all of those websites are looking for pictures to use, you start to appreciate just how big the demand is. Provided you can supply a constant stream of things that someone somewhere needs, you can make a great living doing this.

The photographs generally need to be 10 megapixels minimum because many use the stock photographs for posters etc. and as such the quality needs to be great even when the photos have been blown up to A3 size or larger.

This should not be a problem, as all modern cameras are in the higher megapixels bracket these days, regardless of whether they are Digital SLR or compact. Provided you are willing to take a few pictures a day and upload them, you really can sell photographs to generate additional income.


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You can learn how to sell photographs, by following my step by step guide that shows you how to make a fantastic second income from your photography. Discover how to do this without the need for pro equipment or pro skills. Check out http://www.howtosellphotographs.org for full details.