Selling photos online... official MoneySavingExpert.com discussion

There is no legal process of copyrighting, if you take a photo, you own the copyright straight away.

My OH takes good photos, currently only of family related subjects, but I feel sure that he is good enough to make some money out of his hobby.
He is becoming a dab hand at photoshop too.

What can I say to persaude him to have a go?
What sort of images should he take (DDs birthday shots aren't going to sell, obviously)?
Where would be the best place to start?

full-time-mum wrote: »

What can I say to persuade him to have a go?
What sort of images should he take (DDs birthday shots aren't going to sell, obviously)?

Just ask him to imagine the buzz the first time someone gives you some money for something you've produced.:D

As to what sort of images to take, - if you're doing it for fun/pin money, then whatever sort you enjoy doing. I would never touch wedding photography, for instance, as it's too stressful. Give me some nice quiet countryside any day.:j

Colin.

Hi all,

Just to add my thoughts, I think stock photo could be good to get started. To me it's a certain type of photo you put on those sites. If you think you have a really good pic, though, don't put it on stock. Try and get some decent money from it via places such as this site:

http://www.photographersdirect.com/
http://www.britishimages.co.uk/

But could the amount you make be comparable if you uploaded and sold 100s or even 1000s of photos cheap on a stock image site to if you uploaded and sold a handful of photos at higher prices on a site such as Photographers Direct? I don't know. I still think it's down to the type/quality of the photo. One thing to note is that if you upload your photo to one site you can't upload to another site, so pick your site carefully. I can't say any more but once I've tried stock images/etc. I'll post back with my findings. But for a quick description on some stock sites have a look at this page:

http://www.flickr.com/people/eugy/

As for copyright, have a look at the following site which might help:

http://creativecommons.org/

Every photo I upload has a Creative Commons mark and you can select the type, whether it be All Rights Reserved or if you allow your images to be shared, to be used commercially, etc. It's a open standard and many sites use it.

You could also do the old trick of putting your photos onto CD/DVD (or prints) and posted it to yourself and not opening it. If there is any dispute then you can use this posted version of your photos in court/at solicitors. This goes for anything I believe, so you could copy the contents of your web site onto CD and post it to yourself.

Also, you might want to consider watermarking your images, for example if you upload your images to deviantART at http://www.deviantart.com they let you add a Da watermark automatically. I don't particularly like watermarks as they ruin the photo (at least the one other people see) but certainly helps protect your photos online. Copyright is very hard to protect though. On Flickr alone (http://www.flickr.com) there have been many cases of people and companies using other people's photographs to make profit and/or use in an inappropriate way. Several of made the BBC news and has tended to lead to legal action.

As for making money from your photos, well I've been asking this on other forums, such as Digital Camera Magazine's at http://www.dcmag.co.uk/. People have said yes you can make money from stock image sites but not enough to live on. Other suggestions: promote your photos, such as on photo-sharing sites and link back to your photo site that sells prints, etc. I've uploaded thousands of my photos to photo-sharing sites (mainly Flickr) and have had many people use my photos for blogs, news articles (NowPublic.com for example), etc. Plus I've had priceless.com (Mastercard) pay me for 3 of my London Eye photos for 2 years, a French publisher is trying to get a booklet of my London pics that he has "miniaturises" to be publish and a design agency is paying me for one of my Wimbledon 2007 photos. None of these photos were taken with selling them in mind - basically they are 'snaps' or holiday pics and all I did was upload them to Flickr, add a few tags and add them to a few groups. On photo-sharing sites and the like tags are very important. If you add tags it allows them to be found via searches. No tags mean they won't be found and thus less people seeing them.

Basically start by promoting your photos and getting them seen by as many people as possible. The best photo-sharing site is Flickr but the most visited by far is photobucket.com at http://www.photobucket.com/ (though is very poor quality compared to Flickr). These and other such sites are free (though can be limited to how much you can upload) and easy to use. Perhaps create your own site too. Mine was made from a 'photoblog' service:

http://www.pixelpost.org/

Yeah it's handy to have a bit of computer knowledge when using such services but they make setting up your photoblog as easy as possible and have user-friendly instructions to guide your not too computer-savvy. I also have a blog which I'm going to use to document my progress from happy snapper to photographer (well hopefully) but you could use a blog to promote your own photos. There are many blogs out there but the one I used that gave me the most flexibility was Serendipity at:

http://www.s9y.org/

Very similar to Pixelpost and once either are set-up it's dead easy to blog and upload photos plus it's all free! So whenever I upload a photo to my blog I can select from a list of 'announcement sites' where my post will be re-posted to. This means that a picture you blogged on your site will be posted to other generic blog sites and thus lots more people see the picture and will visit your site. From Doing this my blog now gets about 15,000 hits a month but the trick is to turn this visits into money and that is something I'm still planning.

In regards to prints, if you want an idea for prices try this site:

http://www.londonfreelance.org/feesguide/photo.html

It lists prices for different types and sizes of photos and for different lengths of time. Very handy for a starting point. For selling prints, DeviantArt and Photobox (at http://www.photobox.com) might be good places to start. Basically you register, add a few details about yourself (and thus have your own page) and then upload photos where you select what type of items you want to sell. The prices are selected automatically but you can change them if you wish. I've personally not sold a thing from this so (perhaps don't expect the World) but then I feel my photos are not good quality atm.

Other things to try us entering competitions, perhaps you want get money but you might get a bit of promotion which might lead to money. Networking is good for anything and it's no different for photography. Perhaps joining groups online and off and clubs might lead you to people who could help promote your photography. And as mentioned before get your photos at some local markets, local papers and local shops and go from there.

Sorry, long message and perhaps not written well. Get back to me if I can help any further but I'm no expert?

KrazyK

As a quick addition to me previous comments, have a look at this blog:

http://blogs.photopreneur.com/

It's mainly aimed at telling people how to many money and promote your photography.

Krazy K