Alternative title: Why you should try to sell your photos! So recently I have decided to try my hand at stock photography; to enter this venture I have chosen Shutterstock. I heard about it through a few fellow photographers, who had good fortune. There are alternatives out there (and no reason to pick just one!), but I will tell you about my experience to date and maybe a few tips & tricks on the approval process (at least what has worked for me!!).

The process. So you want to be a stock photographer. You might think to do so will hamper your creative freedom, and you might be partially correct. Things for sale need to have “commercial value.” This to a photographer (or least to me) sounds fairly arbitrary, but essentially you need to put yourself in the place of a graphic designer — find images that convey a message, show an object, describe an event, or really anything that you could picture in an ad. This turns out not to be as challenging as I initially thought, but what you do need to make sure is that your images are up to par.

First step: LOOK AT EVERYTHING AT 100%, PERIOD. I pixel-peep on every image I take, and strive to maximize image quality, to reduce noise, and to make things contrasty enough to catch someone’s eye. Think of trying to be able to produce the largest print you ever imagined…now treat your file that well. The photo reviewers pixel-peep also, so make sure your images have no noise, no sharpening artifacts, no sensor dust, or any other abnormalities (white balance errors, chromatic aberration, etc etc, they all matter)! Otherwise, standard things seem fine — I upload in an sRGB color space as JPEG at full quality (least compression). Tagging and categorizing your photos is the next challenge. If you use Flickr this is pretty easy; I mostly free-associate and type whatever comes to mind.

The initial approval process with Shutterstock requires 10 images to be submitted for approval — you need 7 of 10 to make it through. Choose your best, have releases signed if they include people (forms available), and one dirty trick I do is to size the image down slightly if they have a little noise (minimum requirements are 4MP, my images range from 8.2-16.7MP and give reasonable room to do this). I am very new to the process, but with high hopes and reasonable results to date. Here are a few samples of what has made it through.

So try your hand! Here is the Photographer’s link to Shutterstock. And here is Subscribers link to Shutterstock if you want to subscribe and shop (that is OK with me too). =]

Shooting. I think most everyone may have figured out how to achieve good results taking smoke photos before I did, but just in case here’s my setup. The most obvious observation is that you want to maximize contrast — I used a matte black background to aid definition. Next, you have to light your smoke, and this was really the only tricky part. I remotely triggered a flash at left, and had a reflector (tin foil) at right. There are many more complex ways to do this (light boxes, multiple strobes, etc), but this was quick and easy and it let me experiment within about 2 minutes. The thing you want to note is that you need to control flash coverage; I would recommend either a snoot, or to zoom your flash. Here’s another perspective to see the simplicity (*another note, also I think incense might be a bit easier than matches.. but I didn’t have any around the house).

More creative things to do. After you have your shot, you can invert the colors (i.e. black to white, as below, etc), add color, clone, twirl, or do a number of things to make your art. More examples here.

Well, there’s more to be done. Next I think is dry ice, more smoke, some props, and maybe to gel the flash. I had fun, though. =]

Better browsing; turn it on already! If you have been using Safari you already were in the know… but with the recent release of Mozilla Firefox v3 no one has any excuse not to see photos as they were intended to be seen.

Read more about it at Rob Galbraith’s site. He has an excellent description of how to enable.

As seen on Strobist, Apple is touring the nation and teaching photographers how to better organize work-flow, automate, edit, and print images (i.e. predict image output) using OS X… and it’s free. Awesome! Read more about it from Apple.

Apple, will you please add Seattle to the list of cities you will be visiting? That would be super.