The lure of a passive income, and the chance to do something I really enjoy for a living were enough to capture my interest in MicroStock. From deciding to ‘have a go’ to actually selling images was quite a journey, and one more and more of us are taking.
Before considering making money from photography I was just an average photographer… I prided myself on doing the best with the tools I had available. My Africa blog was shot entirely with a Casio Exilim 7.2 megapixel point and shoot compact camera, which was great for movies, but not so great for photos. Within a few days I’d understood most of its weakness’s however and had come up with various workarounds to allow some manual control of exposure. I had many comments and compliments on the images, so I guess I did OK, but they were far from professional shots.
Understanding what a ‘professional’ image is all about was a big learning curve. What it all really boils down to is understanding light.
The first thing you need to do to get into Microstock photography, and to begin to earn a passive income is open an account with the big 5 microstock agencies.
By far my best performing stock agencies are:
1) IstockPhoto.com
2) Shutterstock.com
3) Fotolia.com
4) Dreamstime.com
5) Bigstockphoto.com
By far the easiest site to upload to is one of the newbie sites: