I’m a budding photographer. I’ve taken a class at our local university. I bought a Canon Rebel XSi, which is a good starter camera for someone who wants to explore the field. I have a detachable telephoto lens.
Although I would like to be a world renowned photographer, I will be happy sharing my photographs with family and friends. But I recently learned about online stock image companies that will advertise my images (and yours) to potential customers and take a cut with each sale. These companies advertise millions of images, so mine would have to be good enough quality for them to accept. But ‘good enough’ is relative. Some sites will accept mom and pop type pictures taken from a point and shoot. In fact, I’ve even seen pictures of animals taken at what I’m guessing is a zoo. For example, I’ve seen lion pictures that showed the head and mane of the lion and a concrete wall in the background. The picture doesn’t ‘tell a story’ like a good quality picture would. But it was good enough to be accepted onto a stock image site, and it’s listed as one of the 100 most downloaded pictures. I’m not a great photographer yet, but with my digital SLR camera and, perhaps, multiple visits to the zoo, I bet I could take a picture that is just as high quality or better. Then my photograph would be good enough quality to sell well. The only problem is that, with lion pictures, I’m not sure they are sought after much. So even if my photograph is good, there may not be much of a demand for my photo. So I took a look at one site to find out where I should focus my energies if I am going to take pictures of animals. By looking at pictures of the most downloaded images of animals I discovered that baby animals of all types are popular, plus a host of others including dogs, cows, horses, and reptiles.
It’s kind of exciting to think that even though taking pictures is just my hobby, I could possibly make it a business.
