Realistic Income From Stock Photography – Can I Earn Real Money with Stock Photography?

The Internet has opened up a lot of creative markets to the masses.  In the past one had to jump through a lot of hoops and make it past a lot of gatekeepers to enter a market place.

But these days, anyone with some talent and some skill that is in demand can reach buyers.  The downside is that anyone jump so the competition is global.

Back in college I thought I could try to get into stock photography.  In those days, back in the 80s then this required shooting expensive slide film, having them developed, writing your copyright information on the slides, mailing them to an agency and then waiting for weeks to see if any were accepted.

I was totally out of my league with my Olympus OM-10 and a lack of understanding of how to create the type of images that were in demand.  The competition was photographers sending in rejects from professional photo shoots.

If your photographs were selected they went into big think glossy catalogs which were shipped to ad agencies every quarter or so.  The whole process of getting established as a stock photographer took years to grow a portfolio of any substantial size.

But the payoffs were better as the ad agencies had the choice between an expensive custom photo shoot and a less expensive stock photo.

Years later when I got back into photograph and entered the digital age with a micro four thirds Panasonic, I discovered microstock.  I thought, whoa! here is a way to pay for my equipment and keep the wife happy.  I can buy new equipment with the money.  Perfect.  So I read a few books on microstock photography and started submitting images.

The way the books told the story, all you’d have to do is submit a few images and they’d get licensed a zillion times and you’d be on easy street.

The only thing was these books were written by people who had gotten in the market when it was young and just about any image would sell.  Now ten years later the market was over-saturated with images and the payoffs were a fraction of what they had been.  Hence, these people started to write books about it.  Just like any “gold rush” when you start hearing about it, it’s over.  When you hear about that great stock, it’s already peaked.  When they tell you to invest in gold, it’s peaked.

I spent a few years creating stock images and improving my skills.  Eventually I discovered and started to create higher level stock images and joined a boutique stock agency and started to concentrate more on fine art photography.  But will say that I’ve made some money in the microstock market.

Over time even small payments add up.  If you get the right image and the agency promotes it, a few winners in your portfolio can bring in some nice income.  The challenge is to create a whole lot of these “winners”.

Here are some of my bestsellers on Shutterstock:

So as you can see, earnings can add up.  The trick is to have a very large portfolio and to be producing images in demand by designers.