Stock photos #photography

Today’s photo of a daffodil isn’t very good, because I took it in really poor light. Notice I have added the copyright notice so it can be seen easily. I’m going to start taking ‘stock’ photos and will add a copyright notice to them.

Stock photos are the ones magazines and newspapers buy for particular stories when they don’t have one in their library. Popular images are police cars, ambulances and fire engines. Places too that show a sign, such as the entrance to a particular hospital or shopping centre. Hospitals are popular because they are in the news a lot. Obviously, photos of famous people are good stock images too.

One of my images was the local Metro and a newspaper used that. You have to be aware of things like signage and buildings that might feature in the news of the future. There are lots of stock photo libraries and they have different policies on charging. One of the most expensive that is used by up-market newspapers is Getty Images, but they have requirements on their images that many people would find hard to do. Some libraries will only accept images that are 300 dpi and many bridge camera produce images that are 72 dpi. DSLR’s will produce images at 300 DPI and very large images too. My Nikon produces images that are about 6000 px by 4000 px and so they are suitable for large posters.

You can even take pictures of things in your home, like food photography and photos around the garden too might be suitable to add to your photo library. You can then try to get them accepted by a website that sells stock images and pays some kind of royalty payment. Picfair allows you to set the price and then adds it’s 20% commission to that. I haven’t tried this one yet, but it seems to be a better way of selling rights on images.

I’ll end with a few photos from my WordPress image library. I haven’t taken many new photos, it’s difficult in winter. Spring starts on Friday and I am interested in this solar eclipse and the effect it will have on light.

Please comment and share your thoughts on photography or you can follow me on Twitter. These images are copyrighted whether they have the copyright notice or not…

Wednesbury Christmas

 

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