Selling your photos

Mickey1 · Nov 17, 2014

I have been a pro and a Armature photog. for a while and have never actually tried to sell my work.I always did it for myself or just to capture a moment. OR I did portrait or weddings etc... so I would work under someone and take photos for them. However I have a love of the landscape and more of the artsy fartsy type stuff and would like to know if there is a online source or a place to put your work up for it to be sold that actually gets looked at. I have heard Ebay but have not tried it as I wasn't real sure how they were doing it. are they selling just a copy? the neg? ( I don't give up my Negatives for nobody with out a big check) a file?

just things im thinking of supplementing my income while doing the full time thing. Would like to share some of the experiences I have with family etc.. however if I can sell it to help pay for this adventure it would be nice.

any suggestions would be nice.

I know some mags. will look for photos of like flowers or RV life or ????? to print. but how do you know who and what they are looking for?

Wigpro · Nov 17, 2014

I sell my photographs in 3 locations - I have a SmugMug account and I also have a Fine Art America account and the third way is by utilizing those two services among my friends on Facebook and other social media...not setting the world on fire, but do manage some decent sales from time to time...it is time consuming and you must market yourself to generate web traffic and ultimately sales.

I also build web sites and generate more income that way and utilize my photographic skills and sell my service as a package.

There are links on my website to drive people to my SmugMug site and my Fine Art America site.

I have not found a good "Stock Photography" site that generates any steady revenue...so I avoid that.

Good Luck -

Jim

SeilerBird · Nov 17, 2014

Best of luck to you if you wish to become a professional photographer. Anyone with a $200 digital camera can produce National Geographic quality photos now a days so the competition is extremely tough.

The best way to sell photos is to sell them to Stock Photo agencies. There are dozens. You submit your photos to one of these places and anyone can buy them for one time use for a small fee (25 cents to a dollar). It doesn't sound like much but if you are really good you can have quite a nice income. The problem once again is your competition. There are literally millions of people with the exact same idea you have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_photography

The problem with selling to stock photography labs is that it is basically a full time job doing the submitting. Most photographers that I know selling stock have a college student who is a photography major doing the submitting. The reason the submitting takes so long is because every photo has to be tagged. You need to tag each photo with dozens of key words that can be searched for. No one can use one of your photos unless they can find it and stock photo sites generally have several million images.

Mickey1 · Nov 17, 2014

yeah that's what I was thinking also. the tagging dose not sound as fun but hey anything could happen.

As far as 200 digital. yeah I know. not real happy about it but hey this has been around for years if you could afford the camera you could take the photos. I actually have spent good money on my gear. but I also know that the guy standing next to me with a 5.00 point and shoot is taking the same shot.

I shoot a 7d. and that is the back up to the mark 5 I use as a main. so I was in it to actually make good images. but I know anyone can get lucky once.

thank you for the leads wigpro!

I have thought of building the web sites also. have done it in the past but again it was a hobby that just kind of irrupted. so I have no formal training in it so most don't like to deal with that.

Selling your photos

Mickey1

Active member

Wigpro

Well-known member

SeilerBird

Well-known member

Mickey1

Active member

Latest posts

Members online

Forum statistics