Photography Tidbits

If you are deciding to get into the stock photography business your first task is to create an attractive portfolio; an important part of this is organizing your photos into easily accessible files on your computer, ideally limiting the file size to approximately 20 photos per file. Another important tip is to give each photo an easily recognizable name for quick access.

Quality is key in this business and I recommend you try to get the best shots you can since editing can sometimes reduce the quality of your photos and the end result of all your hard work might just be that they are rejected due to poor quality. To achieve the highest quality possible set your camera to an optimum resolution. Having the perfect lighting is also important and I recommend keeping the sunlight at your back when shooting outdoors and using flash indoors in order to produce better quality shots.

For basic cropping and image resizing use Photoshop Elements 6 as other free online software will reduce the quality of photos for these basic editing procedures. The software is available at Adobe.com and I can also recommend some excellent training videos for Elements 6 provided by LearnElementsNow.com that will show you some excellent editing techniques that will actually improve overall photo quality.

Never miss the perfect shot, so remember that digital photos can just be erazed, so always take 3 or 4 shots of your subject image. I could add to that and say never leave your digital camera at home as you never know when the perfect shot could arise and a mobile camera just isn’t good enough for the strict photo quality standards.

Now I have already mentioned stock photography sites that are the basis for making money from your digital photographs and they don’t accept just any digital photographers work and supply a small test that needs to be passed before you are allowed to submit your digital photos for sale on the stock photography sites. This is why the overall quality is so important otherwise you will have wasted your time and resources.

Upon acceptance to the stock photography site don’t submit everything you have, take care to only submit your very best work. Present your work in a way that will entice purchasers to return to your stock. A final tip is to always submit your photos in .jpg format as certain other formats will be automatically rejected by some stock photography sites.

Apart from the stock photography sites there are a whole range of other photo business options whereby you can literally turn your photos into cash.