the world of Microstock

Microstock Photography involves selling a photo over and over again for a very low price. A good stock photo should earn $1-$15/year, although some very simple images have been known to earn hundreds or even thousands annually.

Getting started with stock photography involves a lot of time, a bit of effort, and usually entails a good amount of rejection (which can actually help you to improve as a photographer, and makes it feel even better when you are approved!).

My minimum recommendation for getting into shooting/selling stock would be a DSLR capable of producing images with a resolution of 6MP or greater. I personally use a 10MP Nikon D60 and would strongly recommend it or anything similar (D40, D40X, D3000, D5000), as a great camera to first start learning on.

If you do decide to give stock a try I would recommend starting out at shutterstock, it is the fastest place for getting sales (I often see images sell within 24 hours of being approved), and making your first sale(s) can be a huge motivator!

Please use my referral link when you sign up, shutterstock ref id 210748

After signing up as a contributor with shutterstock you will be required to submit 10 initial images for review, but only 3 of the 10 need to be approved to become approved as a seller. These images should vary a bit in subject, be at least 4MP in size (height*width will give you MP, for example 2000*1500 = 3000000, or 3MP), and each of the photos should be viewed at 100% to look for any imperfections. Feel free to ask for my opinion or for opinions on the shutterstock forums before submitting as you can only apply once every 30 days.



If I receive any interest in this subject I will add more info/answer any questions and add other microstock agencies I have had success selling with so far.

Fun with Flash

I mixed up dates today and ended up prepared to shoot, with absolutely nothing to take photos of.

So that the day would not end up a waste I decided to play around with my new flash a bit using a tripod and a universal TV remote to photograph myself under the hood of my shiny new car.



I was shooting in the shade but early enough that it was still pretty bright out. For the first shot I used the kit 18-55mm zoom that came with my camera and just let it shoot/focus automatically.  

Notice the remote control above my right leg as I rip two washing machine hoses I had laying around out of my car?

Next I switched the camera over to Full Manual, setting aperture to f/13 and shutterspeed to 1/250 of a second with the intent of creating a dark/underexposed image. I flipped up my cameras on board flash and set it to full power, then set my new flash to optical slave mode on full power so that it would go off whenever my camera flash fired.






I played around with using the flash as a flashlight in one hand while triggering the camera with my tv remote in the other hand for awhile before taking a couple shots of just my car and heading in for the day.

Partially desaturated in post processing using Adobe Lightroom.

Shooting the Moon

It turns out I missed the full moon by 2 days but it was a beautiful night and I like the photos all the same.

For these shots I used a Nikon d60 with a Tamron 100-300mm zoom mounted on a tripod and triggered using a 10-second timer delay to avoid camera shake.

The two images below were shot at f/6.3 at 300mm, ISO 100 using shutter speeds of 1/160 and 1/250. I also tried out using f/40 and 1/2.5 shutter speed but the longer exposure ended up giving a grainy looking halo around the moon. Once the exposure is correct so that the image is not coming out too dark, and also not coming out as only a white circle getting the focus dead on is essential. If focusing manually spin straight to infinity then come back slightly until you get a nice crisp detailed moon in your viewfinder.



Both photos were cropped to give a more zoomed in and off center image, each could also still be zoomed in further before reaching a 100% crop.

The orange tint was added in post processing using Adobe Lightroom.