Between the spontaneous snaps of just how delectable your breakfast looks this morning and the planned pics featuring your dearest subjects enjoying a special occasion, we really do take a lot of pictures, sometimes more than what we know to do with. Sure, you can always just upload everything to your cloud storage account or you can make sure the memories live on in cyberspace, by uploading them to your Instagram, Facebook, etc.
At some point however you’ll have to find something to do with all the pictures you take because just keeping all your high resolution images will eventually fill up the space you have available to store them. Continuing to store and add more of them will eventually require you to dip into your pocket for extra hard-drive space, an extra memory card or two, or perhaps an upgrade to your cloud storage service. Yes, there’s always Facebook, but in the same way that you don’t have time to upload all your images one-by-one, even your most dedicated of social network stalkers won’t go beyond the first few photos that show up in your photo album.
There is something constructive you can do with the pictures you take however and that’s putting them to work so they can earn you some money. Even some of those photos you edit can earn you money and in fact those are probably the ones with the best chance of generating some revenue.
Stock Photography
If you have a really good camera and along with your basic editing and photography skills you feel as if the photos you take have way more potential than being uploaded to Facebook for some of your fake friends to “like,” stock image sites like Shutterstock and Shotshop offer the perfect platform for anybody really to upload their images and have them sold as stock photography. A well taken pic, perhaps with a bit of editing like blurring the background, or a little enhancement with the help of Topaz Labs, or any other little tweaks, can earn you at least one dollar each time someone downloads it. Many artists, web designers, publishers, etc. hold the common misconception that just Googling pictures for their projects and downloading them is okay, but it isn’t. There are copyright issues which could really turn nasty and costly should the project in which the illegally downloaded image is used get big. Royalty claims and settlements in relation to this happen all the time, but we just don’t hear about them all too often.
When legitimate bloggers, web designers, graphics designers, journalists, etc. search for high quality images for their various projects, they buy and download them from stock photography platforms. So if a few hundred foodie bloggers for instance are looking for a good pic of a breakfast meal served at a prestigious restaurant, if you took that pic they were looking for, a few hundred downloads would then amount to a few hundred dollars in your account.
So the next time you wish to put your feature-filled camera to good use, upload the pictures you take to an online stock photography platform.
