Photography is a great passion of mine, a hobby which I try to engage in as much as I can. Unfortunatly due to work and Business commitments my time for photography is limited to holidays.
Never the less, recently I have identified a way to combine, my making money onine word with my photography hobby. This article is a ‘How to earn money online from your Photographs’. It gives you some pointers where to start earning money from your photographs and suggests some hints and tips along the way.
As with all things this assumes you are willing to but the time and effort into your project, you do not have to be interested in photography but it sure helps! You dont nessiceraly need a camera that costs thosands of pounds, but an eye for a good shot and a creative streak will help you.
Selling your Photographs
There are two ways that you can sell your images online, firstly by doing it yourself, creating a website and marketing it, and secondly selling your images through a commercial online gallery.
Why would anyone want to buy my photographs?
As a designer this is not a difficult question to answer, in graphic design we are always looking for an image to best illustrate the artwork we are creating, very often we are looking for somethign very specific and will trawl through thousands of images to find the perfect one. Why should that perfect one not be your image?
Ok people wont want to buy pictures of your latest party, but if you have some aptitude for photography you will have something in your portfolio that someone might want to use.
How to Sell – Own website
Creating your own website has the advantage that you cam have the look and feel of the site exactly as you want it, visitors to your site will only have a choice of your images and you will keep the all of the sale price.
If you are not a web designer and do not want to employ a web designer to create your site, you can get open source web designs that will get yo started.
The difficulties with this method is that you need to market your site yourself, you will need a budget for this or you will need to find a target market or niche for your images. You will also have to work out a method of charging for your images, this might simply be a paypal system or you may want to develop an ecommerce site with a shopping basket. Either way this starts to get complicated.
How to Sell – Commercial Galleries
There is another way, many of the large online commercial galleries will sell images on your behalf, once you have signed up you will be able to upload your images. The prices will either be fixed by the gallery or you will be able to set your own prices from which the gallery will take a cut.
The advantages of selling your photographs this way is that you need no worry about the website, or the marketing of your images, or how to take payment, or control copyright, you simply upload the images and away you go.
The following are online galleries who will either buy your photographs directly or will give you a cut of the sale price of any of your images they sell. As with all the recommendations I make on this site, these are all people I have used or am using.
SmugMug Pro – Not really a commercial gallery but allows you to have your own space, share and sell your photographs
Big Stock Photo – A very simple to use photo gallery
Fotilia - I find this site not as easy to use, however it is well worth persevering with as you will get the results.
DreamsTime - A good site, easy to use and seems to be the quickest to upload pictures to.
IStockPhoto - One of the best sites, the user has a control panel on whcih they can manage all their account.
How much money can you make?
How much money you can make is very much down to the quality and quantity of images that you have for sale. The variety of the images could also affect the performance of your earnings, getting your images into a wide variety of different niches will increase your market.
Really what we are saying about how much you can earn from selling your photographs online is how long is a piece of string.
In the short time that I have been selling my images online, I ave uploaded probably about 150 photographs to the various galleries listed above, where possible I have uploaded the same photograph to multiple galleries, however you do need to check the terms and conditions and ensure that they don’t have an exclusivity clause.
Although int he very early days sales were very slow, they have begun to pickup. With the number and types of photographs that I have for sale I am not about to pay off the mortgage, but it h given me enough cash to upgrade my camera!
I have spoken to several photographers on photography forums who make their living exclusively from this type of work so depending on what your targets are, you can archive either a nice hobby that pays for its self or a good living.
Its up to you to make it work, put in the time and effort and you will reap the rewards.
