Stock Photography - What is it, and is it right for you?It's hard to surf the web, open a phone book, or open a product brochure without finding stock photography. Advertisers, webmasters, and others need generic images to help sell their products, but it can be expensive to hire photographers to produce the images they need. That's where stock photos comes in handy.Large stock firms like Getty and Corbis, as well as many microstock houses like iStockphoto and Shutterstock, have an inventory of millions of photos available for purchase and use. Traditionally these companies bought from professional photographers who made a good living supplying them. Because of the internet, amateurs and pros alike are able to make money in the stock photo business. While this has opened up the field to photographers of all types, it's also driven down the price, thus lowering the profitability. What types of photos do they want? People photos mostly, though artistic "concept" photos are also popular. Pictures of people doing things: having meetings, talking on the phone, driving a car, cooking dinner, etc. are all in demand. I read about one woman who's posted hundreds of photos of her children playing around the house and yard, and she makes hundreds of dollars a month from their downloads. If you think you want to pursue this, wait until you have a library of several hundred good photos, then visit the website of stock houses and register yourself. Some of them will ask for a sampling of your work to determine if you have good skills and type of photos their customers want.
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