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STEP #11: Submit your images to microstock agencies

April 26, 2010 By nrjberg 1 Comment

You’re now ready to submit your first images! This is a big step and a very important milestone for you.

I hope you realize the magnitude of what you learned in the previous steps and I will summarize the key points to make sure you remember them.

Step 1-4: You identified a market with hungry desperate buyers and limited competition. You hopefully also selected a market you’re passionate about but that’s optional (but it certainly helps to keep the motivation up).

Step 5-6: You shortlisted a number of stock agencies and prioritized them based on some important criteria’s to maximize your success.

Step 7-9: You selected your best images based on technical quality and how useful they are commercially. You also saved your own ass by removing images with potentially legal issues.

Step 10: You tagged all your images with relevant keywords to make sure your images are found by the photo buyers when they search the database.

If you follow these steps you’re miles ahead of your competition and you can literally run circles around them. They will have no clue what hit them when you enter the market, all they will know is that you crushed them.

Now it’s time to submit your images. Most agencies nowadays support digital upload via the Internet but some “anti technology” agencies might still require you to submit CD’s or DVD’s. They are relatively few though so I’ll assume they accept that you upload your images over the Internet.

Make a final check to make sure you upload the right images and use the upload interface the agency provide. It’s usually self explanatory how to do it so I won’t bother you with too many details here.

After you bumbled through the previous steps a number of times you’ll realize you need one extremely important tool to save time and reduce frustrations to a minimum.

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STEP #9: Remove images with potentially legal issues

April 21, 2010 By nrjberg 1 Comment

It’s potentially dangerous to ignore this step when you make your image submissions to microstock agencies because you might end up as a jailbird or end up in the poorhouse if you’re not careful.

You need to have a basic understanding of the law before you make your first submission. It’s luckily not that complicated and the most important parts can be condensed in a few bullets:

Always make sure you have a signed model release if you sell the image for commercial use (advertising etc.) and the image contains recognizable individuals.
Always make sure you have a signed property release if you sell the image for commercial use and the image contains recognizable private property.
Always make sure you have a signed model release or property release if you sell images with Royalty free license and the image contains recognizable individuals or private property
You can sell images with recognizable individuals or private property without model or property release but only if you sell the image with Rights Managed license for editorial use
If there are several recognizable individuals all of them needs to sign the property release
If the recognizable individual is under aged the parent must sign the property release.

I recommend you always try to get a model release whenever you can. Imagine Coca Cola offered you $20,000 for exclusive use in one of their campaign and you didn’t have a model release. That would suck, right?

Both you, the stock agency and the end user could be sued if you break the law so always be careful with commercial issues.

I’ve created a free video to to help you stay on the right side of the law. Watch the free video by clicking on this link.

Disclaimer: I’m nor a lawyer neither a professional on legal stuff and I recommend you always ask for advice by a trained professional.

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: Image Submissions, microstock agency, Model Release, Photography Tutorial, Property Release, Rights Managed, Royalty Free, Stock Agency, Stock Photography

STEP #8: Select images that are commercially useful

April 20, 2010 By nrjberg 1 Comment

Even if you’re images are technically perfect they might be rejected if they are useless for commercial reasons.

Here’s a simple checklist with common commercial issues that could get your image submission rejected:

Inappropriate images (pornography, glamour etc.)
Images with no demand
Images they already have too many of
Bad composition
Tight cropping and framing
Images outside the agencies target market

Always read the submission guidelines carefully and weed out images with questionable commercial value.

Note: here you should put the highest priority on images that falls within the market you identified in step #1-4.

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Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: Chromatic Aberration, File Formats, Image Noise, Image Submission, Inappropriate Images, microstock photography, Photography Agencies, Photography Tutorial, Stock Images, Stock Photography, Submission Guidelines

STEP #7: Select stock images with good technical quality

April 19, 2010 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

OK, so now it’s time to select images with good technical quality.

Here’s a simple checklist with common technical issues that could get your image submission rejected:

Image noise
Blurry or unsharp images
Chromatic aberration
Interpolation artifacts
Color cast
Dust
Leaning horizon or leaning buildings
Contrast issues
Badly exposed
Wrong file formats
Wrong resolution
Excessive sharpening

Always select ONLY your VERY BEST images for the first image submission because the QC controllers will be extra thorough in your first submission.

Even worse, if you fail to get only one image accepted they might reject your whole batch, especially if it’s you’re first submission.

Read the submission guidelines and make sure you don’t violate any technical requirement.

Next in line is to make sure you don’t end up as a jailbird but more about that in the next post.

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: Chromatic Aberration, Image Noise, Image Submission, Interpolation, microstock photography, Photography Agencies, Photography Agency, Photography Tutorial, Stock Images, Stock Photography, Submission Guidelines

STEP #6: Select one (1) agency

April 18, 2010 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

OK, so next episode in this Microstock Photography Tutorial.

You need to keep things simple so start with only one agency in the beginning to avoid being overwhelmed by different requirements and submission guidelines.

You can and absolutely should scale to many more agencies after a while but more about that later.

Based on the notes you took in step #5 you now need to make your second strategic decision.

High commission is obviously good
High #visitors per months is good
Requirements on exclusive rights is NOT good unless they pay a huge commission
It’s good if the agencies style and markets they target is a good match with your style

You must now decide which stock agency to “attack” and soon we come to the fun part

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: microstock photography, Photography Agencies, Photography Tutorial, Stock Agency, Stock Photography, Submission Guidelines

STEP #11: Submit your images to microstock agencies

STEP #9: Remove images with potentially legal issues

STEP #8: Select images that are commercially useful

STEP #7: Select stock images with good technical quality

STEP #6: Select one (1) agency

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