Great Escape Publishing

Posted August 26th, 2011 by Lori Allen & filed under Travel Photography.

Today, let’s take a look at the math of photography and how much money you can earn doing it… Specifically, the math of stock photography… Lookstat.com published an article about the math of stock photography last year titled “How to Make a Million Dollars in Microstock.” They crunched some numbers, and found that if you make $4 per image, and you add 400 new images to your portfolio per month, you’ll be a millionaire in less than three years. Sound ambitious? It should. 400 images a month is a lot of photographs. And in stock, your photos have to be technically perfect so 400 images is really more like 4,000 whittled down to 400 after you take out all that won’t pass muster. So let’s look at some more attainable math… Let’s say you start now with zero images in your portfolio. And instead of uploading your photos to one agency, you upload to four. If you upload 20 photos per week to four different agencies, that’s 320 new images for sale per month. Assuming you’ll earn around $1 per image per month (a much more realistic goal), by this time next year you’ll have made over $23,000. Keep uploading 20 new photos to four agencies per week, and your monthly income will continue to grow… In your second year, you’ll make $69,120. In your third year, you’ll make $115,200. It keeps going up from there. Of course, this is assuming you can upload 20 new photos per week, that they’re all accepted, and that you can maintain an average income of $1 per image per month. To do that, you’ll need to consistently take good photos that sell. And you need to reserve some time at night or on weekends to learn how to edit your images in a program like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom as it’s an absolute necessity that your images get processed before you submit them. We include step-by-step instructions for both editing and processing your photos for stock as well as editorial and fine art in our Turn Your Pictures into Cash program. In it, you’ll learn …

Why now is the best time to sell your photographs and who is willing to buy them…
Exactly how to get started taking saleable photographs today (in your own hometown)…
Why you don’t have to be born with a “good eye” to take great photos…
The truth about your equipment (and why you don’t need to spend a ton of money to get started)…

…and more. You’ll get everything you need to know to create a second income stream for yourself and even fund your next vacation by taking simple pictures of everything from your backyard to your kitchen sink and selling them for cash. [Editor’s Note: Learn more about how you can turn your pictures into cash in our free online newsletter The Right Way to Travel. Sign up here today and we’ll send you a new report, Selling Photos for Cash: A Quick-Start Guide, completely FREE.]