Great Escape Publishing

Posted March 4th, 2011 by Bonnie Caton & filed under Travel Photography.

If you’d like to sell stock photos of your pets, here’s a tip directly from a photo buyer…

Make sure your pet is wearing a collar and tags before you get out your camera. Pet shelters buy stock photos of animals, but they can only use photos that show the pet wearing a collar and tags — and those can be hard to find in stock agencies.

More on where I found that tip, and others like it, below.

Last week, I gave you your first Get-Started Stock Photo Basics Tip, on getting to know the three agencies that BSC readers have the most luck getting into. If you missed that issue, you can read it in the archives here.

This week’s Get-Started Stock Photo Basics Tip is…

Step #2: Find Out What Stock Photo Buyers Want

Stock agencies want you to succeed and sell photos. After all, when you make money, so do they.

So most of them are happy to tell you what’s selling right now. You can even find specific photo requests from buyers. You just have to know where to look.

Here are a few places to start:

1. The Catalog. It sounds obvious, but this is an important place to look. Start by going onto a stock photo agency website and doing an image search for something you’d like to photograph. Say, for example, you want to photograph an apple. Try searching for “red apple.” Then, sort the results by “downloads,” or “popularity,” to find out which images sell best. You don’t want to copy those images, of course, but you can compare them to see what they have in common.

2. Most Popular or “Best” Images. Many stock photo agencies have a page that shows their best-selling images. Sometimes you can even find the best-selling images of all time… of last month… and even of just last week. This is good information to find out what people are looking for seasonally. Here are a few places to check out:

Bigstock.com – Go to Bigstock.com, scroll down to “Trending Keywords” and click on any of the trending topics to see the best-selling images for that topic. You may need to sort by “Most Popular.”
Fotolia.com – Best selling images here
Dreamstime.com – Here, Dreamstime highlights what its editors consider to be the best images.

3. Image Request Forum. This is where I found the handy pet tag tip. An agency request forum isn’t so much about what’s popular as specific images that buyers are looking for. For example, right now on Fotolia.com, someone is looking for images of elderly people with a police officer, representing security for seniors. Someone else Dreamstime.com is looking for photos of starfish.

Those are just a few of many, many topics that buyers are looking for on image request forums. Here’s where to find them on the three agencies where BSC-ers are getting accepted the most:

Fotolia.com – Sign up as a member a Fotolia and sign in at the site. Next, go to: http://us.fotolia.com/forum and click on “Order Request Board.” You’ll see what photo buyers are requesting right now.
Dreamstime.com – Go to: http://www.dreamstime.com/forum_2

We also have a wealthy of information in our e-letter archives.

So how do start selling YOUR photos? We’ll talk more about that next week, with…

Step #3: Make the leap – Select your best images and send them to a stock agency.

Your Weekly Breakfast Dish
The latest from your Breakfast StockClub Facebook Page

There’s a lot of excitement about the Breakfast Stock Club Premium Challenges… and for good reason! I’ve now heard from two people who submitted some photos they took for the Challenge and got them accepted into stock photo agencies — congratulations, guys!

From Glenda Dannar Thompson: Excited about getting started. Backing up all my photos to a secondary external hard drive today. Thanks for the warning. I would hate to lose years of photographs! Shooting more stock today. Signing up and uploading photos tomorrow. What an exciting opportunity. Thanks for the Premium club and challenges!

Breakfast Stock Club Premium members — look for your Breakfast Stock Club Premium Challenge #2 in your in-box this weekend!

[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.]