Great Escape Publishing

Posted November 4th, 2010 by The Photographer's Life & filed under Travel Photography.

This week we’re talking about selling your travel and family photographs to online stock photo agencies. In Delray Beach this past weekend, workshop attendees at our Ultimate Stock Photography Workshop photographed over 30 different models — both in the studio and on location in places like a local restaurant, a local cigar bar, a mansion on the beach, the beach itself, and poolside at the Marriott. Then, they sat in laptop labs where they learned how to edit their photos for sale and met photographers like Andrea Gingerich (a photo inspector at iStockphoto.com), Danny Warren (an environmentalist by trade but a photographer by passion), and Jani Bryson (former real estate broker turned full-time professional stock photographer). If you couldn’t join us last week, don’t worry. We recorded all the conference sessions and collected all the PowerPoint slides. We also made several online videos of the laptop labs so you can follow along step-by-step when it comes time to edit your own photos for sale. And we put together a quick-start guide with a list of stock photo agencies and instructions for breaking into each. Yesterday I told you how stock photographer Kevin Lohka uses a free program called ProStockMaster to save time and upload photos in his sleep. Here are a few more great time-savers he uses to ease the transfer of photos online so he can spend more time taking photos and making money. ** 1. Keyword all of your images in Lightroom. With a program like Lightroom, you can enter all the titles, captions, and keywords for your images and they’ll stay with your photos when you upload them to stock sites. Do the work once, and then sell your photos in multiple agencies to profit two or more times. ** 2. Avoid extra processing by taking logo-free photos. Tell your models to wear clothing that is logo-free, so you don’t need to spend time removing them in Lightroom or Photoshop. ** 3. Take a lint roller to your models’ clothing before you start to shoot, too. It’ll force you to look closely at your model’s clothes for hidden logos they (and you) might have missed. And it gives you the opportunity to spot problems you’d typically want to remove in Photoshop before you put them up for sale (like dandruff and stray lint and hair). — Lori Lori Allen Director, Great Escape Publishing [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.]