Selling Stock Photos

StockRiot is perhaps one of the newer sites on the block, but is offering photographers (and illustrators) a 50% commission with no sign up fees, or hidden charges. They offer a growing collection of member generated royalty-free stock photographs & vector illustrations.

They also have an new affiliate program offering 10% commission (for a full year) on all sales to affiliate members who refer photo buyers.

Higher ISO settings on your camera will make it more sensitive to light, making low light shooting easier, due to shorter shutter times and decreasing the chance of blurring. During daylight shooting this will help you freeze the action. But there are drawbacks. Raising the ISO setting will increase the amount of noise. At low ISO settings (amount will vary according to camera) the noise will be subtle, but at higher settings noise will become distracting—especially in flat areas like blue skies, or smooth skin tones.

Here is a neat site that is not just for Photographers. They offer stock photos, videos as well as illustrations and fonts too! Their site is available fully in English & partially in Dutch, German, French, Italian, Polish and Spanish

They also have an new affiliate program offering 10% commission (for a full year).

There are a few reasons why you might want to close crop a photograph. You may want to pace an image from one photograph into another, or simply remove unwanted background clutter. If you are a designer, clipping paths are used to bring an image into a page layout program without bringing the background. It is also useful for flowing type around the object.

One of the worst things you can do is to simply use your paintbrush tool and paint over the background. Well now that I think about it, the Magic Wand tool is worse. However, paths are vector-based; therefore, they have hard edges. Gradated shadows, transparent clothing, soft focused edges or the dreaded FRIZZY HAIR-- these are not good candidates for close cropping with the pen tool. We will discuss those in a different tutorial.

PhotostockPlus is a stock/event sales solution. Unlike most other websites listed here, PhotoStockPlus does not act primarily as a microstock agency, but as an event photo site, with stock photo benefits. Photographers purchase memberships starting as low as $24.95/month or $99 per year. Basic accounts will get you 500 megs of space - higher end accounts have up to 10 Gb.