So, after getting some images up on Dreamstime, I’ve now switched to Alamy. It’s much more user-friendly for contributors, and the standard of photos is very high. Their QA is a bit fierce and took some getting used to, hopefully I’ve sorted that now. For me, it’s a way of offering people an easy way to get hold of high quality prints of my photos. We’ll have to see how it works out.
Stock photography is a different culture to how I usually work, and most of the images you’ll find in the gallery on this website would never be accepted by an Agency. Unconsidered trifles are no that commercial. Will it affect my style? I don’t want to lose my art for the sake of putting some acceptable, sharp, perfectly lit photo on a micro stock site. It is proving to be an interesting experience, though, looking at photography in this new way.
Alongside a million other images (or fifty million) it is difficult to think of a suitable niche. Dreamstime seems to be the goto place for images of business people, not something I’ll be trying any time soon. Alamy perhaps have a wider scope. Both sites encourage the uploading of thousands of pictures. Mmmm. I like giving my work an individual touch. Simply uploading a hundred unedited images from an SD drive in the hope some might sell seems a bit unlikely as a winning strategy. Maybe if I’d been in at the start, but not this late in the game.
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