I’ve just received my first money from selling stock photos in my profile at Fotolia. Fotolia is a microstock site for commercial stok photos.
It sounds a bit complicated, but it’s not — it’s about such kind of photos that can be used for instance in the making of newsletters and printed materials, in comercials in media and in websites. In fact it’s about everything, that meets some simple criteria — to have good technical quality and nice concepts in composition, to have clear accents in focus and well balanced defocus, to have no trademarks or copyrighted objects. And if there are human faces to be seen, the photo has to be accompanied with signed by every person in it model release document.
My photos are nothing special — I know about lot of other people profiles in this and in similar stock sites, that are lvels above mine. And I mean even people from Bulgaria like me.
Nevertheless for me this first payment is a reason to feel happy, because at last half of my photos there are made with my film camera before I got Pentax *istDL. And with homemade lightig, DIY macro-tents from home materials and instead of flashes — lamps and reading spotlights.
I’m aware this is not the professional way, it’s not even the recommended amateur way. But for me it was very important im my growing as a photographer to prepare each shot and to for instance see how exactly dark reflections affect the shooting of glass. Not that I’ve beome some kind of expert with this first payment — no, but it’s nice for my self-esteem and for growing up.
In the lower right corner of my site there is a list is several such places for photos microsales. These are the stock sites that are useable enough, enough developed and in the same time have a way to send payments to Bulgaria. And you san send photos there online. Out there there are countless stock agencies, but most of them have the photos mailed to them in CDs. I neither have enough photos for CDs, neither have faith in post offices.
I have some growing earings in several other sites, but Fotolia won the contest for the first earnings transfer. Money came fast in MoneyBookers and converted to my local curreny BGN, as I have ordered.
It just remains to decide when to transfer them to my bank acount and have them in cash. And to decide what to do with them — whether to use them for urgent bills or to wait to have some more and use them later for some photo gear…