Twenty Tips and
Tricks to Winning
on Microstocks
The idea when submitting to microstocks is to make money, so
your goal should be to formulate a plan that maximizes your prospects
of success. What is in that plan will depend upon the kind of
person you are and how much time you want to spend on stock
photography.
So far, we have covered quite a lot of ground. It is a good time to
take stock (no pun intended), to think about what we have learned,
and to add in to the mix a few tips that I think will enhance your
prospects of making money from microstock photography. Some tips
work better for one type of photographer than another, but let’s start
with a tip that I think applies generally to everyone.
Tip 1: Buy the Best Equipment You Can Afford
I have already discussed equipment choices. You know it is not neces-
sary to buy really expensive equipment to meet the needs of your new
microstock career, but if you are anything like me, money burns a hole
in your pocket (Figure 8.1). Don’t waste your money buying expensive
kit you don’t need! But it can be a false economy to buy too cheap a
camera. Remember Jon Oringer’s comments that digital single-lens
refl ex cameras (dSLRs) are Shutterstock’s preferred tool. That tip
applies to all image libraries. The better the camera, the less time you
will have to spend overcoming the limitations of a cheaper kit. Since
dSLRs are available for just a few hundred dollars, they should, I hope,
be accessible to most of you reading this book.
Keep in mind that a cheap point-and-shoot digital camera will not
have a raw fi le format mode and may well output JPEG fi les that have
imperfections—too much noise, compression artifacts, and so on.
Dealing with these problems so as to generate acceptable fi les for