Transcripts
1. Introduction: My name is Logan Benetton. I've been shooting stock photos for online agencies for seven years. I have been submitting video clips for two years, and I currently have an online portfolio of over 16,000 files. Although there are similarities between stock photos and videos, this course will focus on uploading photos only. When I first wanted to sign up at a stock agency, I was rejected three times for all manner of reasons that didn't really make any sense to me. This course is designed to help you avoid the mistakes that I made and hopefully get your images accepted by the stock agencies in your first try so you can start selling them straight away. Before doing stock photography, I mainly did street photography and head shots for models and actors. I thought I was fairly decent and experienced photographer, but I soon realized that stock photography is like nothing else. You can be an amazing photographer and still get rejected by the agencies, or you can be an average photographer and still sell more images than a really great photographer. This course is for anyone who wants to make money selling their photos on stock agency sites. It doesn't matter if you're a seasoned photographer wanting to make a move from a different style or a complete beginner who just wants to earn a little extra money. We'll talk about cameras, what to shoot, what not to shoot, how to edit, how to keyword, and by the end, the class project would be to sign up with a stock agency, submit 10 images. Hopefully have them all accepted and perhaps even make a sale. I do encourage you to start sharing your images in the class project straight away now. That way we can discuss them and correct any errors before submitting them to the stock agencies. All right. Let's get started.
2. Reasons for Starting Stock Photography: There are many reasons for doing stock photography. I started because I was looking for a way to make a little extra income. I already had another job and I never intended for stock photography to become a full-time thing, but that's just the way it worked out for me. Some other reasons for doing it, reasons that I have come to love about it are the freedom it gives you. If you're already a working photographer, you probably know how stressful it can be to work with clients sometimes. With stock photography, it's really you are your own boss. You can shoot whatever you want whenever you want. It's passive income. This is a big one. This is a major reason for doing stock photography. Every single file that you upload is an asset that has the potential to earn your money for years to come, day in and day out even when you're sleeping. I'm still earning hundreds of dollars for photos I shot five years ago. It might take some time to plan and shoot a good stock photo and edit and keyword it, but once it's up down in the stock sites, your work is done and you, you have created a source of passive income. It's a great way to learn photography what's getting paid. Traditionally, one way of getting started as a photographer was through unpaid internships for the studio. When you submit to stock site, your work is going to be harshly judged by the reviewers, something we'll discuss in a later lesson. But this is valuable feedback that you wouldn't get anywhere else and it's feedback that will help you improve your photography. It certainly did for me. It's fun for all the family. Some of my best selling photos our of my children and their mother. This is a job where you can actually make a living by playing with your kids and spending time with the family. Just a few other reasons. It's relatively cheap to get started. You don't need expensive gear, more about that in the next lesson. Year on year, the demand for stock content has increased. It's a multi-billion dollar industry, meaning that this is probably something you could be doing for years to come. So in a way, it's a future profession if you choose to do it full time and if you choose to make a career out of it. It's easy to get started. Anyone can do it. It's perfect for a lot of different types of people, stay-at-home moms, dads, people traveling. If you're a young person traveling and you want to make some money in a foreign country, often you would need a work visa, something like that. In most countries you are free to take pictures. So those are some of the reasons for getting into stock photography. In the next lesson, we will be talking about cameras.
3. Your Camera for Stock Photography: Welcome back class. In this lesson, we're talking about what camera to use with stock photography. This photo here just as a random example, I really like this image though. I shot this using a medium format camera the Pentax 645. The image resolution is 8,256 by 6,192 pixels. That's huge. The camera cost me roughly $7,000. I have not sold any copies of this photo and there are hundreds more like it in my portfolio. This photo on the other hand, one of my all-time best sellers, I've sold this over 1,000 times. I short this from my first digital camera, the Canon EOS 550 or Rebel T2i as is also known. I bought that use for around $300. My point here is that you do not need an expensive camera to make money with stock photography. I'm not going to recommend a specific camera to you. Instead, I'm just going to read out the technical requirements from one of the major stock agencies and this is pretty much the same for all of them. JPEG files, best possible compression, at least three megapixel resolution. This is my girlfriend's old camera. She got this probably around 10-12 years ago. It's got some tape around it because the battery cover is loose and it's basically falling apart. We've given this to our three-year-old son to play with and he's having lots of fun with it. He's able to use it. He's taking some good pictures. It's got a resolution of 10 megapixels. This will do. If you don't already have a camera and you don't have a lot of money to spend, my recommendation would be that you buy second-hand camera body and that you spend the greater part of your budget on a good lens. Once you start making some money and you're able to upgrade, you can replace the camera body and keep using the lens that you bought on your new camera provided that it's the same brands system, of course. Although it is possible to get adapters for most lenses to use them on camera bodies. What do I mean when I say a good lens? Well, for stock photography, zoom lens is a very handy thing to have because it gives you versatility. Being able to focus at a close distance, gives you even greater versatility. Super close-ups and extreme close-ups known as macro photography, that's quite popular when in stock photography. I would always recommend that you get a fast lens, which means low F numbers. This allows you to get lots of lovely background blur and you're able to shoot in low light conditions. I'm currently using a Leica M9 and mirrorless Sony. This is the A7, R4 that's filming me right now. If you're just starting out, I would recommend trying out a few different systems to see what works best for you. It is of course, different for everyone but essentially what you want for stock photography is something that will help you create a lot of images fast. So you can build up your portfolio fast because that's when you're going to start seeing the sales. My Leica, for example, it's fully manual, it takes me a lot of time to focus on this and in the time it takes me to focus, I could have taken 10 pictures with the Sony camera in autofocus. That concludes the lesson on cameras. I'll just quickly mention some of the things that you need. You need a computer with a reliable Internet connection. That's very important. Editing software. I use Lightroom and Photoshop. You don't need flushes and strokes and things like that. Just go out and shoot outdoors. Use natural light to start with. One thing that would be helpful in this situation is neutral density filter. It's basically like sunglasses for your camera. In bright daylight, you're going to need to shoot it high F numbers to let less light in. Which means you will lose that lovely back on blur. More about that in an upcoming lesson when we go out to shoot some pictures.
4. What Not to Shoot: In this lesson, we're talking about what not to shoot. I think it's important to get that out of the way before talking about what's actually shoot. Again, I will just read out some guidelines here from agency, this is from Dreamstime. This is pretty similar across the board. Don't upload offensive content such as explicit nudes, drugs, people in offensive positions, racism. Pretty straightforward. I recommend that you read the guidelines and contributor agreements carefully for each agency you want to join. But what about our legal requirements? Firstly, as a photographer, not just a stock photographer, any photographer, of course, you have to comply with the laws of the local government wherever you're taking pictures. As a staff photographer, if you're taking pictures of people, you need to have a model release. All the agencies provide these. I've included a generic one in the course materials that you can download. Personally, I use an app on my iPad called Easy Release. I just like to keep things digital. I find it easier to organize, rather than have folders. Therefore, is full paper releases. There are exceptions, situations where you don't need a model release, but they are very few. One of which is editorial photography, we'll talk more about that in the next lesson. For now, just as a general rule, remember that if a person is able to recognize themselves in your photo, it doesn't matter if they're unrecognizable to you or anybody else, if they're able to recognize themselves, this could be because of the clothes they're wearing, because of the location, and so on, then you need a model release. Property releases: We need these for a recognizable property. Like the model release, this means that the owner of the property is able to recognize the property. You might think that property means a house. In stock photography is a lot more than that. You can take pictures of yourself sitting in your living room, and if you have lots of unique, recognizable, and focus features, you need to sign a property release. Tattoos are considered property. You need a release for tattoos, not from the wearer of the tattoo, but from the artist who created it. Animals: if they're wearing tags or they're recognizable by their owner in any way, you need to have a property release. Artwork: you need a property release. Some agencies can be very strict about this. For example, you took a photo of your three-year-old kid holding up a picture he made with his crayons. Some agencies will reject that image if his artwork does not have a property release. Trademarks: you can not show trademarks and logos in stock photography. Not ever. Best thing to do is not shoot them. Always ask your models to wear plain clothes without logos. Of course, there's so many logos everywhere. If you do capture them, then don't worry too much about it, you'll just remove them in Photoshop, Lightroom, or whatever. It's easy to spot a logo, but what you might not know is that trademarks can be a lot more subtle. Stitching on jeans for example, patterns, colors. Sometimes it can be very difficult to know. Just remember if in doubt, clone it out. In addition to the things I just mentioned, there are certain unique locations and events that you can't shoot and submit to stock agencies. To give a few examples of the top of my head, some of them are the Burning Man Festival, Joshua Tree in England, any land belonging to the National Trust. So that includes a lot of beaches and countryside. Also, there's some subjects I've just been covered way too much already. Flowers is right at the top of that list. So now that we know what not to shoot, let's move on to the next lesson and talk about what to shoot.
5. What to Shoot: What do you shoot when you've decided to submit your images to stock sites? This is a really big subject and to find success as a stock photographer, it's probably the most important thing to consider. But for the purpose of this class, I'm going to try and keep the answer relatively short. When you're shooting stock photography, you have two options. You can submit editorial images or you can submit commercial images. Editorial images are pictures of things that are newsworthy. Most of the things we talked about in the previous lesson don't apply here. You don't need property releases, you don't need model releases when submitting your photos. All you have to do is title them in a certain way. This varies from agency to agency, but usually this would be the date, the location, and a brief description of the event. Now, the people buying editorial images can only use them to illustrate news stories, and so on. They can't use them to sell and promote products and services, which is where commercial stock photography comes in. This can be anything I didn't mention in the lesson about what not to shoot. However, if you want to make sales, there are some categories that are just more popular than others. Model release images of people tend to fall into this category. If you're just starting out, have a look at the top-selling images of the stock sites, and that will give you a good idea of what's popular right now. However, don't try and copy the style of other photographers. My top tip for deciding what to shoot is to just take pictures of something you're familiar with. If you do sport, take pictures of that; if you're into cooking, do food photography. What's important is that you find a niche and that you stick with it. That way, you'll be able to start creating your own memorable style, and buyers will keep coming back to your portfolio because they did like your work and they know what to expect from you.
6. Working with Models: All right. I mentioned in the previous lesson that pictures of people are some of the most popular. Where do you find some people to take pictures of? If you want to keep your costs down, especially if you're just starting out, I highly recommend that you ask your friends and family if they're happy to pose for you. They will, of course. You need to sign a model release same as anybody else. If you don't have any friends, there are various online platforms where you can advertise for models and find models. Craigslist and modelmyhim.com, they're good options. If you live in a big city, you shouldn't have any problems finding anyone. Quite a few models who are just starting out who work for TFP as well, which means time for print. They pose for you for free in exchange for pictures. You provide them with high-resolution stills from shoot, and they can use those on their websites, on the social media, on the portfolios, and so on. When meeting models always arrange to meet in a public place, and if you're going meeting a female model, always offer her to bring along a friend if that makes her feel more comfortable. Always get the model releases signed before you start shooting. You don't want to risk for getting about it as just a good practice to get that thing out of the way from the outset. Have a look at the outfits the modal brought along before a shoot. Beforehand you should already have told them not to bring anything with logos, trademarks, striped clothes can cause another problem called Moire, which is where defined patterns turn to an outlook a little bit story than goofy looking. This is another reason for rejection, something that can't be fixed in the edit. But as always, it's best to save time and just avoid it from the outset.
7. On Location for the Shoot: In this lesson, we're going to go out and shoot some stock photos. Grab your camera and let's go. I'm going to take some shots of my baby son. Once again, just to show you that having a fancy new camera doesn't matter. For this shoot, I'll be using this old Olympus camera with a cute lens. First things first, always set up your camera to shoot raw. It gives you more options when you go to edit. I'm going to do that right now. Under this and about cameras, I'll talk briefly about aperture and how using low f-stops, it's my personal preference and how it seems to be quite a popular look. Portrait focused shots is a very common reason for rejection. One way of making sure that your shots aren't focused is using a higher f-stop. However, buyers really love this cinematic style with a shallow depth of field and the foreground being clearly separated from the background. I have an image here that was shot with the lens wide open at f1.8, which is how I shoot most of my content. As you can see the focus is very shallow. The eyes are super sharp, but nearly everything else is blurry. One thing to remember when so many shots of people is that the review is almost always, once you see the focus being on the eye. Now, because the focus is so important in stock photography, if you don't have a lot of experience nailing the focus at such a low f-number, I really recommend going a little bit higher. For shots of people f3.5-f4 is pretty good. For the most part that will keep your subject in focus and you still get a good amount of that background blurry that buyers like. In a previous lesson, I mentioned neutral density filters. I don't need one right now because I'm shooting indoors. I ain't got one on my camera at the moment. But if I was outside and shooting in bright daylight, and say I wanted an aperture of f2 for example, without a neutral density filter, I could be looking at a shutter speed of 1-4,000 or more which the canvas just isn't capable of doing. If you're shooting still life against a plain background on landscapes, you might need to close eyes f8 or f11 to get more details in you shot. As you've probably noticed, there's no baby here, models, especially children, they get bored. So it's best to always prepare your set, prepare your lighting, set up your camera, do everything that you need to do first, and then bring your models in. Don't bring them in until you're ready to press the shutter. I'm going to be taking some shots by the window here using natural light. I want to be shooting at f3.5, and my internal meter here it's saying that I need a shutter speed of 150th of a second to accomplish that, which is a little bit too slow for me. You see another reason for rejection, not very common reason, is camera shake. The easiest way to avoid that is using a tripod. Or you can do it by using faster shutter speeds. Back in the days of film, for avoiding camera shake, the general rule of thumb was to double the focal length of your lens and use that as your shutter speed. This being a 42 millimeter lens, means that I should be shooting at one-80th or one-100ths of a second. The scene is too dark for me to do that. The only thing to do now is either bring it to my artificial light, which I don't really want to do. I could set up a reflector to bounce the sunlight or I can increase the ISO, which brings us to another reasons for rejection, cabin noise. Increasing your ISO will make it possible to shoot in low light and to use faster shutter speeds when shooting fast-moving objects or sports for example. This is what you want to do to freeze the action and limit motion blur, but it also increases camera noise. Some high-end modern cameras can go as high as 800 ISO before they start introducing noise that is unacceptable for stock photography. I prefer not to go above 400, and most of the cameras are usually they leave my eyes at 100 or 160, which is the native ISO, the base ISO for the camera I use most of the time. I'm going to crank this up to 200 and see what happens. Now if my reading is on 80th of a second. Which is not ideal, but it's acceptable. I'm going to go get my model. Take a few shots, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll be editing our photos.
8. Editing your Stock Photos in Lightroom: In Lightroom now, and we're going to edit the shots that we took in the previous lesson. I do all my editing in Lightroom Classic and other alternatives. Capture One is another piece of software that I've heard good things about, and I'd like to give that a try one day. But I've been using Lightroom for many years now and that's what we're going to be using today. Let's just save yourself some time. The first thing you want to do is get rid of all of those shots that don't work. These are shots to completely out of focus, just don't look very good. Most of the things can be fixed, whether or not it's actually worth your time is a different matter. But our focus shots, blurry shots, shaky shots, then there's no much you can do about that. I have all the shots you wanted me take my son here. They're all fairly similar. Just to show you a few different scenarios and problems you may encounter. I've imported some of my other recent shots as well to look at. These are from two different shoots using my Leica M9 camera and Sony a7IV camera. Just to show you as well the difference between cameras and how that affects what you're able to do with the image and post-production. We're just going to flip through all of these really quickly. Hit "B" for the ones that we want to work on, that will put them in the quick collection. I highly recommend that you get familiar with keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom. It'll save you a lot of time down the line. As you can see, I'm not selecting these two because they're totally out of focus. This one's good. Out of focus, motion blur, out of focus, can you use that one. This one is completely out of focus, blurry, and poorly cropped, so that's a definite no. [inaudible] I've jumped into the Quick Collection and as you can see I've got 26 out of an original 47, so that's nearly half gotten rid of. I'm not going to work on all of these right now. I'm just going to show you a few so you can see what's wrong with them, and how we can fix them to make them acceptable for submitting to stop agencies. I think I'm going to have a look at this one. I'm just going to double check that this is definitely in focus. I'm going to view it at 100 percent, and zoom in. This is what reviewers do as well, by the way when they're looking at the images, they looking at them at 100 percent to see that everything is the way it should be. This is at focus, its sharp. The focus is in the right place and this eye on his face. That's good. I can jump into my develop module. I'm in the library module now. I'm going to switch over to develop. Now, the first thing I would use redo when adding an image is applying a preset, which is basically a filter. That ODs have develop my style and my idea of a what I find aesthetically pleasing and perhaps more importantly, what sells. I've saved these looks and settings, this presets to save myself time and editing. I'm using my little stack 2020 presets, these are all named after the originally image that they're based on. If you're interested in trying them out as a base edit before adding your own little tricks and adjustments, you'll find a link to them in the resources. For this image, I'm thinking that Chiaro might be a good one. That's Chiaro, so chiaro is cool. This is preset that I use a lot for images that were taken like this by the window and that using natural light. we got lots of natural light on the outside, but you've got lots of shadows and blacks on the inside. You've got there are stack contrast. It's got a little bit of an orange teal look too as well. I would submit this image as it is. There's just a few more things I need to work on, but the colors, contrast, shadows, highlights, pretty good. Maybe the highlights are just a bit too bright here under and a cushion. I'm going to bring them down a little bit. looks good. This looks good to me. This is what my preset applied, and if I click reset here, you can see what it looked like before. If I was editing this from scratch and not using preset, there is a few things that I would need to do. First of all, you can see by looking at the image that the colors look a little bit off, they're very orange, very warm. That's because the white balance is wrong. I didn't set to correct white balance in camera. Now if I've been shooting a JPG, that would be a big problem but because as shatter, this is a raw file. This is really easy fix. This go up here and adjust its temperature slider to make it either cooler by going to the left, or warmer by going to the right. This number you see here is the color temperature, which is measured in Kelvin. For daylight scene, 5,400 is usually pretty good. That's what I would go for. Let's try that. That looks much better already. The white looks white, which is what you want. Another way you can do it is click here. It says custom at a moment. Initially, you would've said As Shot, and I'll be back to normal. We start it out. If you click here As Shot, you can select a white balance preset. If I select Daylight, that looks pretty similar to what I had before. Lightroom thinks that 5,500 should be the daylight temperature. Another way you can change the white balance is by going here, selecting the eye dropper tool and select a, well, pick and target neutrons, what we're calling it here. That would be something that's just off-white but grayish. Let's resemble. That looks pretty good. I'm going to stick with that. The next thing I would do is make sure that the exposure is good. This image is properly exposed. This would be underexposed, overexposed but probably could bring exposure up a little bit. Now look's good, to add a little bit more contrast into the scene that probably lowered the blacks a bit. Maybe lower the shadows to bring up the whites and highlights to split those too much. Lower the whites a little bit again. Curves down here, which is another way of fine tuning your exposure and the shadows and highlights. You can see here, tells you what you are adjusting docs, lights, highlights, shadows. If I can lift the lights up a little bit, maybe bring the shadows down a little bit, and then then docs come up slightly, maybe a little bit more shadows there. Then I'm going to bring up the saturation slightly, bring a little bit more color to his face, vibrance as well. What I'll do as well sometimes, is I'll go down here to work on individual colors. I'm going to target his skin which is here and there. The orange, yellow, orange. I'm going work on to Hue, take the orange slighter, move it slightly more towards orange away from the red, see this is too red, this is too yellow. I want to add just a tiny little bit of orange, and then a little bit yellow to the right. It'll make it more clean. [inaudible] Are we good? Now bring up the saturation of a yellow slightly. I'll bring up the luminance as well to make a little bit brighter. What else is wrong with this image as a stock photo? I think the cropping could be a little bit better. I don't really like, I'm seeing just a little bit of his leg here. I'm going to click here, and crop and straight too. I'll crop overlay, is what it's officially called. I'm just going to drag this to here. You can see these lines, this grid shows you the rules there basically, which is a good compositional to stop agencies love the innovative few images. Adhere to that rule if you're not familiar with it. Basically you want important parts of the image to touch the lines where they intersect, like here and here. This image is well suited for that, make his eyes sit right on the line and move it over a little bit. That's pretty good. Turn off my crop tool and we have it. I think I'll leave it like that, that'll be my final crop. Next up, we've got a logo on its top pair. Well, I'm not sure if it's a logo, but it might not be a recognized trademark. But most stock agencies would look at it and say that it's intellectual property and they would reject this photo, so [inaudible] of it. I need to get rid of Saturday and I need to get into this car. The way I'm going to do that is I'm going to take my spot removal tool here, I'll hit "Q" in my keyboard. I'll bring up a brush, basically you can set the size and the feather, then the opacity of it here. I'm just going to paint over the Saturday using this tool. Then basically, it's going to sample the pixels in another area and fill in the bit which you selected from there, if that makes any sense. This looks pretty good. I missed out a little bit up here, so I'll bring up my tool again. I can actually drag and move it around, move my selection. That looks good. Now I just need to get rid of the car. I'll do the same thing, bring up my Spot Removal tool, and I'll work on the car. It might be a little bit difficult around here getting close to this rattle he's holding. Now you can see it decided to take a sample from over here, which I don't want, so I'm going to click that and just drag it over here, and there. This didn't quite work out the way I wanted to, so I'm just going to keep using the Spot Selection tool. There, that looks pretty good. It's not perfect. What I could do is bring this image into Photoshop and do some more work on it to make this look really smooth and seamless, but it looks alright. While I've got my Spot Removal tool, I'm actually going to look at all these little bits of fluff, like this one. I'll just select those. By the way, when you are using your Spot Removal tool, you can hit "A" on your keyboard, and that, I don't know what this is called, but it inverts, I suppose, the colors of the image, so it's easy for you to see where you might find some spots to remove. This one, and this one here. Then I'll probably clean up this bit here a little bit as well. I could just keep on doing this, cleaning up little bits. No need for that really. This looks pretty good as it is. This image is ready to be submitted. What I'm going to do, what I usually do is, I color code my images when they're ready to be submitted. You've got your numbers, 6, 7, 8, 9, those are your colors. Six, we'll label it red. Seven, yellow, eight, green, nine, blue. I usually hit "8" for green. Sorry, that's blue. There, green. If I go back to my library, you can see that's green now, so I know that that's ready to be submitted. Let's have a look at another image, this one. We'll go into our develop module. This is a shot of my other son that I took when he was playing on the beach. This was taken with the Leica M9 camera, and the Leica Summilux f/1.4 lens. That's some quite expensive gear compared to the Olympus camera I used for this image. But they both look good to me, I think. Let me go to 100 percent on this one. That's pretty good. Go to 100 percent in this one. Might look a little bit sharper, the Leica camera and the Leica lens, but it doesn't really make much of a difference for stock photography. What's wrong with this image? Well, first of all, I'm going to apply a preset. For this one, let's see. If I want to apply Chiara on this one that would not work, it just looks wrong. Diffused Windsor here might be good. I think Sunny Blue is what I'm going to go for, and that may look a little bit yellowish. I'm just going to lower my white balance here. That's too blue. Let me bring it up a little bit. There, probably good, and that's good. Then you can fine tune that with a bit of tint here by the way, and make it more pinkish, more greenish. I'm going to make it slightly more pinkish, there. I think this is a good look for this scene on an autumn day on the beach, with cloudy skies. First up, the horizon is not straight, so I'm going to crop that, like this. There, pretty straight. The subject is right in the center of the frame here, which I think works well for this image, it doesn't always work. I'm just going to make a few more adjustments to the colors and the light. I'm going to see if I can bring out the clouds in the sky here. I'm going to bring down my highlights and whites. I'm going to adjust the tone curve here a little bit, bring up the shadows, bring down the dark. I'm going to go to my colors, and then I'm going to adjust the saturation of the aqua and the blue, and I can bring up the saturation of the aqua to make it really blue. That's a bit too much. That's probably good. How about the blue? What would that do? Not too much, again, just a tiny bit, there. Then the luminance, bring that up. We'll get rid of the clouds, bring it down, and I can see the clouds here. But it doesn't look right, it's too blue. Again, I just want a little bit, and the same to blue. Let's say if I did bring this all the way down here, that would probably be a rejection for over filtering the image. You can be artistic to a certain degree with stock photos, but if you take your corrections and your color comparing too far, then that's going to be a reason for rejection. I think this is actually a bit over saturated now, so I'm going to go and just lower that a little bit here, and the vibrance too. There. If we view this at 100 percent, that looks pretty good. It's in focus, it's shot, but there's something funky going on with his shorts here. This is mooray, which is a reason for rejection. See the colors on his shorts there, how it looks quite yellow, orangey? That's something that happens usually when you take shots of really fine patterns so that the stripes on his short here, that these fine lines, basically, cause that. That's a reason for rejection. To fix that, I'm going to get my Adjustment Brush, which is up here, under your Histogram, or you can hit "K" on your keyboard to bring it up. I'm going to select, it's already selected, I'm going to select Mooray here from defect. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that Show Select Mask Overlay down here is selected, so I can see what I'm doing. Because basically when I'm painting with a brush, it's going to show me these red brush strokes so I can see what I'm targeting. I'm just going to go ahead and paint all over his shorts here, where I see the mooray. If I select mask overlay off, you can see how it corrected the mooray. Actually it did a little bit of the sand here as well. I got too excited and I painted all the sand. To get rid of that, I'm just going to click "Erase" over here. Now you can see there is a minus inside my brush. If I select a smaller brush here, I can just paint over the bits that I want to erase. That looks pretty good. I think this image is ready to be submitted. I'm going to hit "8" to label it green. I'm going to go back to my library, and have a look at another image. This was taken with the Sony a7R IV, which is a 60 megapixel camera, I think. It produces some ridiculously huge files, which is not necessarily a good thing for stock photography, because when you zoom in close, you can really tell at this resolution if something is soft or out of focus, which this image is. If you look at it, you can see his eyes are soft. This one would be rejected. How about this one? This one is much better. I think this was a nice image, but it would not be accepted as a stock photo because of the focus being off. But this one would not be rejected because of focus, so I'm going to have a look at working this one. Again, I'm going to apply filter, so I preset. Blue Cigar looks pretty good, go for that. I'm just going to do a few fine adjustments. I'm going to hit "8", and that one is ready to go. I forgot to hit "Attribute", and select the green label. I've got the images that I selected, and want to submit. All I need to now is add some keywords.
9. Keywording your Stock Photos: I'm still in Lightroom. I've switched from the Develop module to the Library module. I'm going to add some keywords to the images that I just edited. Having edited your image, you might think that you are scot free now, but you can still be rejected for poor keyword practices. On most sites you're allowed 50 keywords. I don't think you need to use all of them. You definitely shouldn't try to fill them just for the sake of it. Adding keywords that aren't relevant to an image is annoying to the buyers and it could be a cause of rejection. I'm just going to work on one of these three selects. I think I'm going to go for this one. I'll go over here to my keywording panel, and let's just click here to add keywords. This photo, for example, I could add the keywords, baby, child. You can't really tell his gender, at his age, so I could say girl. I could say boy. I could elaborate a little bit more and then I could say childhood. He's got a rattle in his hand, I think rattle. Good keyword practice, when you're key wording, it's good to just ask yourself the questions: who, where, when, and what. For this image about the who, I've got a baby, the when I haven't got that. For the when, and this could be anytime this picture was taken indoors using a flash. It was during the day, but it could very well be in the evening. But I'm just going to say day, and where is indoors. It's in the bedroom. What, we already got the what, a rattle, toy as well, bed. This is just a few keywords that are relevant. What else could I add? Could I say son, daughter? Now, that's irrelevant. Everybody is somebody's son and daughter. If one of this child's parents was in the shot, then that would be a different matter. Then I could tag it with mother or father or parent as well. But in this particular instance, it's irrelevant, so that would be poor practice to add that keyword. He's in the bed, babies are often in cots and cribs, can I use those keywords? No, not really, because he's not in the cot or crib. If this was cropped a bit tighter then yeah, maybe it would look like he's in a cot. But still it's not really proper to do that. With your keywords you need to be as objective as possible. You need to just add what you can actually see in the picture. You can add more abstract concepts. For this one, for example, I don't know what facial expression he's got. He's looking happy, but happy is a keyword that's very overused. I'm just going to say that he looks a little bit surprised. That's a keyword, surprised. After adding the keywords, we need to add a title and a caption down here. We exploit your JPEGs of this data, along with the keywords will be burned into the file, and the stock sites will extract it. You don't have to fill in these things manually 20 times if you have looked at 20 stock sites. Some sites will use the title here, as their title, some sites will use module right here in the caption box as the title, and some sites will use both. So when you write both of these, you should be descriptive, using natural language, and include the most important keywords without being spammy. What's spammy? Well, this shot for example, I could write baby being a baby on a bed. Baby at home, baby. That's wrong. That's wrong and very naughty, don't do that. The caption needs to be slightly longer than the title. For this photo, for the title I'm just going to write, Baby lying on a bed with a rattle. For the caption, A little baby, three months old, is lying on a bed at home with a rattle. Actually, I'm going to write, with a wooden rattle. I could add some more keywords to this image and I will do that, but I'm not going to bore you with that. I want to show you how I would export this once I'm done. Let's say this is all done. It's been edited, I add keywords, a title, and a caption. I'm just going to pretend that all three of these images have been keyworded and that they are ready to go, ready to be exported. I'm going to select all of them. I'm going to right-click, go down here to Export. Again, I've got some presets over here just to save myself some time, where I would usually export my files to whatever. You choose your folder up here where you want to export and to let's say desktop, whatever. You can put it in a subfolder. File naming, you want to rename your file, that's a good thing, to add a custom name to your file. But what's really important though is your file settings here. Image format, JPEG, that's what you want. Colors base, sRGB, that's what you want as well. For stock agencies and quality, make sure that's set to 100. Limit file size, you want to make sure that is not checked. Resize to fit. You want to make sure that, that is unchecked as well. Resolution, I usually set that to 300, 300 pixels per inch. Metadata, make sure that, that's selected. Include all metadata, because that's where your keywords are. That's how they'll be burned into the file so stock agencies can just extract all your keywords and your title and your caption; and fill that into their system so you don't have to do it manually when you upload your file. Post-processing, after Export, do nothing yeah, that's fine. Watermark, you want to make sure that, that has not been checked. You do not want to add a watermark to your stock photos. Yeah, that's all you need to do really, in Export. Boom, that's it.
10. Time Saving Tips for Lightroom: In the two previous lessons we edited and keyword it and a few images for upload. But chances are that you are always going to be uploading more than just a few images at a time. This whole process, especially the keywording can become quite tedious. Therefore, we want to speed up the process, so we can spend more time behind the camera instead of in front of the computer. When I added a bunch of similar photos in Lightroom, the first thing to do is look for an average image in the batch. By that I mean an image that is well exposed. Let's say, a good representation of all the images in terms of color and contrast. I'm just going to have a look at the one we edited earlier, this one. What I'll do, I'll go to my film strip down here and I'll select all the other images that are similar to the image I've just been working on, and then I want to have the same look, select them, then I hold option on my keyboard. I'm on a Mac. On Windows, you would be pressing the alt key. Hit option and I'll click "Sync". That's it. Now, all the other photos I selected will have the exact same settings, the same coloring as the one I worked on. I'm going to jump back to the library and have a look at keywords. The most simple way of speeding up the keywording is, of course, by selecting several images at once, and just keywording them all at once. But as always, you want to be looking at each image individually just to make sure that the keywords you add are actually relevant. For example, in these images, the baby's holding a rattle in quite a few of them, but not all of them. So if a typed in rattle and add in that to all of these, then for this image, for example, it would be irrelevant. That shouldn't be there. This image will be fine, not this one, so we'd have to remove that individually. You can do the same thing with your title and your caption as well. Again, down here title. Baby lying on bed with rattle. Lightroom remembered that from earlier. Now, you see it's been applied to all of the photos that I had selected. Again, you want to make sure that it's actually relevant to the shot. One technique that I've found to speed up my process quite a lot as by using Lightroom's synonym feature. The way that works is you add a keyword and Lightroom will automatically add up to seven related keywords. You need to set up every keyword one at a time, but in the long run it's definitely a massive time-saver. The way that works is you go to your keyword list. For example, let's look at the keyword baby. I'll double-click that. Here we've got the keyword name, baby, and then we got the synonym. I think every time I add the keyword baby to a photo, I also want to add the keyword child. Also add the keyword, young and small, could be one. What else? Child, young, small, childhood. As I said, you can add up to seven here, I can only think of four that would be relevant every time I use the keyword baby. That'll be enough. We'll just leave it at that for now. Hit "Save" and see, and I'm getting this error, "A name must be provided". Just a little bit of a glitch in Lightroom. Basically, in you synonyms box, you cannot end with a space and a comma. You have to finish like this, finish your last synonym and nothing after it. Save. There we go. Now, if I select these images with a baby in it, all the images I want to tack with keyword baby, not these ones. I'll go over here to my keyword box. Click "Enter keywords", and I type in baby, baby. It will add the keyword baby. But what about the synonyms? Well, you have to go up here where it says Enter keywords, this little drop down menu, and select "Will export". See now all the synonyms are showing up. Baby, child, childhood, small, young. These are the keywords will be burned into the file when you export. The keywords that stock agencies will be able to read from the file and add to their system. All right. There you have it, five keywords added in the time it would take to write one.
11. A Quick Word on Taxes: Just a quick word about taxes. As a contributor, you record it by the agencies as an independent agent, and it's your responsibility to declare and pay your taxes to the appropriate authority. Most of the agencies and companies incorporated in the US. If you're American, I assume all you need to do is keep track of your earnings and then do whatever you need to do with regards to the IRS. If on the other hand, you're a tax resident in another country like I am, you need to submit a form W8B, WB8, I believe it's called, with every agency that you join. If you don't do this, they will automatically deduct 30 percent of your earnings for Uncle Sam, and as far as I know, this is money that you won't ever be able to reclaim. All of the agencies will ask you to take a tax interview when you first sign up and they will provide you with this form as well, so it's pretty straightforward. If the country where you're a tax resident has a treaty with the United States, you won't be liable for the tax there. You just have to keep a record for your own country. Some of the agencies will send you your yearly summary as well of all your earnings for you to keep track and help you with that.
12. Submitting to the Stock Agencies: You made it. We're finally ready to sign up with some Stock agencies and submit our photos. I'm not going to go into detail about how to sign up with the agencies. It is too many of them and they all have different sign up procedures. What I'm going to do instead, and I'm going to give you a shortlist of some of the agencies that I recommend you start. You will find instructions on their websites for how to sign up. Links are provided in the course material as well. First up is Adobe Stock. This is an excellent place to start. The royalties are good. By adding your photos to that collection, your work is automatically promoted to people using Adobe products. Because Adobe Stock is integrated within the Creative Cloud, guess what? The people using Adobe products are some of the people most likely to buy stock photos, these people are designers, illustrators, or the photographers. If you do really well in a specific sales target, I can't remember exactly what it is. But if you hit the sales target in a year, they will give you a Creative Cloud subscription for free as well. Next up, another agency that I really like is Dreamstime. Their royalty structure is slightly different from other agencies. Basically, when you sell an image repeatedly, it's going to move up and they're earning tiers, and you will be paid more per sale as to your image grows in popularity. This is an incentive not to upload to many similar images as well because you will effectively be in competition with yourself. The third agency that I recommend you check out is Depositphotos. One of my favorite agencies, simply for the fact that they treat contributors well. Every time I needed to contact them about something, I have received a personal unfriendly reply, usually straightaway that helped me out references and letters of recommendation. Then finally, hence, it's really easy and quick to submit you work. The final agency I suggest you submit to is Canva. This by far the easiest agency to submit to. You just upload your files by FTP and then that's it. You upload and forget about it. No filling in boxes, categories, and stuff like that. You don't even need to upload model releases. By submitting to Canva, you're simply acknowledging that you have to require model releases in your possession, on file, and you're able to produce them if they're ever requested. Those are not all the agencies out there. If you're familiar with it, the Stock photography industry, you may have noticed that I left out some of the big players. I really wanted this course to be helpful and I want you to profit from the sale of your photos. Now recently, the way some agencies have decided to structure the way they pay to contributors, has led me to the decision that, can I just recommend them to someone just starting up. You deserve a fair price for your work, and you deserve to be treated with respect by the agencies who work with. Because without you, they wouldn't be in business. What I'm saying here, this, you should look carefully, every agency you're thinking about joining, read their contributor agreement, and only sign up if you feel that it's right for you.
13. Keep it Up: Before concluding this class, I'm just going to give you a few quick tips on how to improve your sales. In order to sell anything on the stock side, buyers have to find your content. You do this by entering the search term and feeding it into the agency's algorithm. I have no idea how the algorithm works. They vary from agency to agency. Most agencies won't reveal how they work, but some of them do give you tips and insights. Adobe, for example, will tell you to list your seven most important keywords first. Other agencies, they don't explicitly mention this, but I always put my 10 most important keywords first on all sites I submit to. In my experience, what I've found to matter when it comes to generate consistent sales is to be consistent. Upload all the time. Little and often, upload. If you have 20 files to upload, rather than upload them all at once, split up the batch and upload four everyday over five-day period. I only upload five days a week. The review process, depending on the agency, can take a few days. But sometimes maybe this is just because of the size of my portfolio, I have seen my images reviewed and online the same day. That's why I only upload five days a week. I don't sell much over the weekend. There aren't many people working and there aren't many people buying images over the weekend. If my images go live on Saturday or Sunday, they're essentially wasted because they don't get a lot of attention. When people return to work on Monday, my images will been pushed right down the list. Content is extremely important as well, of course. You only going to make sales if you keep up with demand and shoot what people actually want to buy. All the agencies have blogs, forums, newsletters for contributors. Read these to get an idea of what's selling, where the market is at and where it's going, and just pay attention to what you see around you. What did the advert you see online, on television, on billboards, what do they look like? That's a good indication of what stock photography is going to sell. Get big fast. Having a big portfolio, of course, will increase your chances of buyers finding your work. Again, uploading and trying to build up the size of your portfolio as quickly as possible. I personally found that it wasn't until I had about probably just over 1,000 images online that I saw good regular return. Now that may sound like a lot, especially if you have another job or other obligations. But if you can just manage to upload 50 shots a week, you'll get to 1,000 in four to five months. Remember once you images are up there, they'll be able to provide you with passive income indefinitely. A good way to increase your output is by batching. Set aside four to five hours every Saturday, Sunday, whatever works for you, and just spend that time, well, taking pictures. If you're working with models, you can book them all in the same time and you can work with them individually or you can spend the time doing group shoots.
14. Conclusion: That's all from me. Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope that it was useful to you and that you'll join me again for future classes. I also have a YouTube channel where I upload videos about photography, so be sure to check that out for more tips. You can also follow me on Instagram to see more examples of my work, if your interested in that. I try to cover as much as possible in this class. But if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me directly through here, through YouTube, on Instagram, or post your questions and comments in the discussions. I'd really love to see what you do is really how you progress, so please keep posting your images in the project page. Post your images that are accepted in stock sites, post the ones that are rejected as well, so you can see what went wrong and if there's any possibility for fixing them, resubmitting. Stock photography really is a great way for anyone to make an income, either part-time or full-time. It's getting started and keeping going. That's the hardest part. But once you get the ball rolling, you'll soon hit a tipping point and you will see your earnings radically increase from one moment to the next. If you always wanted to go traveling but you didn't know how to pay for your trips, stock photography could be your ticket. If you're looking to create a stream of passive income, stock photography might be worth considering. Whatever your reasons for taking this class, I wish you all the best to your photography, not just stock photography but photography in general. Because remember if you decide to do this, if you decide to get involved in stock photography, don't just take pictures to sell in stock sites. Take pictures because we love taking pictures, take pictures because you want to slow down and capture life's little moments.
Logan Bannatyne
