Introduction to the industry.
Stock photography is a huge industry, one that generates steady incomes for those photographers with the willingness to succeed. As with any worth while undertaking nothing comes easy and nothing comes for free. To succeed in this game you need to be able to; a) take saleable photographs, b) be organized enough to get them to the market. c) be patient and keep adding more images to your library. In the past getting into Stock photography was a huge undertaking. You either had to set up your own mini Agency or sign on with one of the big agencies. If you set up your own agency you were required to do all the leg work of sorting, filing and marketing your images. If you signed on with a big agency you were required to have at least 1,000 images before they would even talk to you. With the advent of the Internet and the growth of high-speed broadband connections these barriers have been eliminated. Today anyone with a quality digital camera can enter the stock photography market place and make money selling their images online.
There are literally hundreds of agencies online offering photographers a place to sell their images. In addition photographers have the opportunity to set up their own online mini agency or add a Stock Page to their portfolio site.
The big agencies have also moved online, but their requirements for acceptance have also become more difficult. Getting your images in Gettys or Corbis is very diffucult and for the most part the domain of well established professional photographers.
However you chose to sell your images online, one thing is for sure you will have to adhere to the three basic principles of the successful stock photographer ‚ Quality, Quality, Quality. Oh and lets not forget Quantity.

What photos will sell?
The first step in selling your images on-line is understanding what images sell, and which sit and collect cyber dust. Truth be told there is very little restriction on what sells and what does not sell. The key here is to understand which type of images sell the most and in the case of Licensed images the most often. As you sell your images on line you will need to understand that just about any image can sell as long as it meets the technical requirements of the agency and you can find a buyer.
A search for ìStock Photographyî on Google returns 15,400,000 sites. The biggest agencies like Corbis and Getty are of course listed first. These agencies are still the domain of professional photographers with huge libraries, and will not entertain enquires from amateur photographers. They have huge libraries of images from professional shooters and even hire their own photographers to shoot stock on assignment for the agency, which the agency then owns. All the regular photos that you would think are really great and will sell have been done and are sitting in these agencies files. These are what are generally know as commercial stock photos and your chance of selling these is not so good.
What you will be able to sell are EDITORIAL stock. Editorial stock does not sell for as high a price as Commercial Stock, but you will sell more images more often than when trying to sell Commercial Stock.
The images you will be able to sell are the ones that no one else has or that no one else has access to such subject matter. What you need is a niche. Pictures of regular people doing regular things, shot in a professional and appealing manner are what you will be able to sell online.
Photos that sell are the ones that tell a story or as stock photographers like to call them; photo illustrations. A photo illustration is a photo that has something going on in it. We have all heard the term ìA picture is worth a thousand wordsî well when you hear this, think Photo Illustration. These are the stock photos that sell well.