Digital cameras and the internet changed all that. For me the first sign that I could add stock photography to my income stream was when I found Alamy.com. I already owned a pro spec digital camera so for no real extra cost I could shoot stock photographs and upload them to the Alamy website where they would then be available to buyers quickly.

Alamy also broke the mould by not editing the content of the images, photographers could make the photos that they wanted to and as long as they were up to Alamy’s strict quality control all was fine. Even now most photolibraries edit the content of the images photographers submit so a human decides if your photographs are saleable before they even get to the market place. Alamy lets the buyers decide.



I have to admit that like many photographers I initially took a lazy approach to shooting stock, I gave them my full attention technically (as Alamy demand) but I shot a lot of “well maybe it will sell” images. Amazingly some photographs did sell, which woke me up.



I started to think and plan my stock photography a bit more carefully, no more grab shots, and sales improved I’m pleased to say. Over three years I did market research and I increased the number of  photographs that I have on Alamy to 2300. My sales have been regular and the income was especially useful during a long bout of illness when I was unable to work. I have a long term goal of getting 10,000 photographs on line but that will take me years to achieve.

So all good news then

Well no, Alamy is an evolving beast, in an evolving marketplace, and goalposts are ever moving. For instance the way that photographs should be keyworded (the photographers responsibility) has changed, meaning that I have had to wade through Alamy’s clumsy software to re-keyword a couple of thousand images more than once, very time consuming. The promised bulk editing software from Alamy is still eagerly awaited (as of Feb 09).

Competition for sales in now fierce, the ease and low cost of shooting stock which I saw as an advantage also worked for everyone else, there are currently 14.99 million stock photos on Alamy and that number is growing fast. Amazingly Alamy’s 15 million images are a drop in the ocean of stock photographs available for sale via the likes of Getty, Corbis, imagefile etc.



The average price for a photograph has tumbled as a result of the huge amount of photographs available, good old supply and demand.

However, despite all of the downsides I like Alamy and I will keep making images for Alamy. I usually shoot stock photographs during quiet times and the more images that I have the better, the photographers with 10,000 + photographs on Alamy are still doing fairly well, but I will also start looking at niche markets and making photographs for them as well. (see my thoughts on Trevillion).

I first came across Trevillion Images in a magazine article where the high quality of the photography was mentioned.

I browsed Trevillion.com and was impressed by the photographs there, in fact the quality of the work seemed way beyond what I could produce. I am a commercial photographer used to producing images to a brief, timetable and budget which often  can be different to making photographs for pleasure. I say for pleasure because the images on Trevillion are obviously commercial but they also go beyond that. The images are fine art photographs of the type that photographers make for the sheer joy of the creating beautiful images.

I resolved to start making photographs for fun again and hope that some would suit Trevillion.  Some time later I had a CD of images to submit…. Trevillion were very gentle when they rejected my images and they left the door open for future submissions.

During a commercial shoot with a model I spotted an opportunity to use the location for “fun” images, the model was enthusiatic so we made a small series of images which I submitted to Trevillion.



Much to my amazement and pleasure some of the images were accepted and I duly sent the high resolution files. In a short time there were some of my images in the Trevillion web site. I felt surprisingly proud, that my work had moved up a notch.

An even bigger surprise was how quickly sales were made and my first cheque arrived. The images were licensed for use as book covers  (Trevillion images main market). Over time I have added images to the Trevillion library and although I only have a few (25) images online amazingly I have had sales, which says a lot for the high quality of Trevillion images sales efforts.

Would I recommend Trevillion images to other photographers?



Absolutely, they are easy to deal with, they do make sales but best of all they have helped rekindle my love of photography.

Trevillion Images