There are very few people in the world who make a good living from photography. The upper echelons of the industry are fiercely competitive and you have to be very good and geographically well placed to take advantage of opportunities. I am not very good and I live in a small town in Thailand.

I have earned a little from the occasional job, but have also investigated other ways of making money from my photos. One of the options is stock photography. The principle is simple enough. You load your photos onto a stock photography website. Other people come along and buy them. The site keeps part of the sale price and you get the rest. Riches ensue. Except they don’t.

I started my stock photo career with istockphoto. I loaded a few photos before realising that they were selling them for about a dollar; which meant I would receive something less than a dollar for each sale. And they were uber-strict about logos, in as much as your photo could not contain any. Goodbye all my cool windsurfing and motor racing shots. Also goodbye a cool windsurfing shot which didn’t contain logos because I spent a day removing them with Photoshop, because I didn’t have signed model release from the passing sailor to say I could sell his image.

In the end, my massive library in istockphoto totalled 4 images which have earned me $44 over five years; and I have not seen the cash because it is too small an amount to send to me.

So I rather lost interest in the whole stock photography venture, until Mr. Enthusiasm Ray raised the idea with me again. He has been contributing to stock libraries for years and makes a reasonable amount every month, certainly enough to make me think it was worth investigating again.

He contributes to a number of sites including Getty Images which is one of the top stock sites in the world (respect); but more at my level is a company called Alamy. Unlike the dollar a photo deals in istockphoto, Alamy are selling to clients who are willing to pay in the hundreds of dollars; now that sounds more like it.

It’s a matter of moments to sign up to Alamy, but then you read what you have to do to be accepted as a photographer. You need to send them four images which are then subjected to quality control. The rules are quite simple. Every image has to be technically perfect. Sharp where it should be sharp, no noise, no blemishes, no chromatic aberration; just a perfect photo. Once those four have passed, then you can submit more; but every batch can be subject to random checks and if a photo is found not to be perfect then the whole batch is rejected. Fail QC too many times and you are thrown out. No pressure then.

I selected four images, not because they were particularly saleable, but because they were technically clean, and I sent them to my guru. He said they would be OK, so I submitted them to Alamy and then waited a couple of days for the QC. Success! I am now an Alamy photographer.

But that is not the end of it. Before you can put the photos up for sale you have to assign keywords. There are 19 million images on Alamy (now there are 19,000,004 thanks to me), and it is the keywords that will decide whether or not a customer will see your image. You have to guess what search terms they will use and the process is a mixture of art and science. Ray had told me he spent more time on keywording than preparing his photos, and last night I found out why.

He set me the task of putting keywords on my four images. I spent at least an hour on each trying to develop a suitable list. She who must be obeyed helped by going to a stock site, calling up similar images and checking the keywords they had used. Eventually I had an impressive list of words and sent them off to Ray. He was quickly back with a longer and better list; I have much to learn.

By 2200 I had finished preparing my four photos and they will soon be for sale in Alamy. All I have to do now is wait for the money to roll in. Probably I shall add some more, a hundred should be enough to ensure a reasonable income.

I asked Ray how many he had on Alamy. Probably more than a hundred by now?

Three thousand eight hundred
WTF!!!?
You can expect to sell one photo a month for every thousand you have loaded to the site.
WTF!!!?
I suggest you plan to load at least forty a week to start building up your stock.
WTF!!!?

This is going to be more of an enterprise than I anticipated; but I just have to think of all the eager punters out there, just aching to buy a photo of a polo pony, a motorbike, or a cat. Riches will ensue.