Celebrating my first sale on Alamy. A whole £50 - so not quite ready to retire and become a stock photographer for the rest of my life. It's also a picture taken at a National Trust property and NT has just ordered Alamy to delete all non-authorised images taken at their properties - so likely to be the first and last money I earn from that image!
Search for B407D9 at www.alamy.co.uk to see my new favourite picture! (and taken with the D70)
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12 comments:
Congratulations Tom. Just hope NT don't try to sue the ass off you now :)
Fortunately it was sold for use end of April, so before NT started getting protectionist about their own photo library.
Tracked down where it was used. Financial Times apparently, 25 April.
Also still using a slightly oddly cropped version on line, which it hasn't paid for!
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/29f653d0-2f9d-11de-a8f6-00144feabdc0.html
Have set the Alamy dogs on them.
I am impressed! You are now truly famous. (Wouldn't know where to begin with this stock photo stuff myself.)
You're easily impressed.
All very simple really. Register. Make sure your photos match the technical specs (which isn't too difficult). Spend a few hours uploading just about everything you don't need a model release for. Spend a few more hours keywording everything once they've been accepted. Go away and do lots of other unconnected things for six months and wait for a sale.
Of course, if you're organised you'd probably continue to upload every month to increase your chance of sales - but I'm very slack!
I am spurred on by your success. I will upload 5 images for QA this coming weekend. Ooohhh! The excitement!
Believe me, the excitement wanes...
Upscaling images for Alamy.
1) Resolution?
2) Resampling mode?
We need to know. Come on Tom, spill the beans...
From memory you're aiming for uncompressed files between 48-52MB at 300dpi (with the 5DII you might not have to do much upscaling). I used bicubic resampling in PS and have also successfully passed pics upscaled in Nikon Capture.
You then save them as jpgs at highest quality, there is an upper limit for compressed jpgs to be uploaded. The guide Alamy provides for photogs on the site is actually pretty helpful at taking you through the process to get pics to submission specs.
Not that I am going to have the time (or pictures of sufficent quality) to do this, but....
- I take my image file (RAW or whatever)
- I fart about with it until I like it or get bored (so far, what I normally do)
- I then resize the image so it is 48-50MB if saved as uncompressed TIFF (or similar) using bicubic option - is a bit of trial and error needed here?
- Sharpen (if not already done so)
- Save as a Jpeg (quality 10 or above in PS
Is that it?
More or less. I'd advise working with RAW, although I have also got images based on jpg only through QC.
Avoid too much PP, I think Alamy suggests doing nothing to images if it can be helped. They certainly say sharpening should not be done.
I have sometimes done some noise reduction and a tiny amount of levels/curve adjustment if a pic needs it. Generally though, if a pic needs too much messing around with, chances are it will fail QC and isn't worth the effort.
Getting the size right is a bit of trial and error, especially at first. You can get some guidance from the figure at the bottom of the image window. However once you've worked out how much to increase the pic size, for example along the long edge, as long as you don't crop at all, you can repeat this for every photo.
Nikon Capture is quite good because it lets you pick the final output size - which makes life easier, although I was thrown slightly by the fact it doubles everything as it works in 16-bit!
To be honest, once you've done your first 10 for the initial QC test, you'll find you can process images pretty quickly and upload. The time consuming bit tends to be the keywording - but again, you can get into a rhythm for that as well.
And before everyone gets too excited, I've just noticed that you can only get paid once your balance reaches £250...so a while to go before you see any cash!
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