Try To Profit From Your Photography Talents

Real World Aviation Spotting
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Hello planespotters,

in this post I’d like to give you a quick insight on stock photography. I will also give you info on the site I use und recommend (Alamy).

Just to let you know I am relatively new to stock photography myself and would love to hear from some of your experiences with aviation stock photography, may it be Alamy or any other website, and if you agree or disagree with what I’m saying.

The Jetphotos prescreening thread made by ka77 has proven that there are many talented aviation photographers here in the community who deserve to earn some money off of their work.

I know some of you might think that you really enjoy taking photos of planes and don’t need to get any money out of it. You happily upload them to Jetphotos or Planespotters and get nothing much out of it - which is fine. This is what I thought as well for a long time.

Until someone told me:

‘Picasso liked painting, Taylor Swift likes singing and Messi likes playing football’.

Some of the pics I see in the JP prescreening thread are mesmerizing, and I really do believe many of you could benefit in uploading them to stock photography sites.

Why Alamy?

Travel photos are very sellable on Alamy (aircraft go under this category).

You receive a lot more money on average per photo than on other sites like Getty or Shutterstock. This does mean that sales are more rare on Alamy, though, however photographers receive up to 50% payment on each photo, as apposed to 10-15% on most stock photography sites.

Stock photography sites in general allow sooooooo much more freedom in the way you crop, edit and compose your shots.

In my opinion, Jetphotos has in a way brainwashed me into believing that if a plane isn’t perfectly centered, taken from the perfect angle (frontlit) or isn’t quite perfectly exposed or whatever, that it is rubbish. This is rarely the case. I have uploaded multiple photos to alamy that could never make it onto JP.

Evidently you can put amazing shots onto JP or Planespotters, but your creativity is so much more restricted.

There is a very well explained guide on how to upload your photos to Alamy on the Alamy website.

Here are some of my pics that would have had no chance on Jetphotos (I’m not doing this to advertise my photos in any way. I genuinely want to give some decent advice here):

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You know, I think this would also be a great confidence booster.

Will for sure try this out.

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Yeah absolutely!

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How much money have you made in a certain period of time, this seems interesting

I see that one copy is 23 usd, like how often do people buy them?

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I actually don’t have any sales yet myself, as I’ve only got 28 pics on Alamy so far. To get an average of 1 sale a month, you need about 500-1000 photos on sale.

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Oh my that’s a lot

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Yeah, welcome to the world of stock photography. Like I said, if you upload to Shutterstock, IStock, Getty, etc. you will sell a lot more photos, but usually for less than half a pound.

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But of course it doesn’t only have to be photos of planes. Other categories like Street photography, landscape, technology, you name it, are great too.

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I must say, though, that stock photography sales are becoming less frequent due to ai. People create ai images even when there are loads of real photos out there which are 100 times better than what ai has generated. They don’t care, though, to them it is ‘good enough’, sadly.

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