Selling photos on Stock Photo sites

[scottynz]

Hi, I have a lot of great images from my years of backpacking around the world (mainly landscape and cityscape, but also some good people shots). I know that many of these are good enough to sell and be published in print publications or on websites and I want to get them on a stock photo site (or several) to try and earn some revenue from them).
I'm just a bit confused as to what to do?! Having read the conditions on Photographersdirect.com, I'm inclined to want to stay away from microstock sites where I would get 50c for a pic that might end up on a magazine cover. However, my shots have been taken on a Fuji Finepix S5500 which is an amazing camera but with only 4.2 mpx - not quite meeting the 6mpx requirement of Photographersdirect.
On the other hand, I've read reports by people who make over $2K a month from having 1000 or so pics on several microstock sites. They upload bulk, saturate the market with their pics and sit back and let the money come in.
With the quality of shots you can get on micro stock sites these days, is anyone even bothering going to a site such as Photographersdirect? Am I better off just biting the bullet and loading bulk images on many sites rather than maybe selling a few images on a more reputable site (site suggestions please??) at a higher cost?
Thanks for your help

 

[tirediron]

Hi, I have a lot of great images from my years of backpacking around the world (mainly landscape and cityscape, but also some good people shots). I know that many of these are good enough to sell and be published in print publications or on websites and I want to get them on a stock photo site (or several) to try and earn some revenue from them).
I'm just a bit confused as to what to do?! Having read the conditions on Photographersdirect.com, I'm inclined to want to stay away from microstock sites where I would get 50c for a pic that might end up on a magazine cover. However, my shots have been taken on a Fuji Finepix S5500 which is an amazing camera but with only 4.2 mpx - not quite meeting the 6mpx requirement of Photographersdirect.
On the other hand, I've read reports by people who make over $2K a month from having 1000 or so pics on several microstock sites. They upload bulk, saturate the market with their pics and sit back and let the money come in.
With the quality of shots you can get on micro stock sites these days, is anyone even bothering going to a site such as Photographersdirect? Am I better off just biting the bullet and loading bulk images on many sites rather than maybe selling a few images on a more reputable site (site suggestions please??) at a higher cost?
Thanks for your help

And I've read of people who make $2000.00 a month stuffing envelopes from the comfort of their home. Granted, it's possible, but given the saturation level of most microstock sites, I wouldn't want to imagine just how many images you'd need to have to make $2000.00 a month. Personally, I steer clear of all of that.

 

[XtremeElemenT]

the only 3 i would recommend are:

getty images
Alamy

and maybe photoshelter.

getty and alamy are by far the best sellers of stock images where photographers can make decent money for their photos.

Photoshelter is still a quite new company but it is slowly getting seen in the market and the sales are increasing.

You can upscale your photos in photoshop using the bicubic smoothing method. I do this for my stock images on alamy because the uncompressed file needs to at least 50mb and my 12.3mp raw file is somewhere around 18mb so i upscale to 25mp lol and it becomes around 73-78mb file and still looks sharp.

You have to remember you probably wont start seeing sells till you break the 300 mark of photos in portfolio and then youll probably start seeing a steady cash flow once you break 1,000 images

 

[scottynz]

Thanks for the feedback guys!
Xtreme, when you say 'Steady cash flow' what sort of amounts are you meaning? Does anyone realistically make a living from Alamy or are we talking $100 a month or so as a supplement to another income?
Here's the report from a guy making over $2K on mcro stock sites: http://www.dphotojournal.com/sell-photos-online/. Sounds like a lot of work to get up and running but the payoff is good!