Unique Stock Photography (How to make your stock photos sell)

The first images you'll see when you google the word stock photo are clean cut businessmen and women shaking hands in the cleanest corporate environments you'll ever see. These kind of images sell very well and are heavily used in campaigns around the world. The main problem with us relatively new comers to stock photography is that if we tried to tackle this market we'd be fighting the big boys in the royalty free image industries. That means that there's a good chance you haven't got the resources, models, staff, environments, setups or equipment to contend with the guys that are pummeling out the business stock images day in day out like conveyor belts. So whats the best angle to come in from?

In our experience the best place to start is where others haven't yet. So if you went to the search bar on www.istockphoto.com and typed in 'running', you'd get thousands of contributors 'running' photos show up. However if you typed in 'cross country running', you might only get a few dozen. So that's where you'd begin. Thats what we did, and it was the turning point in our istock career.

Our cross country running photos have been our best sellers to date.

The image in the center was used for an advert in mens fitness magazine in 2011.

This method or searching what isn't well covered applies to any subject or field that takes your fancy. If dramatic sport images aren't your thing or you don't have access to areas or models that would suit that type of photography. Then look up images that 'you' can specialise in that haven't got many images to represent them on istockphoto.

Another example of images that have worked well for us are 'stuffed crust pizzas'. Pizza is a well covered area but 'stuffed crust' came up with almost nothing. So we did these photos at a pizza shop that needed images.

These Royalty Free Pizza stock images have been a great addition to our istock portfolio. Whenever a new type of pizza style comes out at dominos or pizza hut it's a good idea to replicate the images of them for the smaller pizza shops that wish to compete by following suit.

Our latest angle on unique stock photography was focused on health and fitness. We noticed that there wasn't a lot of images to represent resistance band training. We had a few resistance bands lying around that a friend had bought for us when we moved to thailand to save on luggage weight. So we used them to create these resistance band stock photos in our living room.

Also to link in with the theme of us moving to thailand we thought we'd do a Muay Thai Kickboxing Photoshoot. Which turned out to be one of the most dramatic photoshoots we had done for a long time. The images turned out so well that istockphoto accepted them into their vetta collection straight away. Which is their premium set of images renowned for creative artistic direction.

Vetta images can get rather pricey for the customer so sometimes we choose not to nominate our good work for the collection so that we can get more smaller sales. But in this case istock chose to nominate them for us because they liked them so much.

If you are a current istockphoto customer and want an istock promo code, they are currently offering 5% off 120 credits or more at iStockphoto.com (minimum $175 purchase). Use coupon code ISTOCKEX5 during checkout. Expires 06/30/2012.

I hope that this post helps you to get a head start in your istockphoto career.