A CG Stock Contributor, my first stumbling steps…

I thought I should write a few words of how I got into iStockphoto.

I was working at a company as a flash developer in 2006, and a colleague of mine who was interested in photography talked about this site called iStockphoto and how he tried to get approved for a contributor account there. I vaguely thought that maybe I could do that as well, but submit my CG work as stock footage and I signed up for an account, but at that time, I didn’t have enough free time to take the next step and send in samples to get accepted as a contributor.

Then I more or less forgot about it and it took until March 2007 for me to return to the site and send in my three application sample images which led to that I got my contributor account at iStockphoto approved a few days later.

Not knowing much about stock images, I sent in my first image, which was a shot of a Dry Martini with some Olives in a blue-grey environment. That was sort of my test image to evaluate if there was any point in doing this, and see if anyone would buy it.

Months passed by and with a stock portfolio of this single image I didn’t sell one single copy. Looking back at it now, it was probably not a suitable stock image, which the lack of interest for it shows (it was not until January 2008, someone bought one license of this image, and til today, that’s still the only one I’ve sold of it.)

Anyway, in May 2007, I had to re-render an old image of mine for a print run. It was a Science Fiction image of a Futuristic City I had created a few years earlier. As I now had it rendered it in an extremely high resolution, I thought that well, even though I haven’t sold anything on iStock so far, it wouldn’t hurt to send this one in as well, as I anyway had it rendered out. Said and done, and it got accepted.

And about a month later I had my first iStock sale. Woohoo!

It was just a few dollars, but still, it proved to me that the site worked. And it has continued to sell copies now and then since (and it still does even today). Doing some calculations on the amount of sales and money earned I quickly realized that it would take forever before I even would reach the minimum payout amount. But you can’t judge something accurately with only two images, so as this one did sell, I decided I’d keep adding images now and then and see how things evolved.

The third image I added, changed it all for me and was an eye opener for the possibilites of working with micro stock. But I’ll save that story for my next post. This was a brief introduction of how I got my feet wet and got started in the Stock Photo world with my CG images.