It’s a shame – it would be good to think someone could fill in the mid-ground between the really expensive stuff Getty do and the cheap low-end microstock, which pays photographers so little it barely seems to be worth it.

• Photoshelter’s Announcement

I submitted ten images, but didn’t actually regenerate them to match their requirements. After reading their standards later, they should have been saved with AdobeRGB, not sRGB, should have been output at a higher JPEG quality level, shouldn’t have been sharpened, and shouldn’t have had their colours played with as much as I did.

So, I’m quite pleased that they accepted three of the images, which can now be bought for use as stock photos. If you want to see what got accepted, here’s my photo page. I’ve submitted a few more now, so hopefully some of those will join the initial three soon.

Submitting the images wasn’t too difficult – very similar to uploading to Flickr. For generating images with the right settings, I’ve made a new export profile in LightRoom, and I’m creating second versions of some images so I can do more colour tweaking and add vignettes for the copes that I’ll put on Flickr, while keeping the ones for PhotoShelter a bit cleaner.

Why PhotoShelter rather than one of the many microstock sites? A few reasons:

• Most microstock sites I’ve looked at have very precise standards for submitted photos, with many wanting really huge files. That’s extra time and effort to produce the files, and extra time to upload each one.
• Very small payouts. They are geared up for selling images as many times as they can, but the payment per sale is usually only a few cents.
• Most will only accept ‘perfect’ images, with very little style to them.

I’d end up spending a lot of time and effort doing the sort of photography I don’t really enjoy, with relatively little reward.

PhotoShelter seems to have a chance of more payout, though that remains unknown until one or more of my photos actually sells, but they accept images of they type I actually enjoy taking.