Making Your Own Stock Photography with Your Digital Camera
By Harry Kaplanian
March 26, 2004

There are basically two ways of making your own stock photography.
1. You conceptualize an idea and then take a photograph to match.
2. Have fun by taking your camera where ever you go keeping your eyes and mind open for any interesting shots that you might encounter.

Get to know your digital camera
More important then the type, brand or quality of your camera is the knowledge of what the camera is capable of under different conditions. You'll be surprised with the results you can get from a low end camera. The most important thing is to spend time playing with your camera under varied conditions. It is important to remember that you no longer have the constraints or costs of film. Force yourself to overcome your traditional feelings to conserve film. Try taking a picture of the subject several times at different F-stop settings. Try it again at different speed settings. If the camera has bracketing abilities, learn how to set this feature and practice with it extensively. Pay special attention to any odd effects you notice appearing under particular conditions and settings. See if you can reproduce them. Take the same pictures in the morning, mid-day, afternoon and night time and see what happens and how you can make the photograph work. Try odd angles and views. Try points of view that you would normally never use. The most important issue here is to have fun! After spending time and understanding your camera, you will begin to notice an increase in quality and interest of your photographs. You will soon notice images that you and others would want to use.

Smaller Cameras
One of the advantages of cheaper smaller cameras is that you can take them with you virtually anywhere you go. If you are walking around and see something that might make an interesting shot, you can easily take out your not so bulky camera and compose a fantastic photograph with it. Also, people don’t tend to take a small camera seriously when seen in public. You don’t look like a professional and you don’t get noticed. This allows you to take advantage of photographic situations as they arise. Small cameras lend themselves to natural subjects and situations. Large professional looking SLR cameras make people nervous and uncomfortable. Security guards are also less likely to expel you from a building or scene if they think you are photographing personal images.

Archiving digital images
After several weeks or months of experimentation, you will probably end up with a large collection of images that take up quite a large amount of disk space. It’s time to figure out some sort of a backup solution. You can try writing the images to CD, but if your digital camera is capable of 3 or more mega-pixels, the CD solution may be time consuming and restricting. DVD-Writers have drastically dropped in price and can store 7 to 8 times the data CDs are capable of. You may eventually consider a tape backup unit or even another hard disk drive to copy and backup data.

Show the world
If you think you are ready to share your images with the rest of the world, try some of the on-line Stock Photo Web sites. Many of them accept digital photos from other photographers. Some of them are listed in our cool sites link. You might even be able to recoup some of your initial costs. Another option is to create your own web site to expose your works to the rest of the world.