As of this morning, I’ve officially passed the Alamy guidelines and quality control checks and I’m officially represented by Alamy!
I suppose I should back up a little. I’ve been getting more and more into shooting “stock” photography. What this means is that I submit photos I’ve taken that may be of commercial interest to stock agencies. They market the images and sell them and the photographer is paid a commission. There are two major approaches to stock photography — microstock and macrostock. Essentially, microstock groups images quite cheap, generally on a subscription basis. Graphic designers, PR firms and other parties purchase the rights to these images and use them in however they want (or as stipulated by the license agreement). Money can be made by selling large quantities of images.
Macrostock, on the other hand, deals with generally very high quality images which can have tighter restrictions. Images rights are purchased for a specific project. Information such as size of image and production run are all factored in and the buyer is allowed to use the image for the specified time frame. Alamy is one of the major players in the macrostock marketplace.
For more information, Wikipedia has a good description of stock photography. Alamy themselves have a good description of exactly who they are.
In order to get accepted by Alamy as a contributor, one must submit four photos for quality inspection. If any of the four aren’t perfect, they reject the whole batch and you have to start over again. Judging by some of the forums I’ve read, this can be a somewhat troublesome task. Thankfully, I didn’t have any trouble so I either got lucky, or my photos are better than I thought. Now that I’ve been accepted, I can submit larger batches of photos (which still have to pass random spot checks for quality) and I can begin hopefully, selling images. Time will tell how well this plays out!
As I write this, my images are in the queue to become publicly viewable within 24 hours. With that said, the logo below is a link to my Alamy home page and should begin to have pictures listed very soon!
Since this is a numbers game (the more photos I have for sale the more I’ll sell), I will continue to upload so this page should have more and more photos as the weeks go by!
I’ll be sure to keep everyone posted if I make a sale!