Best place to sell your photos and granting your copyright of your stuff

freedom21 wrote:

The wonders of the Internet, and the digital world. i wonder how people will live, if everything that you do is for free?

Anyway, I remember in a wedding asking a photographer to sell me the negative of a picture of mine, and he refuses... he said to me - it is not for sale, if you want another copy, tell me, pay me, and I print you one, and send it to you...

Maybe back then, a photographer could still make a living from taking photos...

So what do you do if you want to share/show a photo on the Internet, and earn at least a symbolic payment, r that your rights are somehow granted?

Thanks kypfer

Basically, the internet is a "free place". The very nature of the medium means that I can right-click on almost any image and save it to my hard drive.

Your problem, as a potential seller, is to make the presented image sufficiently attractive that people might want a copy, but presented in such a way that a download is of little interest.

As with your wedding photographer, retaining the original negative or digital file and only supplying printed copies is one way around it, but you've got to remember that these days it's so easy to make a good quality copy of any printed image, just using the flat-bed scanner incorporated in so many consumer ink-jet printers, that even selling one high-resolution copy is potentially opening the door to "illegal" copying, should the image really be that good!

Any printed image will need to be of top quality, not just bashed out on a desktop inkjet, but printed in good-quality long-lasting inks on heavy-duty paper, so there's a significant investment there even before you've sold anything. Work through an agency, who've already made that investment, and they'll be taking their (probably sizeable) cut from any sale, so you'll have to sell even more pictures to even make any effort worthwhile.

When you pay a wedding photographer to take pictures of your wedding, you're not just paying for the pictures, but for the time and experience that goes in to making those pictures, so that they are all carefully framed, correctly exposed and no-one is left out.

Very few professional photographers rely on "random" photo's to make any significant income, moreso they present their personal favourites framed and/or mounted in such a way as to make the whole an attractive package, not just a photo for the customer to mount as they wish.

As I implied earlier, "rights" are a very flexible concept and will vary from country to country. As soon as you post on the internet you're laying yourself wide open to exploitation, vainly hoping that a few decent-minded individuals will consider paying you the "going rate" … you'll need to be "good" to make anything more than a bit of pin money like that!

Good luck