This is a guest post series by photographer Evi Abeler. If you would like to write about food photography on learn food photography, visit guest post page to learn more.
Have you been taking a lot of food photos for yourself and not published them? In this post Evi shares with us how you can put those images to good use.
What to do with all these food images?
After 5 months of photographing food I have accumulated quite a collection of images on my hard drives. I was looking for a way to get them out into the world and a friend who works in the stock image industry recommended to submit my unused images to StockFood. I browsed their website and found that they have quality stock photos, a good reputation and professional photographers working for them. I love that they list their photographers and frequently send out image wish lists. You will find quite a few names you might be familiar with on their site. In comparison to Getty or Corbis they are a small and select stock house that takes time to connect with their photographers.
Submission Process
"Sure, why not!" I don’t expect to see a ton of revenue, but another income stream and the additional marketing will be great for me. I sent the StockFood representative a link to my website and they requested a sample submission from me. So, I took a day to clean up and prepare about 50 images and sent them out. The submission guidelines are quite specific. They accepted my submission and I just signed my contract. (Yippee!!!) The copyright stays with me and they have the right to market and license these images worldwide for the next three years in exchange I get 40% of the net revenue. Besides the marketing they will also take care of image editing, data acquisition, key wording in several languages, captioning, customer advice and customer service, order processing, photo dispatch, recipe text production and account settlement.
Images submitted
For my submission I was looking for beautiful images that are not too time or location specific and that represent my style. I submitted a bunch of images from the shot with the Crosstown Bakery, my recent shot with food stylist Laura Knoop as well as some of my own set ups. Here are a few examples:
After I am set up with them I am planning to contact the editor to see what kind of images they think I should work on and will set aside a few days a month to shoot stock. So keep an eye on their portfolio list, soon you’ll find me there on the very top!
Maybe you are considering submitting your images to a stock site as well. Here are two websites I found helpful: Selling Stock, Stock Photo Talk
So long,
Evi
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Stock Photography eBook
Nicole Young has written a great eBook on Stock Photography. And its only $5. You can learn more about the eBook here.
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Food Photographer’s Diary Series
Here are other posts from Evi’s food photography journey–
- Starting in food photography
- Food photography portfolio event
- First photography shoot for restaurant.
- Her food photography studio
- Shooting first food video
- Food shoot with a food stylist
Do you have a similar story? Would you like to share your food photography journey on learn food photography? visit guest post page to learn more.
Hi Evi, thanks for sharing with us again. I just checked stockfood’s submission guideline, it says it expects the image file to be at least 34MB, but even when i shoot RAW, my photos are only a few MB, do I understand it wrong or something?
Hi Yue. You need to convert your RAW file to an 8 bit Tiff file and then see what size it is. Any camera over 12MP should be fine to meet the minimum file size requirement.
Ron
That is right Ron. I export my files as 8 bit Tiff files, 400 dpi, at least 30″ wide or long..and get around 40MB per file.
Thank you Ron!
Some great information and images as always. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you!
Thanks for sharing this information with us Evi.
A very informative post. Have been thinking in this direction….
Hi Evi,
I have also just sent off some of our images to Stockfood in the hope they will be accepted. I’m so excited to (hopefully) be able to use some of our hundreds (if not thousands) of pics we have taken over the last year. Wish us luck! Keep us posted on your most popular photo sales Evi, and we will do the same. Will be interesting to see what sells!
Hi Ingrid and Vanessa,
Good luck with stock photography. Do share with us how you experience was and what you learned.
Good Luck!
Hi Evi,
Thanks for the info.
What exactly do you mean “they will also take care of image editing” ?
They send out themed promos and image galleries to clients, which they’ll edit/crop images for. They also have the right to manipulate the image.
I have been wondering about stock photography for a while now. Can you keep us updated on how it is going?
Will do….I think it will take at least 3-6 month to see some action…
Hi Evi, How long did it take to receive a reply after you sent the first ten photos to stockfood?
I contacted them with a link to my website and received an initial response pretty quickly, within a week, asking me to make a full submission….which was approved about 5 weeks later….then another 2 weeks or so for the contract to be sent back and forth…and it will take them another months to get the images into the database.
Hi Evi and Neel and all
Pleased to report that Stockfood has invited us also to become contributors, so we are currently going through our photos in order to select an initial 50 pics to put on disk. I work for a magazine company, so any tips that I can give anyone trying to do the same is to keep images simple and modern, and uncluttered. No saucy smears or fancy foams!!! Sometimes just taking a picture of an apple with beautiful soft lighting can capture a mood. I’m also awaiting a response from Stockfood to find out if we can keep our images on our blog and flickr site or whether that is considered a breach of contract, so I’ll let you know how that pans out. Its all very exciting, as Evi said we are also not expecting to make a fortune, but little bits add up and it’s another way to promote yourself.
Just an update from Stockfood about image rights, we can keep our images on our blog, flickr site, website, any marketing material and even showcase them in an exhibition, we just can’t (obviously) sell to any other agency or sell to any other party.