One of my gecko designs at CafePress
At the beginning of my venture to earn money online, I did have the brilliant idea of harnessing the power of my pet geckos and Zoidberg the frog, and putting their photos on a stock photography site. Well that was a complete and utter failure! After 4 months there is exactly zero interest in my beautiful flatmates. Still I intend to persevere with the concept, the pictures are great, obviously the execution just needs a little tweaking. Continue reading
The fateful day has arrived! I have left the lab for the last time (as an official employee at least). I managed to sneak out without much pomp and ceremony but left this goodbye poster on a couple noticeboards, and went to the pub next to the Institute with friends for some redundancy beer.
I came, I mapped, I left defeated
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I stumbled on the whole concepts of stock photographs when I began working on my gecko site and needed some nice images of leopard and crested geckos, which I don’t keep. The internet is awash of gecko pictures (the internet is awash with everything), but I started worrying about copyright. Anyway a bit of googling later I came across 123RF, a site that buys and sells royalty free stock photographs, you pay them a little bit of money and you can use the photo for free (although you don’t buy the copyright, so they don’t sell it exclusively to you). Each photo came under £1, for the small size.
Because of my new-found pit-bull terrier like focus on making money online I decided to sell some of my own stock photographs. This resulted in hours of looking through all my snaps on Picassa. One of the problems is that they couldn’t have any sentient beings in them, well they could but then you have to submit a release from the people in the photos, which I didn’t really want to ask for. Quite a few of possible photos were too small, I lost the original files, to sell them as stock photographs they have to be big in pixels, facebook compresses your images! Anyway eventually I selected 12 photos, and submitted them. One thing that I found strange was that I had to upload a photo of my passport.
It gave me great satisfaction to think that 10 of my photos are now “stock photographs” online, marked with 123RF copyright, waiting to be sold (I think I make 50% from the sale). I sat there holding my breath, waiting for the clamour for photos of Zoidberg, the giant waxy monkey frog who lives in my flat, to start and requests to pour in. Incidentally Zoidberg definitely considers himself to be a Sentient Being and I tend to agree but I guess 123RF aren’t worried about him suing them, and I don’t think he minds being the subject of stock photographs, he didn’t say anything when I asked him. After a few minutes I looked to see how many photos there are on the site: >1 million. Ok I guess people might have some trouble finding Zoidberg amongst all the inane flower and tree pictures. It is really worth persevering though, I mean don’t you think he’s the coolest frog ever? Did you notice the green nail polish he uses? Don’t you want to buy a photo of him? I could even throw in a complimentary recording of his love songs with which he serenades my neighbours every night!
Well it pains me to say that the users of 123RF.com are not very appreciative of my arm-chair wildlife photography, no pictures have sold yet. I should upload more photos, for this I obviously needed a new camera, so I quickly went to amazon and bought one. Yes I know I’m supposed to make money, not spend it, but this is “investment”. As soon as the weather improves I will go out and take some great pictures which will make me rich!
