In Microstock Photogaphy, to sell photos online, every effort should be made to ensure each of your photos is the most appealing, best representation of your subject possible. The digital photographer should be able to manipulate 'most' photos to look substantially better than the subject itself in real life. The difference between a good photo and a Great photo is hundreds of dollars.

Points to consider are:

• Composition
• Cropping
• White
• Macro
• Colors
• The best subjects!
• Finishing touches and attention to detail.

Photographs speak for themselves. Microstock photography is about creating interesting and salable compositions which stand out amongst the competition. If your food photos dont make people people hungry you need to work harder at preparing the food or taking better photos. The more appealing the photo, the more photos you will sell online. Even very small subtle changes can have a huge impact upon sales.

In microstock photography it is common practise for photographers to create a composition which leaves an unused area of the photo empty, so that designers/publishers can insert text into this area. This empty area is called "copy space" and the words 'copy space' can be inserted into your keywords.

Cropping is a HUGELY powerful and very important aspect of microstock photography. For your images to sell, they need to stand out as thumbnails. Dynamic and dramatic thumbnails get more clicks, and sales. How much impact does cropping actually have? Here is an example based on a very subtle minor change.

The burger on the left has been cropped more heavily and stands out to buyers as a better thumbnail.

The burger on the right just wasnt selling as well as I expected it to. I deleted it and resubmitted it again after cropping away the empty space, and the popularity of the burger on the left the second time round (over the same period of time) was 500% greater! The extra effort taken means that its now one of the best selling burger photos on Shutterstock :) It is true that cropping heavily doesnt give designers much copy space to work with, and cropping heavily is not always the best answer. But bigger subjects in thumbnails will have a very strong and positive impact upon your photo sales. If you want to sell photos online, you need to grab the attention of the buyers who are very quickly sifting through hundreds (or thousands) of similar shots.

Lighting your subjects is also important. A light tent (also called a light box or an infinity tent) helps to diffuse light and provides a white background. Do a search for pets. You will notice that the most popular pet photos are often those which were shot on white, whilst general pet snapshots do not sell as well. Shooting subjects and making them "isolated" "on white" or "over white" (more keywords for your images) allows the microstock photographer to blow out the background. And blown out white backgrounds appeal to buyers because they have less processing to do, as you have isolated their subject for them! Vary your shots of course. Not every buyer wants an image on a white background.

Bear in mind the fact that we are all bombarded with imagery by the media daily, in magazine adverts, the TV, billboards and posters. Nearly every image we see has been processed, and the fact of the matter is that if you want your photos to be noticed (and bought) they will also need to stand out. Shooting colourful subjects and making your existing subjects more colorful than they are in reality will help boost your sales tremendously! Make your subjects as colorful and vibrant as you possibly can, without making them look artificially so.

The less processing you do, the higher the quality of the image will be. Remember that whilst more colorful images are better, designers like to know the photos they are buying are of the highest quality possible. The colors of the prawn salad photo below was not enhanced, other than a simple tweaking of the brightness/ contrast, a lightening of the shadows and an unsharp mask. Whilst you can (and should) tweak the levels of your photos, it is better to shoot and light the image correctly in the first place.

Generally speaking, the best selling subjects are usually of a business, lifestyle or conceptual theme. Photos of attractive women sell very well too, and most creative or conceptual people/ model photos are quite lucrative. Food shots also sell very well, and have a longer shelf life. Photos of your pets, landscapes and flowers do not sell very well, generally speaking. Thats not to say you cant make a good money from a pet shot, because you can. The gerbil photo below sells exceedinly well, and is quite popular. Note the use of a white background and copy space.

An image of nearly any subject can sell. Ive sold photos of garden taps, gnawed bones, mouldy bread and rotten fruit. An easy and sensible way of determining which images are going to help your portfolio generate more sales is to scan through current the "most popular" photos, and find ones which you feel you can improve upon. If you want to sell photos online, then spend time planning your shoots in advance, printing off shots which are best sellers, thinking of ways to improve upon them, and then taking the time to get the shot you are after.

Learning to correctly keyword photos will also help boost sales.