1. Establish your own webstie where you will offer photos on a chosen license type.

2. Begin cooperation with micro-stock photography sites and share profits with them.

As a beginner photographer you can decline the first method, unless you have top quality photos not so easy to find at stock photo sites. That is because you won’t be able to attract visitors to the site, and even if you will, there will be nothing interesting for them to see or buy. So, second method is our choice.

Micro-stock agencies offer their clients (buyers) photographs based mainly on Royalty Free license at prices starting from several cents per web resolution image. Higher resolution files cost more to download. Stock agencies have milions of photos, raster and vector graphics in their resources, divided on several categories. Currently there are two methods of payment for downloaded content:

• pay-as-you-go - client buys a package of “credits” which he can use at any time, downloading photos when needed. The Bigger the package of credits the cheaper one download is.
• subscription - client pays monthly fee that lets him download limited number of photos every day.

For a long time agencies mainly used only first method. Recenly they are launching subscription method parallel to pay-as-you-go.

What’s in it for photographer?

First of all, your works are in databases which are browsed by thousands of clients each day from all over the world, this is first step to selling photos. Taking into account that works on Royalty Free license can be sold many times to many clients, the royalties are very low - several cents to few dollars. So, producing works that are in high demand, (commercial ones mainly) to achieve high number of downloads is the key to success. Unless you decide to go for exclusivity with one of the agencies, you are free to upload content to every agency increasing your exposure.

How to start?

Each agency requires you to upload sample photos/graphics before accepting you as a submitter. Currently, as long as photos are concerned, you will be good with decent 6mpix DSLR. That, of course, doesn’t guarantee your acceptance, because proper framing, composition and commercial value of photos counts too. Typical stock photos depict items or people on white (or other) background. To create such photos you will need at least small, home studio. It’s worth to mention that not only isolated photos sell.
If you have everything needed then it is time to upload your work.

Where to upload?

Currently the iStockPhoto is a leader on the micro-stock market, which offers both methods of payment. Besides photos they offer raster and vector graphics, film and audio files. After registration you need to submit 3 test photos through the application form. If one of them (or more) won’t pass quality control, you need to upload another to be checked again. The whole pay system is described on royalties page.

To be continued…

Tamron seems to be little wider than KM 50mm, perhaps it’s the effect of different view angles of both lenses. Here are 100% center crops (click for full size):

Left bottom corner 100% crops:

I think Tamron out performed Minolta in the corners a little bit :)

Bokeh comparison:

Now let’s check how it looks against Sony kit lens:

No comment needed. I have compared Sony version of kit lens with the old Konica Minolta version - no differences here, but Sony has improved work of zoom ring, it’s more steady. However I don’t know if it will be ok after some extensive use, my kit lens just stands on the shelf.

If you take this lens close to the flat subject, parallel to lens and take a photo at distance below 1 meter you will see strange things in the corners. The pictures below are 100% crops from left bottom corner, taken at 50mm, distance ~0.6m, camera on tripod.

f2.8:

f4:

f5.6:

f8:

This problem gets bigger the more you close to minimum focusing distance (0.27m). If you go away around 1m or more it starts to disappear. This issue is explained in this test. As you can see it’s all about focus plane curvature.

“On the downside the extreme corners showed a very strong degree of field curvature at 17mm and a little less so at 24mm. This means that the focus plane isn’t flat but it bends towards to corners. As a consequence you will end with out-of-focus corners when shooting flat or very deep objects at large aperture settings (…). The problem will be reduced when stopping down thus increasing the depth-of-field around the curved focus plane.”

For me Tamron is a great lens anyhow. Check out a comparison of Tamron with Konica Minolta 50/1.7.

Sony foam city.

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Sony DSLR A200

Sony DSLR A350 - Polish language version

Sony DSLR A350 & A300

Sony DSLR A700 & A200

Sony DSLR range