STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY START

Today I sold my first photo, for $10. That might not seem like much, but for me it's a milestone.

The golden age of stock photography is long gone, so everyone says: digital has opened the floodgates and getting noticed is much harder. So is making a living from it, but it still seems that a bit of pocket money on the side is possible.

I tried submitting to stock photo sites a few years ago, and have had my own online gallery up for five years, but no luck.

Trying to get on two of the biggest stock photography sites, Shutterstock and Fotolia, was a joke. For the former, I was required to submit ten pictures, have them scrutinised, and get at least seven approved. I dutifully uploaded my best, carefully checked to see if similar photos were on their books and happily noted that mine were technically superior, only to have all ten rejected. Every single one. The photos were returned with helpful comments such as these words appended to a black and white night shot of an illuminated Japanese castle: "too dark." Yes, it's a night photo, most of the frame is dark, except for the correctly exposed castle, which was bright. Apparently the comments were produced by robots, given their largely bizarre and inappropriate nature.

With Fotolia I didn't even get as far as that. I had to verify my identity by uploading a passport photocopy, but no matter which browser I used, their software just failed to function. I emailed them to ask whether I couldn't just send it to them as an attachment, but just got the runaround from various unhelpful staff.

Then late last year, having got bored of Instagram and its futile 'likes' collecting, I had a look at EyeEm. On the face of it, a similar kind of social networking photo community to Instagram, but with a crucial difference: a built-in marketplace to sell pictures, and a deal with big league player Getty Images. And also a generally much higher level of photography on show.

For the last two months I've been uploading a few of my best DSLR pics every day, tagging them and getting them approved for sale (they are professional about this : images with recognisable property and people need release forms in order to be sold commercially).

I was a bit dubious at first, wondering if anyone actually sold anything, but today I got the proof of this.

I've also been building up a portfolio at Stockimo and FOAP, both exclusively dealing with smartphone photography. We'll see what happens there...

I'm not expecting any sudden surge of cash coming my way, but it's very gratifying to have achieved my goal, which was to just sell one picture. To prove that I could do it. I know I'm a second-rate photographer: quite good, but not very good. But there's still scope for financial rewards, and that is without compromising my art, which is very important to me. You won't see me taking shots of good-looking people in suits in front of corporate buildings, for example :)

So you really can earn money from your photography. Don't be under any illusions, though: like anything else for which you might receive financial rewards, it's hard work. Not only do you have to have a large number of images of decent quality, both technically and artistically, there is also the drudgery of uploading and tagging these pictures, which is more time-consuming than you might imagine, and then they have to be screened for suitability, so not all of your pictures will make it. But by all means give it a go - it costs you nothing to start submitting.