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Shooting stock comes with its own set of rules, and while rules are indeed meant to be broken, it requires that you know what you’re doing, or you might end up getting your images turned down by inspectors such as myself and my colleagues on iStockphoto. In the following, I will list 10 of the most common mistakes made by new photographers. If you think some of the advice here looks obvious, that’s a good sign you’re already one step of other people starting out.

1. Don’t Copy Other Photographers

This should be the most obvious of all the tips, yet it is one that cannot be repeated enough. Not only is blatant copying a kind of theft, it will also get you a reputation amongst your peers as a ripper. Other photographers will be wary of you and might start following your work, just to turn you in and protect their own work. If a particular photo really rocks your world, by all means try to replicate it to learn how it was done – but don’t upload it as your own afterwards. Consider it practice.

The line between inspiration and copyism is very thin in the stock world, since many pictures are based on the same themes and metaphors. A really good tip, when you’re planing your shoot, is to search for existing pictures covering the same subject, so you know what to avoid. Or at least make sure you mix it up enough, that your own style is applied to the work.

2. Save at the Highest Possible Quality

Every time you save a jpg-file, it is compressed a little more. Even if you do save at the highest setting. The result is degrading image quality, which may lead to noise and compression artifacts and ultimately image rejection. Shooting in RAW is your first step to avoiding this, and if you need to save your work mid-way through editing, save it as a PSD of TIFF file, which does not compress the image. Only at the very end of image processing, should you save the photo as a jpg, and then you should pick the highest possible quality. Don’t ever use Photoshop’s save for web feature, when processing stock images. It will mess with you colors and cause bad compression.

3. Avoid High ISO

Try to always shoot at ISO 100 or lower. Noise is one of the most common reasons for image rejections, and high ISO means more noise. Some argue that it is comparable to grain in film images, but digital noise does not have same qualities as film grain, and it simply looks bad. Sometimes higher ISO is necessary to avoid blurryness, but try to keep it no higher than 200. Very rarely will a photo taken at ISO 400 be good enough, and anything higher than that will almost certainly not get accepted.

4. Watch Your Filters

There are many fun and artsy filters, you can apply to your pictures, but when you’re shooting stock, you will want to be very careful about not overdoing it. As a rule of thumb, if an applied filter looks unreal or doesn’t blend in perfectly with the overall image, you’ve gone too far. The same goes for noise reduction, which can erase detail and give your photo a plastic look if overdone. Other examples of over filtering include using a water ripple filter, to make fake watery reflections, and fake cross-processing.

5. Mind Edges and Background

Oftentimes when a photo falls into the snapshot category, which is likely to get your work rejected, it is because attention was not paid to the background. Your image is more than just the subject in the front. The position of the horizon, the amount of clutter, placement of things like lights, windows and other people, all of this and more might mess up your background.

You might think that, if you shoot isolated objects, this is not important. If you successfully manage to get a completely white background (or whatever color you are isolating against), this is true to a certain extent, but you will still need to pay attention to the edges and blown out highlights. If your subject is lit, so that the highlights blend into the background, you’ve got a problem. All edges should be watched carefully when isolating – is it too hard or too soft?

Related to this is the crop of your image. If you’ve cropped your image, so it looks like your model has half an arm, this will take away from the value of the photo, both from a usefulness point of view and when the inspector is looking at it. Creative cropping is fine. Sloppy cropping is not.

6. Watch the Lighting

Most of this has already been mentioned, but lighting is so important, I will sum it up again here: Never ever use direct flash. Avoid harsh light and the equally harsh shadows it creates. Finally, also in relation to edges and background, you should watch for purple fringing. All of this is discussed in greater detail in my entry about lighting in stock photography.

7. Logos and Copyrighted Stuff

It should go without saying, that putting a logo in your stock photo is a violation of that particular trademark. Likewise, if you take a picture that features someone else’s artwork, that artwork is most likely subject to copyright and may not be used for royalty free stock. The exception to this is art in the public domain (not the same as being shown in public), and it really comes down to research. You would be surprised at the things, that are trademarked and copyrighted, and if you are in doubt about something, google it and check for any official websites and legal information offered there. And if you find that what you have is okay to use, make sure you put a note to that effect in your image description.

This can be painstaking work, but in the end it could mean the difference between having an image rejected or accepted. My advice is to do what the image inspectors do: Err on the side of caution. In the end, if someone is sued for copyright infringement, it will be you and not the stock agency.

8. Text in Your Images

Generally speaking, any kind of text in stock photography takes away from the usefulness, because it narrows the ways in which the photo can be used. Pictures of signs with text on it, will often fall into the snapshot category as well, which means that it has very slim chances of making it into your stock portfolio, and even worse is digitally added text, which is almost always instantly recognizable as such, and ties into the whole creative filtering thing (as in: it looks fake). In other words: Don’t take pictures of pure text and don’t add it to your images afterwards.

A classic mistake is the picture with copy space (a good thing), where the photographer has added ”Your text here” across it in post processing. Leave it blank and let the designers use it without having to first remove what you put in.

9. Check at Full Resolution

Avoiding noise and taking your processing too far is to some extent a matter of keeping an eye on your work as you go. Doing that requires you to check and re-check what you’re about to upload at 100% resolution. It’s easier to get an overall idea of your image by looking at a smaller version that fits on your monitor, but at 50% you won’t see pixel discoloration or the plastic-like result of too much noise reduction.

Make it a habit to zoom in to full resolution after each change to your photo, and check for degradation of quality. Pay special attention to darker areas (pixel discoloration), color gradients (chunky noise and banding) and spots with fine detail (loss of said detail). These are spots where image degradation is most easily noticed and the first places an image inspector will look.

10. Be Selective

Your stock portfolio is meant for commercial use. Keep this in mind and leave your holiday snapshots for Flickr and e-mailing friends and family. Occasionally snapshots will be good enough to have commercial value, but uploading everything you shoot will only lower the overall quality of your portfolio and probably get you a ton of frustrating rejection notices.

Being selective is more than avoiding snapshots however. Even if you have a model, a good background and a concept behind your shoot, you shouldn’t upload everything that’s on your compact flash card. Make every image in your portfolio different enough to stand out from the others in the same series. Not only will you save designers from having to decide between five images that look almost exactly the same, but your portfolio will just look better, if it’s more than endless repetition. Stand out by being selective and appear more professional in doing so.

Personally, I try to aim for uploading 1 in 10 shots, but most of the time, I end up with something closer to half of that, which is still totally fine, since I shoot at least a couple of hundred shots per session. If you have a hard time picking, enlist the help of others. Ask them which one they would pick and why. If you haven’t been copying other photographers, you will find that they can be excellent helpers in a case like this.

Common sense and understanding the difference between good photography and usable stock is really the key to getting a good image acceptance ratio. If you find that only half of what you upload gets through the inspection process, referring to this list might be a good place to start, but don’t let it discourage you too much. Even seasoned photographers miss the occasional logo and have a hard time picking which photos to upload, and while image rejections are frustrating, they will help you understand how to find that balance and ultimately make you a better stock photographer.

This post is part 10 in a series about my experiences with stock photography, tips and pointers, meant to offer a little inspiration to those interested in such things. The next installment will be an introduction to portfolio building. For a complete and chronological list of articles, check out the Microstock Photographer’s Guide.

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