How to sell your pictures

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The most basic tenet of retailing is to try and provide what the customer wants to buy, rather than wanting the customer to buy what someone wants to sell. This means developing a sense of the 'market', and looking at the characteristics of images bought by media professionals like graphic designers, in order to promote their clients' products, whether that is an actual item, or a service.

On a technical level, photographs should be optimised for the reproduction process they are going to pass through. This means being correctly exposed, properly focussed, and with good mid-tone contrast. Digital images tend to have flattened midtones caused by the camera's linear tonal reproduction characteristic, which should be rendered to the photographer's intent in converting the digital raw file to the tiff that is submitted to a picture library (you do shoot raw files, don't you?). Film images naturally have higher mid-tone contrast already.

You will need a robust 'workflow', or image production sequence from origination to the image finally sent to the library. Programs that organise this workflow in the computer are called digital asset management programs. An excellent guide and information resource to digital workflow can be found here.