A few months ago I took some photos of a very corporate restroom, thinking (for some crazy reason) that they might make good stock photos. I put them up on iStockphoto and pretty much forgot about them. In fact , over the last several weeks, I pretty much forgot about stock photography altogether. I have been travelling for work, trying to figure out how I want to do the real estate photography thing, taking senior pictures of my daughter, taking pictures of the Lakewood High School cheerleaders, and still trying to have a family life. Yep, pretty busy, just like you.

Then I came across a blog post about fotoLibra. I checked it out. I liked what I saw. I made some uploads and then wrote about it briefly yesterday. And in that writing, I made a mistake.

I said I hadn’t made any money off of my stock photo endeavors so far. After I wrote that, I checked in at iStockphoto (haven’t done that for a very long time). Sure enough, I have had some sales. 3 to be exact, garnering me total commissions of $3.92. For the bathroom photos. That’s right - the bathroom photos. Not the pretty picture of golf carts all lined up in the morning, not the pretty cactus or the corporate biz jet. The bathrooms.

It’s kind of funny really. Some friends of mine thought I was crazy taking a photo of a bathroom, much less a few of them. But you never really know what people want (which is why I like fotoLibra), but apparently I must have at least a little bit of an eye for it. To the tune of almost $4 right now. Woohoo. I might go buy a Chai at Starbucks. That’s only enough to pay for a small though.

Hopefully this is the start of something wonderful. Hopefully fotoLibra is more successful. I really want them to succeed. But as long as my photos are selling somewhere, I guess I am happy.

I came across a different sort of stock photography site the other day. fotoLibra takes a different approach to stock photos - they don’t presume to know what people are going to want to buy. Instead, they accept most everything, as long as the photos match their technical standards (which are easily interpreted by the upload routines). No human intervention really. Once you upload your pictures, they are available immediately for people to see, assuming they search for keywords that you have tagged your photos with.

Since their model is a little different, you do need to pay to have your photos hosted on their service. But here is the cool thing - you only pay if you are hosting more than 12 photos. That’s right, the first 12 are free, so you can try out the service and see if it is going to work for you.

That brings us to the subject of this post. I have approximately 6,000 images in my Lightroom Library. Probably half of them could have potential as stock photos. So how do I choose which 12 to narrow it down to? I started with the fotoLibra Submission Guidelines. This helped me to sort out which ones were clearly not good candidates. I narrowed my choices down to about 27 that I thought had REAL potential, based on the guidelines and what I would be looking for if I were buying stock photos (a few friends of mine have said I have a good eye for this). From there I narrowed it down to 9 that have a vertical orientation (marketers like verticals more, since pages in magazines and flyers are vertical) and 3 that are compelling enough they could work as horizontal. I went for a few different subjects - skiing, beaches, sports, scientific, religious - just to see what is going to work (this is a test after all). You can see the resulting choices in my first fotoLibra collection. Some of these images have been placed on other stock sites, but none have sold. We’ll see what happens here.