In June 2004 I was accepted, at my first attempt, as a contributor to Alamy which is one of the UK's largest professional photo libraries. Alamy supply photographs to newspapers, magazines and to advertising agencies, to name a few, both on a licensed (rights managed) and royalty free basis.

About Alamy

We are creating the world's largest and fastest search engine for stock photography. We have pioneered a new two-fold approach to selling images. Everyone with pictures to sell should have an outlet for them. Customers can find the picture they want quickly. Our website has millions of images from thousands of photographers, picture agencies and national collections. Our customers include newspapers, magazines, book publishers, advertising agencies and corporate marketing departments. Our contributors provide the images and we provide the marketing expertise and technology using Alamy software so we can pay our contributors more generous royalties. Images are edited and classified by our contributors because we believe they should have control. We add more than 200,000 new images to Alamy every month.

Like all professional stock image libraries Alamy have a strict quality control and only accept images that are free from all dust, marks and other artifacts, have been correctly exposed, are in perfect focus, are well composed and are also of a file size of at least 48MB. In order to achieve this file size from my Canon EOS-10D (6MP) I use Genuine Fractals to resample them to the desired size which produces results which are superior to most other resizing methods.

At present I only have a small selection of photographs registered with them as a large number of the photographs I now take have already been commissioned and so cannot be re-sold. The problem for me with libraries like Alamy is that picture buyers typically use them for buying stock photos to illustrate a story, for example they may require a shot of a crashed car to illustrate a story on drink driving or a shot of estate agent for sale boards to illustrate an article on house prices. These types of shots are not ones that I would normally think or want to take which just goes to prove that there is an art to successful stock photography by seeing potential in the ordinary everyday scenes and objects and one that I need to develop if I wish to earn any money from it.