A few years ago, I was contacted by a woman working on an article about keeping your work-area tidy for an internal corporate newsletter. She had found a photo I had taken of my messy desk with an old point-and-shoot digital camera and wanted to use it as a “before” photo with her article.
The photo was poorly lit, poorly framed, and relatively low resolution. However, it was valuable to someone, in part because of these issues. A photo like this would never have been for sale on a stock photography site.
The process of actually selling the rights to use the photo was awkward. First, there was some negotiation of the price, then I had to produce an “invoice” for them as they needed it for their purchasing department to send a cheque. They got invoice #000001 thanks to an OpenOffice.org template.
This is why we built ClusterShot – a site that simplifies the process of anyone selling any photo to anyone. Anyone can upload their images, or we can suck them in automatically from your Flickr account or RSS/ATOM feed. You can then set your own price or allow people to make an offer. There’s a simple PayPal-powered checkout process.
ClusterShot is not another stock photography service. Images are not quality-checked and tagged “horizontal white-background caucasian male” by an army of cubicle-farm employees. Some images are great, and some are terrible. Think eBay rather than Amazon.
Try it out – you might be surprised that you have just the photo someone is looking for.