My income from stock photography dried up… but I have a new way of making money from my photos

Screenshot of the Arcangel website showing a series of book cover images flanked by menus
(Image credit: Arcangel, George Cairns)

Back in the mid-90s I was obsessed with using my old Canon 350D to capture images to sell as royalty-free stock photos on sites such as iStock. In those halcyon days, you could earn around $10 per image sale and I often earned around $800 per month, which was a welcome passive income that lasted years.

I had friends who made thousands of dollars per month from selling lifestyle images, so they could hire props and models for a shoot, confident in the knowledge that they’d quickly recoup their expenses.

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George Cairns

George has been freelancing as a photo fixing and creative tutorial writer since 2002, working for award winning titles such as Digital Camera, PhotoPlus, N-Photo and Practical Photoshop. He's expert in communicating the ins and outs of Photoshop and Lightroom, as well as producing video production tutorials on Final Cut Pro and iMovie for magazines such as iCreate and Mac Format. He also produces regular and exclusive Photoshop CC tutorials for his YouTube channel.