Get some great information and knowledge from Morgan David de Lossy and Amos Struck, they shared in webinar called Making Money from Smartphone Photos. Find creative impact and opportunities with smartphone photography and get better with your images on stock image market for year 2015.

How to shoot top-quality images with your smartphone

• Mobile photography can produce high quality images, but only in perfect light.
• Capture spontaneity and creativity. Have a fun and capture photos of activities you like.
• Shot outside in full day light
• Use advantage of your device. Larger screen can help you find new interesting angles
• Take control of exposure

Fotolia mobile photo best sellers in 2014, © Fotolia Instant Collection

What themes and subjects will sell in 2015

• Spontaneity
• Creativity
• Fun
• Photos from real life
• People enjoying their favourit activites
• Selfies (unexpected great sellers in 2014)
• Lifestyle

Basics of post-production on mobile

• Use as less filters as possible
• Don’t over-filter your images – filters often decrease quality of image and for mobile phone, where quality is low from the beginning is this often show stopper for microstock use
• Good results on smartphone or tablet is with Snapspeed. Snapspeed for Apple and Snapspeed for Android – Morgan personaly like drama filter and blur filter
• On tablet you can get good results with Photoshop, now is good price for photographers in combination with Lightroom. Both apps are usable on desktop and tablets as well.

The best smartphone cameras on the market

Interestin point is, that resolution of pictures around you in real world using maximaly 8 Mpix. Take a look to screen from Morgan’s presentation.

8 Milion Pixels in Real World

Safe bet to get good mobile camera is iPhone. Good advice is use DxOMark Mobile results.

Current best mobile cameras on the market

Comparation of image quality, in perfect light. Of course DSLR is better, but in good light differencies are not so big as you can expected.

What to avoid when taking photos with your smartphone

• Don’t capture in low light
• Don’t shoot inside
• For microstock not use mobile phone for photos of you pets
• Don’t use crop in post-production, you have not enough megapixels to do it
• Don’t use gadgets, it reduces image quality
• Keep your lens clean. Do not touch the lens.

Morgan’s list of Do / Don’t with smartphone photography for microstock use

Interesting observation from webinar

• Mobile photo sells are growing rapidly. You really should try it!
• Keywords order in fotolia Instant app, probably in Fotolia images at all are important!
• Keywording must be perfect. Best seller photos using 10-20 keywords in combinations general descriptive words and object specific words
• If you are not using mobile apps for model releases, try it! Often noticed was Easy Release app. Easy Release for Android and Easy Release for Apple. Releases from this app is accepted by many microstock companies.

Bonus at the end. Morgan’s mobile screen with photo apps he used for capture, edit and share

If you want start Making Money from Smartphone Photos here are some apps you can start with:

• Fotolia Instant – from Fotolia
  
• 123rf On The Go – from 123rf
• Dreamstime: Sell Your Photos – from Dreamstime
• Shutterstock Contributor – from Shutterstock

If you want to see whole webinar you can take a look at webinar replay, unfortunatelly it will be live only to 22. February 2015

Presentation slides Making Money from Smartphone Photos

© Fotolia Instant Collection, Morgan David de Lossy

Big thanks to Amos Struck from mystockphoto.org for organize this great webinar and Morgan David de Lossy for sharing so much knowledge and tips.

Do you have other tips, do you know some other contributors app or do you know something like Hydra app but for Android? Feel free to leave a comment here.