Make money from taking photos

Rate yourself as a bit of a photographer and want some extra pocket money? You don't have to be a pro and work for a newspaper anymore. A couple of sites accept photos from Joe Public and will sell them for you for a fee. Check out iStockPhoto and CitizenImage.

iStockPhoto is the bigger of the two. My application is still being processed. This involves a little test to check that you've learnt their guidelines and a sample of three original 1600x1200 pixel resolution photos proving a modicum of ability.

CitizenImage is a much smaller outfit and it's pretty easy to get accepted. I have my doubts about whether there's much chance of getting any cash from them though. Their website gets less traffic than Nimisis.com (Alexa IS useful!)- but I hope I'm wrong. One thing that's confusing is that they say they'll PayPal me any earnings, but there's no PayPal email address to enter in the account settings. I use one address for PayPal and different ones to sign up to websites... not sure they've thought about that.

If this sounds like a good idea to you but you're stuck for good photo ideas, you might like to spend a few minutes at FlickrWatch. Or, if you like manipulating photos there's Warp.

Tags: photo, money, iStockPhoto, CitizenImage