You don’t have to be a professional photographer to sell your photos, you just have to love what you are doing, know where to sell digital photos, and start making money. Bear in mind that you will have to have reasonably good photographic skills, and some basic business skills pertaining to photography.

The internet has provided a platform for people who want to sell their photos and there are a number of sites that specialize in selling these. Because these sites are specialists in this field, you more than likely won’t even need to use your business skills. In this way you will be able to focus all your attention on the thing you want to do and that is taking the right kind of photographs.

It is simple to upload your digital photos to an online site, and the way in which this business works, is that every time someone downloads your photos, you are paid. The amount of money you earn depends on the site you are using to market them, the amount of photographs in your portfolio, and the resolution of the photo. The people who make use of your photo’s (these are called stock photos) are advertising agencies, online marketers, web designers, and all kinds of other professionals.

You can get started quite easily with just a couple of good quality photographs, but obviously the more of these you upload, the better your chances of making money will be. As far as size and resolution goes, you have to make use of at least 10 – 15 mega-pixels, but today’s compact cameras even have this amount of resolution available, and it is enough to get started. You can always purchase a better camera once your business takes off.

The ideal camera you should have to take your stock photos is a DSLR, you don’t need a printer for the camera as you will be uploading them online. But you will need a computer and a connection to the internet. Software for photo editing is also required, but there are so many free options of this software which are web-based available that you will have difficulty choosing the one you want. Using these through your browser will enable you to edit your photos to sell them.

It takes some preparation to go from being an amateur photographer to being a part-time commercial photographer. But, if this is your hobby, it could earn you extra cash, and having an online presence is one of the easiest ways of making cash out of a part-time business.

There are online guides available that will make this transition easier for you, they educate you on what to do to improve your photography techniques and also tell you where you are able to submit them online.

Just for starters regarding where to sell photos, you can take a look at sites like iStockPhoto, it is one of the most popular sites. This is more than just a site however; it is an active community where photographers and designers get together. Big Stock Photo has a huge online presence with more than 1.5 million images available. Dreamstime is also a top player in this industry and has been around since 2004, they pay photographers 50 – 60% of the amount of each photograph sold.  Fotolia is also a social marketplace for designers and photographers and Shutterstock is a subscription based site that offers more than 2.5 million images for sale.