Are there good sites to teach me photography?

Can you actually make money on stock photography sites?

• Sites like Fotolia and Dreamstime, stock photography sites, can the average person make any real money on those sites? I can't seem to find anywhere what the average pay out is, or what the chances are someone will buy your photo, etc. has anyone done this before? any tips?

• Answer:

  Selling photos for 20 cents devalues the entire industry and wastes your time. They would have you believe that you can sell a single photo thousands of times, but once a photo is in common circulation it will be stolen more than it sold. They will also have thousands of photos competing with you. When you consider the time to produce, edit, upload, describe and tag a photo, you will get several hours in to each one. Selling 3 or 4 copies a year just is not worth it. Even worse is when the site sells a subscription and you get even less for each image used. Additionally what I ran in to with one site is that there was one photographer with 50,000 images in the database. In order to compete I wrote a script to batch upload a couple hundred of my images, they responded by rejecting the entire batch, wasting hours worth of my work. It seem to me that this photographer probably had a relation to the site and they were attempting to protect him and just using other images for variety and search engine rank. My numbers were kept so low it never reached the minimum payout amount and it is likely there were a lot of images sold though the system that they never paid out for the same reason. The next issue is that the photography market is severely flooded. Only top quality, unique images are work anything. If you have sunsets, flowers, other scenics, or pets, the stock sites don't want them, they already have too many. If you want to sell stock, stick to the high end sites that pay what the image is worth.