Hi,
I'm a photographer representative, so I can maybe tell about the business. It takes years for a photogrpaher to be able to live with his art, and there are thousands of wannabe photographers around the world. It is a very tough business...
There's three ways of living through photography: by producing images exclusively for a client, one production after another. You need a portfolio, with a representative amount of good pro prints of your work (this is very expensive to gather) and go door to door meeting the people you think they'll be interested in hiring you for a photoshoot.
Second way is to be an artist photographer, selling prints through exhibition, gallery rep or personal website.
Third way is to sell your images through image bank. There's 2 sorts of image banks, the very selective ones, in which your images can be sold $10 000 (and much more), but rare are the candidates to be accepted to be part of the team, and the "amateur ones" where there's no selection, anybody can get a subscription, but your iamges will be sold between $1 (99% of the time) and sometimes up to $1000... and there's even free download image banks, if you want to take a bet on your name getting famous one day, by the chance of internet or else...
so you see, there's a lot of ways to sell images, but very few leads to pay the rent immediately...
For simple information, I'm also a photographer for 15 years, been exhibited about 10/12 times, been published on various magazines... and still waiting for the chance to smile to me (a very few times, i got some cash, and I offered myself things to make better images, but most of the time, it cost more than the gain, with the lab prints for the contests, the art pritns for the exhibitions, the time and money you spent going on meetings for nothing...)! but i keep up!
To drop names, the most famous bank images, internationally speaking, are Getty Images and Corbis.
$1 image bank open to everyone, you have Fotolia for example
I saw lately some image bank proposing to pay for dropping images... A good business for them (as everyone wants to be an artist nowadays!), but I guess not a really good deal for us... Be careful of such tricks...
