I wasn’t going to write a blog post today, but after getting back from my weekly appointment with crazy massage lady Sandy (this week we discussed recipes, mostly, and home decorating, and lots of complaints about her husband) I decided to finally check out the links Getty Images has been sending me the past few months, detailing the changes they’ve made to their Flickr Contributor program.

I may have mentioned here before that I was accepted into the program a little over a year ago. My photos are here. When I was first invited to become a contributor, I checked the website constantly to see if I had any sales, but I never did, so eventually I forgot about it. But a few months ago Getty ended their partnership with Flickr, and started emailing contributors to let them know how they were changing our connections to their site. I kept getting the emails while I was at work and unable to really check into it, but about an hour ago I remembered about the messages and clicked on over to my Getty Contributor page to see what was up. Well lo and behold – I actually had money in my account. Turns out that just a few weeks ago I sold a copy of one of my photos, and on April 25th I’m getting $155.00 deposited into my PayPal account – it feels like free money! The photo Getty sold was this one.

Also, I no longer have to wait until Getty contacts me asking for a certain photo they saw on Flickr that they liked – I can just upload photos directly to my account and someone from Getty will review it and decide whether or not to take it. This is much easier, except that I have to fill out a model release for every single photo that has a human in it, which is a pain. But I’m going to upload some non-human stuff as soon as possible and get model releases from friends I’ve photographed so I can upload more portraits and jumping shots to my contributor page.

So, I’ve officially made my first sale. And I didn’t even know it.