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I've seen many threads asking about methods to gain a passive income in Bitcoin, and most of the replies seem to be based on faucets, trading or sig spamming. I thought I would see if I could build a passive income from free or almost free, camera equipment. I've started a project in Fit to Talk, and I chose to run it there for two reasons. I have complete control over the thread, and the project is aimed at Bitcoin Talk members who may be in countries with "challenged" economies, and they may not have English as their first language. This is the link -
https://fittotalk.com/english-talk/index.php?topic=380.0

The project is aimed at helping members to create images that can be submitted to sites such as Shutter Stock, and later on, I can post links to instruction videos on YouTube, but first I have to manage to build a camera system that is as close to free as I can get it. Please feel free to post comments and advice in this thread. I've almost managed to build a working system based on a Canon EOS 350D, and I will post comments on testing and tuning it once I have obtained a lens and memory card.

I'm trying to restrict this project to the purchased items and free software, and I'm not using any of my more expensive still and video cameras, except for photographing the equipment of course. I'm also avoiding the use of mobile phones, as members may not have phones with suitable cameras included. Maybe that could be a future project, or perhaps somebody else could start such a project.

Are there stock photo sites that pay their members in Bitcoin?

I haven't keep track of stock photo sites for a while, but e.g. Shutter Stock seems to only support payout using the likes of PayPal and Skrill [1] (And I'm honestly surprised that Skrill is even supported, it feels like yesterday that having to deal with cheques was more or less standard).

[1] https://www.shutterstock.com/contributorsupport/articles/kbat02/000006593

That's something that I need to research.My feeling is that if one can find an exchange that will allow payment into your account in dollars, then they could be used to purchase Bitcoin. The idea is to collect Bitcoin into a savings wallet, and use this as an investment for the future. I got the impression that some members had problems in accepting payments in their local currencies. The project is also a way to learn a new skill, and maybe one could earn Bitcoin by taking wedding photos, or some other local event reporting.

I'm super curious if you find something. IMHO crypto is a pretty good fit for royalty-fee-based earnings since for many content producers relatively small payments are involved.

At some point, about 2 (or more) years ago, I've done a bit of research in that direction. I was hoping I find something without KYC requirements.
I've even posted some images to bittit (which now doesn't seem to exist anymore). Unfortunately I've never received a satoshi for them.
So.. good luck with your project, but be careful, since where money is involved, IRS may get involved too, and you may need KYC and accounting. I hope I'm wrong.

Jet Cash, are you sure you can sell photos to shutterstock with cheap equipment?
I mean, those photos are very high quality and resolution, colors, etc. They are even better than those free websites like pexels and pixabay, which are very good too.

I don't use cameras since smartphones showed up, but my smartphone cannot make good resolution photos like shutterstock require


I think this could be easily solved. Jet Cash can sell to shutterstock, receive in fiat, convert to btc, and pay for those members in btc.

I don't want to get involved in any money or other financial transactions. That's when you need KYC, and government permissions, and of course it creates tax liabilities and possible scam accusations. I hope that it can become a small group of members helping each other to find cheap kit, and to improve their photographic skills. Maybe some of the members will work together to help with exchanges, but I would prefer to keep out of that.

BAT is a crypto for content producers, and Steemit offers crypto payments as well. Maybe those sites could be used for people to get started.

Man apologise if I didn't understand things there cause I have some questions: If you try to help to local charities, why did they give you Canon 350D gift?
I think it will be better if you take it in some local phone/camera repair services and ask them what kind of chargers and etc are needed for it and if they have equipment, whether it's possible to test it.
And also, you need great camera like Canon EOS 5d mark 3 and similar to take high quality pictures which will be acceptable for shutterstock.

Some of the charity shops in England just dump stuff that hasn't sold in a month, in the rubbish bin. It was in a box that they asked me to dispose of. I bought a charger on Amazon, as I mentioned above, and the camera appears to be working, but I need to do a white board teat when I get a lens and memory card. It didn't sell because it had a dead battery, no memory card, lens or charger, and it was not possible to confirm it was working.

In my opinion, the camera is not the most important item when creating commercial images. I would rank it fifth in the following list

1. The business acumen of the photographer
2. The creativity and knowledge of the photographer
3. An ability to use image editing software to enhance pictures.
4. The lens
5, The camera.

I hope that this project can build a community to help members with items 1, 2 and 3, and that it can provide suggestions for the acquisition of Items 4 and 5. Maybe we can look at repairing broken equipment to reduce costs.

Buying the most expensive camera, and taking auto pictures of cats, babies, clouds or the tower of London is unlikely to get one listed, let alone make sales. At a basic level, one should switch to aperture priority the enhance of blur backgrounds, or to shutter priority for night shots. It is also useful to have a reasonable command of English to add descriptions, keywords, and the EXIF data.

I agree that the commercial exposure the image gets and the creativity are the most important.
However, I'd put the camera onto place #3 because many may prefer unedited photos and a bad camera can add noise into the photo which will make it undesirable.

Is it the camera, or the settings that cause the noise? For example, an incorrect ISO setting can introduce noise. Also, I'm told that the noise can be removed by using Lightbox, although I have never tried this.

I've seen cameras where setting low ISO (100 or less) was basically impossible, so the noise was present whenever there was no perfect sunshine. I so don't remember what camera was that, but if I will remember I'll let you know.

And of course, there may be a "cultural difference" too in what cheap camera means  :)
What I mean is that Canon EOS 350D costed 999$ in 2005 (https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos350d/22) and that doesn't make it cheap. I can even tell that my camera from 2005 (Sony DSC-H1) made cleaner pictures than my actual DSC HX-60 ; imho nowadays they sell high number of megapixels instead of better image processors.

I've just bought a wide angle zoom lens 24-40mm, but it is stuck at f3.5. The lens id usable, but it will be interesting to see if I can repair it. It comes with the caps and a filter, and it looks to be in reasonable condition apart from the aperture setting. It is manufactured by Sun, so, as a cheaper lens, it may be harder to repair than a Canon. I only paid £10 fr it, so it is an interesting experiment.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Canon-FD-fit-Wide-Angle-Zoom-24-40mm-working-but-Stuck-at-f3-5/401922682467?hash=item5d94756e63:g:1ZMAAOSwCH9dpd2g&autorefresh=true

Now I need to find a compact flash card.

One direction could be the Chinese shops, like AliExpress and such, just the delivery times are big.
Another direction could be to find a friend or acquaintance who upgraded the card for his phone (or got one that doesn't even need a card anymore).

Also keep in mind that most probably you don't need a big card. Even if you get it with you in holidays, you'll just have to transfer the pictures more often to laptop, cloud or an USB stick.

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Thanks

@ NeuroticFish
Thanks for the comment, and I decided things were going too slowly, so I gave in, and I have bought a 4Gb card, and a couple of lens online. I'm waiting for delivery at the moment. The Chinese option is cheaper, but I didn't want to wait a month for the free delivery. The max memory size I can use is 8Gb, and maybe I will order one in the future. It might help as I want to record in RAW. There doesn't seem to be much interest in this on Bitcoin Talk, so I'm moving away from a cheap camera system acquisition into an experiment in reverse lens macro photography. Things get really interesting once you go to 10 or 20 times magnification. As long as you can focus of course.

@Saisal

I don't have any problems with making money, andif you had really read my posts, you would have realised that my project was aimed at helping people to build their photographic skills on a low budget. I hoped that this would help them to avoid the predatory scams that seem to be abundant on Bitcoin Talk at the moment. I haven't clicked your link, but you text follows the same tired old formula, so I would encourage others to ignore it.

Are DLSR cameras really the only option for this project here? I mean if we are only talking about an "almost free camera equipment" here we have cameras on our phone who could do a pretty good job on delivering a good image. The only downside I see is it will lack the image quality from what the DSLRs have and most cameras from phones nowadays over saturates images as it looks "good" in your social media.

Mobile phone cameras have improved a lot, and even my cheap Huawei can take useful pictures. They are limited by the lens and sensor size, and it is only recently that depth of field control has been introduced. A modern phone with 3 lens and advanced features is going to cost well into 4 figures, and that is above the budget for this project. Whilst some have received large payments for shots taken with a mobile, they tend to be opportunistic rather than planned stock photos. To build a portfolio of several thousand images, and to differentiate your photos from the millions of others that are available, I believe than one needs to have a fair degree of control over the image capturing process, and also it is useful to store them in RAW. This helps with the post processing.

Anyone with a mid to top-tier phone made within the last five years should have a camera that's capable of taking high-quality photos. You've touched upon this, but the most important thing is making sure that their photography skills are up to scratch.

I do think that this has a relatively thin link to Bitcoin though. I don't know of any stock photography sites that pay in Bitcoin, and from the sounds of it you do not either. Maybe this could be a project you could work on to help this idea come to fruition?

I still think you need to consider good mobile phone cameras as a good option for the project. Even though they are on a jpeg format this photos could still be edited on free apps that can be downloaded to the phone itself. Apps like Lightroom and Snapseed are both good and free softwares that mobile photographers use to make the image even better. I might not be utilizing my phone's camera right now but if you somehow include this project I think a lot of us members here can start maximizing the use of our phone's camera. Still if the issue here is quality control I think we just need a strict set of guidelines for us to follow.

You can take some beautiful with a lot of mid-tier smartphones, and since having a 1k smartphone is pretty popular, most of the camera's on the newest Samsungs, Pixels, and iPhones are already a DLSR level, especially if you understand angles and photography - it's actually very in-depth, has aspects like image stabilisation, colours, etc...

The problem here is though, who even uses Shutterstock images? I can't imagine someone taking photos and being able to sell them for any money at all, unless they are really, really well done.

Crypto-currencies would be a great way to pay royalties though... Especially if they are only small amounts.

And that is why you need an imaging capturing system, and not just as phone with a lens. You get a better base if you shoot in RAW as well, and then do some post processing. I hoped that we could work together to help members to create images that are "really well done", and pick up a bit of regular income. I believe that the money you would need to spend on a high end phone would be better spent on some second hand equipment, but you can't play games on a camera.

I did a little bit of research and apparently the competition of Shutterstock, Getty Images, has a mobile app (https://www.mystockphoto.org/getty-istock-contributor-mobile-app/) for their contributors and can be used to upload images taken from their mobile phone. This would be good for people looking to get some royalty income out of their licensed photos but the only downside I see for the community is I don't think they pay in Bitcoin but instead pay USD through Paypal and Payoneer. Also in terms of payment and other essentials is Shutterstock better than Getty Images?

Thanks for looking into this for me.

There is a lot of competition to get listed on Getty, Shutterstock and the like, so I thought it might be easier to start with Steemit and similar sites. They pay in crypto, and this can be exchanged for Bitcoin. It might be easier to get listed and earn revenue on such sites, especially if one associates a story with the pictures. Mobile phone images are a different category, and I see that you can buy supplementary lenses for the cameras. That may be the way to go in the future, but I think it is a bit expensive at the moment for this project.

I've hit a couple of problems, and it looks as if I may need to buy an adapter ring for the FD lenses. I'm expecting one to arrive today or tomorrow, so I'll see how I get on with that. The first one that I purchased on Ebay hasn't been shipped yet, so I've written to see if the seller will cancel the transaction, but I'm still waiting for a reply. Once I have mastered control of these cheap lens, I may decide to concentrate on Macro and night shots with them.

I know a crypto (STEEM/SBD) to crypto (BTC) would be more convenient since we have a lot of crypto exchange and P2P exchange accepting that kind of exchange but in terms of profit gained from your post in Steemit I don't think you would be earning a lot from it. For one Steemit even though they value content the ones who really earn are people either part of a group or part of what they call a "circle jerk" the ones who post with good content and is not part of a group doesn't have a good chance to earn a considerable amount everytime they post unlike people who are part of a group who has a sure upvotes coming from people part of their group. I would rather take my chances earning royalties in Getty Images or Shutterstock rather than fishing from upvotes in Steemit. Besides Paypal/Payoneer USD to BTC isn't that hard anymore.

I lost interest in Steemit a year or so ago, but I was thinking about revisiting the site.

My current thoughts are based on Brave, hoping for donations if I set up a photo gallery. I need to see if it is possible to provide an image without a watermark for BAT donations. The alternative is to leave the watermark on the image, and to solicit Bitcoin or BAT donations, and to include various affiliate links on the pages. I'll see what is available in the latest Piwigo CMS.

I know it's your idea and you want to keep it as it is - limited to the professional cameras instead of smartphones but I'd also like to add something here just like others. If you open this to smartphones (ah yeah I know you might not support this but still), I've recently bought OnePlus 7T on very small EMIs and I'd like to earn something through it to get its EMI recovered each month through the phone itself at the very least. If I can do photography and help out by any means (if you allow smartphones like OnePlus 7T series, Huawei Mate series and Samsung Galaxy's latest S10 and Note 10 series and few more high end phones based on your choice), please let us know at the earliest and let us showcase our photography and see if we can match those professional camera guys' quality.

I'd not prefer to work on any social medium that pays in crypto after Hyperspace's (formerly Synereo AMP) demise.

I haven't closed the thread to anything other than forum rule breakers. My feeling was that mobile phones that can take decent pictures are too expensive for some members in poorer counties.

Since I started this thread, I have learnt a lot, and I'm moving towards macro photography with vintage lens, and boca images that exploit the imperfections in the lens. The idea was to try to build a project that could help members to build a passive income with very little financial investment. There didn't seem to be much interest, so I've moved on to challenges that I find interesting, and that help me to improve my knowledge of photography.

[ps]

Here is a video by Nicole Glass about submitting cellphone images to Shutterstock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GrSItxUBXU

That is not a problem, because you can still convert all fiat to BTC yourself. I think it might be more beneficial if someone went to a Payment

processor and make some suggestions that these Payment processors partner with companies like Shutterstock to pay the bitcoins on their

behalf, because they do not have to deal with Bitcoin then. This way you do not have to do the conversion and you save on the exchange

conversion fees.  ;)  Also, to answer your question... Shutterstock is easier and more user-friendly to use.

Even thought many of the high end phones might cost in the 4 figures, lots of mobile service providers offer these phones on contract as a bundled item and you have the option to pay off that over 2 to 3 years. Why should people settle for inferior cameras, if you can get a excellent camera with a mobile phone? 

The thing with companies like Shutterstock and Getty Images is that you are competing with professional photographers and they only pay for the ones that are exceptional.

I have a professional photographer in the family and loads of his photos gets no payments.  ::)  Do you have the secret sauce to share for the amateur photographers to make a little money?