A photo I made of my friend Janet's back last summer was noticed on my blog by an ad agency who asked to licence the image for use in a trade show booth for Tempur-Pedic, the maker of Swedish mattresses and pillows. I license a few images a year this way. I imagine if I applied a concerted effort (several days a month) to meticulously posting and captioning some of my nicer unpublished images, I could generate a nice stream of gadget money (the sale of this image, for example, could buy me a Sony PSP}. Given that a significant portion of my traffic is from image searches, I wonder if a whole new market must be emerging out of communications professionals on a tight budget who are licensing stock images from amateur photographers. Converting my extensive photo archives into extra income would be nice, but between a busy new job in management and being a daddy, the best I can do at this point in my life is to continue to enjoy making photographs for fun before profit.

- mike lee - langley park, md