What do you mean: is my camera approved? I went to the store bought it with some lenses, I paid for it. Now I need a license? No, you don't need a license1, but...
If you want to sell photos to stock agencies like Getty, your camera needs to be among the cameras that Getty has approved:
Approved Cameras
The cameras that Getty has approved are:
If you are shooting on a 35mm digital camera it must an approved camera from this list:
- Canon EOS: 1D(Mk1,Mk2 or Mk3), 1DS(Mk1, Mk2, Mk2 or Mk3), 5D, 30D and 40D
- Nikon: D2X, D2Xs, D3, D200, D300
- Leica M8
- All medium format backs (e.g. backs by Phase One and Leaf etc)
produce sufficiently high quality images to be accepted by us.
Is your camera on that list? No? That's not fair! Too bad, that the way it is, if you want to sell photos to Getty, you have to play by their rules. If you do your own selling, your play by your own rules.
Why a list of approved cameras
Getty does in-house test of cameras for:
- Quality of the files as far as vibrancy or sharpness.
- Size of the TIFF2 files.
- How do the photos scale up to 48Mb.
- How do the photos withstand to upsizing to 300Mb as far as posterisation, sharpness and noise goes.
- How much information is there in both the shadows and highlights.
1 unless you are a wedding photographer in the state of New York ↑
2 All images must be uncompressed 47.5-52Mb TIFF files, flattened, with no layer, path or channel, 24 bit RGB Color, 8 bits per channel 8 bit file ↑