When Hurricane Irene hit the coast a few months ago, I was like many other people who had no power and was bored.  So we drove around looking at the damage. I brought my camera with me hoping to see something that might be news worthy to photograph. I didn’t see anything that would make CNN so I started photographing random destruction of nature, done by the hurricane.

One scene that I found was this road that had been damaged by the storm surge and had debris covering most of it. Like most stock photos, it was not an award winning newsworthy photograph. But it was something I felt might sell. I took a picture of the scene shooting horizontal first, because I felt it made a better photograph in horizontal. Then I turned the camera 90 degrees and photographed the scene shooting vertically. This took maybe 30 seconds since I already had my position and settings where I wanted them from the horizontal shot.

When I got back to my office a few days later when I had power back it took me less than 30 seconds to edit the second photo, because I had my keywords and settings from the previous horizontal photo. The total extra time spent on the second photo totaled less than a minute.
While the sales so far from the vertical photo have not been as good as the ones from the horizontal, they have totaled more than a couple dollars. Which is not bad for something that only took an additional minute or so of my time. Odds are that buyers would not have purchased the horizontal photo, so I would have lost out on that extra few dollars.
So when you are shooting remember to photograph the scene in vertical and horizontal if possible, because microstock is a get rich slow venture. And all those extra couple dollars here and there add up to a lot of money if you stick with it.