Many people must be thinking: "I'm not a professional photographer. Why would people want to see my photographs?". Well, if it is any consolation, neither am I, and I can say with confidence that my highest earning photographs are really nothing to write home about. Funky skies, shallow depths of field, blurry foregrounds, etc. I had absolutely no idea these photographs would be bringing in so many visitors, but they do, because they have been around for a while and people are genuinely interested in the subject, but mostly because Google does not have the artistic sense to tell a good photograph from a poor one. People find these photographs with Google Image Search, click on the thumbnail and arrive at my site. Some may leave disappointed, expecting a higher quality picture (something they cannot really tell from the thumbnail). Others may simply not care much about the quality. Even those who do, seeing a high-quality photograph may arouse their curiosity to further browse the site, but looking at things other than what they came looking for may not generate extra clicks. This is all highly speculative, of course, but the point is, whatever impression the photographs create, there are people out there who hang around for long enough to click on a few ads, and that is compelling enough of an argument for trying AdSense on those pages!
As a side note, it would be tempting to look at the number of return visitors as a measure of the popularity of the site and implicitly of the quality of the photographs. I will refrain from speculating on it, and only mention that sites that do have a loyal base of visitors, such as forums, are known to be poor performers when it comes to advertising income due to their regular visitors developing what is called "ad blindness".
For those publishers preoccupied by the quality of the photographs they are presenting, there are a few simple things one can do to greatly improve things. Cropping the photographs properly, or framing them carefully when taking the shots, is one thing that comes to mind. Badly framed pictures can be easily spotted even when looking at Google's Image Search thumbnails, and they are definitely not very attractive (I would not be surprised if the number of people clicking on thumbnails has a role in determining the site's Image Search ranking). Other easy post-processing steps could involve adjusting the colors to make the photographs a bit warmer (by adding a hint of red/orange), adjusting the brightness and contrast, etc. Most importantly, running unsharp mask as the last processing step can have a dramatic impact on the sharpness and overall appearance of the photograph.
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