I had a really good discussion with a budding stock photographer yesterday who offered $75 for an hour’s one on one tuition/advice from me. We discussed his portfolio, talked about improvements and had a good debate on how to come up with ideas for new shoots. He asked me if you could “make it” with just travel photography or whether you needed the second of my three main subject areas (places, things, people) to get a reasonable income. Of course,...
It is that time again – a review of the year’s earnings from stock photography. First the good news – I ended the year with a record total earnings of $32,732 after a decreasing trend over the past three years ending in 2016 with $28,368. Looking at this on a monthly basis, almost every month this year has been higher than I earned in the same month in previous years, which I think is a very good sign. The last...
November certainly was a good month for me this year. Even though we have a US holiday, the sales were good throughout the month and I ended up with earnings of $3177. This is my best month ever (ignoring one special month in December 2014 when I sold an image on ImageBrief for $1060!) This continues a pattern I have seen all year where, almost without exception, the earnings in a month this year have exceeded the earnings in the...
I’m very late this month – my apologies! I was off on yet another trip to take stock photos – this time to Southern California. Not as many images to process as my last trip (which I haven’t finished yet), but I now have another 823 to process and eventually keyword the selected images. One thing you need to understand about this business – it is actually quite a lot of hard work going through every image, choosing the ones...
It is a long time since I posted, but I do have an excuse. I was on a cruise around the Baltic sea (and to save you reaching for Google Maps, the ship went from Sweden to Finland, Russia, Estonia, Poland, Germany, Denmark and finally Norway). I’ve come back with 2270 images and am slowly working my way through them to try to get the best stock photos out of the voyage. However, I came back to some nice earnings...
Another month end comes round. Is it just me, or is time speeding up? Anyway, this month is following the usual trend – add more images, earn the same money! I still think it is a viable way to earn money, it is just different to what it was a few years ago when adding more images resulted in a growth in earnings. Now it seems like the time spent on adding more images results in a continuation of earnings...
Some months up, some months down – that seems to be the story of stock photo earnings these days. Overall the month was not bad with earnings so far of $2267. For some reason I am not seeing any sales on Zoonar (when I normally get some sales each month) and that could be a reporting issue on the site, but it is unlikely to shift the dial very much. As a summary chart this month I have included the...
The days shoot by and here I am writing once again about earnings. It has been a busy month for me putting all my Hawaii images online and I’m still going through the videos and uploading those. I took quite a lot of Point of View GoPro images with the camera stuck on the front of the car as we drove around the narrow roads in Maui, so hopefully some of those will sell. Of course, Shutterstock, in its wisdom,...
A steady performance during May – ending up with $2448 compared with $2469 in April. I am continuing to maintain my monthly earnings chart to see how my performance has varied by month over the years and it is showing some interesting results: What I hadn’t really noticed before is that the early months of the year have been showing a steady increase year by year. So the 2017 results are generally higher than 2016, 2015 etc. May is slightly...
I was reading a discussion about the Adobe Stock Contributor Portal and a few people were complaining about how their sales had fallen since Adobe took over Fotolia. I was under the impression that my sales had gone very strongly in the opposite direction and so I decided to look at my stats and see what my experience was. As I suspected, the results have been very positive: Adobe announced the purchase in December 2014 but not very much...
