After posting my results for August, I had three good questions posted in the comments section: “I have 2 questions could you help to share your thought? – Do you think spreading photos on wide spectrum of agencies is slowing down your sale on Shutter, or it’s just the nature of summertime? – How about your sales on Deposit photo, is this a right vehicle to park your photos?” “From your experience, is it ok to sell an image as...
Jason F recently commented on my Master Class in Stock Photography and added in a series of questions that he would have asked if he had been there! By the way, I screwed up on the “Pay what you want” price – I had intended the minimum price to be $0.49. I’ve fixed it now. But back to the questions. I’ve split them up to allow me to put my thoughts against each one. 1. What are some more examples of reworking...
Earlier this week, I gave a talk to the Winchester Photographic Society on Stock Photography. Originally planned for 40 minutes, the depth of interest as shown by the questions asked throughout the session made it overrun to almost 60 minutes! Through the course of 70 slides, I explain what stock photography is all about, what the legal issues are, in particular with regard to releases and the appropriate marking of images as commercial or editorial, what you can earn, what...
One of the things I don’t like about the Sony (perhaps the only thing?) is that it seems to attract dust on the sensor. I try very hard to avoid dust – putting the lenses face down on a hard surface and keeping the camera body facing down as I unscrew one lens and move across to the new one – but somehow dust just gets on that sensor! Dust is more visible when you have stopped down to a...
Earlier this week I talked about Steadify – a new approach to a tripod for relatively slow exposure times. The project to actually build and sell this is now live on Kickstarter, so if you want to take advantage of the early bird offers, now is the time to do so. I’m planning to buy one and review it in due course – I’m always looking for something to reduce weight and this might help for some types of shoot....
This July 4th, I went up to Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania to see and photograph the fireworks display over the city. Although only 70 miles away, we decided to stay for a couple of nights both to get the best idea of where to shoot the fireworks and to get some other images of the city as well. As I started to realize, getting everything right about fireworks, especially if you want to position them with the city itself to give...
We have all been there – we travel to some location, perhaps on vacation, and then the weather isn’t really that good for photography. Do you still take your photos and then what do you do with them on your return? I recently went to New York City for a couple of days and although it was generally dry and a partially sunny, we took a trip to Staten Island on the (free) ferry past the Statue of Liberty and...
The earlier posts on this subject have covered the basics of what stock video is, and then more detail on the sort of clips I have been producing. Now I’ll focus on some details about how I go about getting the clips taken, edited and uploaded to the five agencies I support: Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Pond5, Storyblocks and iStock. The first step obviously starts in the camera. I’ve been choosing to shoot in the PAL standard of 23.98. There are...
A friend with a deep portfolio on images on his hard drive recently asked me if I had any advice on breaking through the barrier of “just too much to do and not enough time” to get started in selling these images on the various stock agencies. Often, being faced with keywording and describing hundreds or thousands of images, we tend to just put it off for another day! After all, this part of the process is the most difficult...
Did I really need to buy a new camera? Obviously no – the businessman inside me said firmly that the Sony A7r ii that I have (with 15000 shutter activations) is more than adequate for stock photography and the new model (the mark 3) has only a few enhancements. But the inner child knew that a new camera body was just what I needed and that I would be able to take higher speed videos and slow them down (only...
