Now that I am back from my vacation in Spain and London, and have started to go through my 2100+ images, I will write first about what I look for when I am travelling and how I approach the processing and selection of images. I’m doing this in parts, as the whole thing could get too unwieldy. I’m writing this now that I am back home, so the first question of what to shoot is me thinking back about why...
I’ve only had one sale since moving to the new design of my personal stock agency, and so I decided to change the license type (from a sort of restricted royalty free license competing with Shutterstock and the like) to a one time use license with an extended option (for resale products) and reduced the pricing significantly. I rewrote my license based on one that Robin (from Symbiostock) uses on his stock site, and changed the pricing so that the...
After an extended vacation in Spain and then in London, I am back at home with around 1600 images to process and sort for my stock library. I thought I would write a long blog post about how I approach that, what I look for in terms of a useful stock photo from travel images and also how I go about keywording them. I have only just finished importing them into Lightroom, so it will be a little while before...
After a great set of earnings in August (OK, perhaps that isn’t altogether true…), I decided the time was right to build a new computer for my photography. My current PC was bought refurbished in 2010 and although I added more memory, it was increasingly slow when I wanted to move between the panels in Lightroom and even loading an image for editing seemed to take a few seconds. Frustrating! I saw this article by a fellow photographer Nasim Mansurov...
This is a specialized post and only of interest to people who have created their own stock agency site using the Symbiostock plugin and WordPress. I’ve written a couple of posts about how I transitioned from the legacy Symbiostock Theme to the new plugin here. Why Backup: You may have signed up for backup services from your web hosting company, but at the end of the day you will have put 100s of hours into uploading, describing and processing your...
As I mentioned earlier this week, I have been creating a new Symbiostock based personal stock agency for all my images. This was partly because the legacy theme is not being supported any longer and partly because I wanted to simplify my hosting arrangements. To illustrate the issue, someone bought a couple of images from my legacy site last night, I charged him, but the site didn’t send the email with links to the images. Not good… Anyway, I thought...
Talk about being a glutton for punishment… I put many, many hours into creating my own stock site at BackyardStockPhotos using the first Symbiostock wordpress theme written by Leo. We had lots of issues along the way, with Leo battling bravely through each one and constantly listening to the endless demands of the stock photographers and illustrators that were using the theme. As often happens with internet based forums, the whole thing degenerated into name calling and a very antagonistic...
With three awards under my belt, I must be an expert at Image Brief submissions! I thought it might be interesting to talk about how I approach a brief – there was one today that asked for: Signs of a middle-aged person/a couple with plans to go out for a day/eve. Tickets to an event on a table next to car keys or other symbols of leaving home; the supporting text will depict hesitation about going out due to a...
As regular readers know, I have not been a big fan of Fotolia on several grounds. I didn’t like the pricing approach and the way Dollar Photo Club was launched, my rejections have been sky high – perhaps getting a 40% acceptance rate (if that), and their upload process was tiresome and annoying. Then, of course, the sales weren’t great either… Talk about a triple whammy. Fotolia was bought by Adobe and changes are definitely occurring – there is the...
I’ve written about food photography before – recommending the series of books that Taylor Mathis has produced, but here is a free, very comprehensive guide from the Serious Eats website. Full of detail and examples of the techniques they are recommending, you can find it here.
