Category: “How-to” articles
As photographers (dropping the “stock” word for a moment) we all like to create artistic masterpieces that truly capture the grandeur of a place or landscape – especially if the sun is rising or setting at the same time. There is just something about the conjunction of colors that automatically attracts us to sunsets! Often such sites are simply to let friends and family see the best shots we have taken – pointing someone to a stock agency and saying...
I’ve decided to write a fuller post on my experiences on Fine Art America as I’ve been increasingly impressed with the sales coming from the site and thought some of my landscape/fine art readers may like to know more about this site and the opportunities for selling non-stock images. Fine Art America is a combination of a social site for photographers and a print on demand site for connoisseurs of good art! There are millions of images from abstract painting...
Perhaps this is a hopeful title! However, I became very disillusioned with the performance of my personal stock agency site (BackyardStockPhotos.com) over recent weeks with its hosting at BlueHost. I track the response time of the site using Pingdom. This site sends a page load request every 5 minutes and graphs the results. As you can see, there have been some good times, but some horrendous page load times as well: 6 seconds is a long time to wait for...
This is a specialized post and only of interest to people who have created their own stock agency site using Symbiostock and WordPress. 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 images on your site. What happens if there is an issue on the server hosting your site and, for some reason, the...
One of the challenges of stock photography is to think of that next subject! Sometimes we think that everything that can be photographed, has been photographed, and is available for sale on all the agencies! When I get to that point, it is always good to open a bottle of wine, relax, and remember that every image can be improved in some way, and that there are ways of seeing things that have perhaps not been done before – and,...
I’m sure this has happened to you – you make an effort to go somewhere to get some fantastic sunset shots, but the weather is just not right – too cloudy, too hot, too misty, you name it, it has happened. One of the wonders of digital cameras is that they can often see an image better than you can, if you spend the time to get the best out of it. A recent trip to Newark (I know, I...
Note: Significant updates to post following release of V2 of StockUploader. In my book, as well as in numerous posts on my blog, I have pushed the benefits of Lightburner – where you upload once to their site and they handle the uploads to all the stock agencies. I have also said that I would be willing to pay for the service as I found it so helpful. Well, my wish came true – they introduced a pricing plan, but...
I blogged about this a couple of weeks back, but Leo (the designer behind the Symbiostock network) has been making remarkable progress and we now have a very substantial and flexible stock agency developing using WordPress. Two things of note – the first is that the site design is now much more professional – I hope you agree that my own stock photo agency BackyardStockPhotos.com would not deter anyone from moving forward to buying an image from me! The second...
An eye-catching title…but what can we do to increase our earnings potential from images already in our portfolio and online. I was thinking about this recently when looking at some of my better selling images on Shutterstock. One that caught my eye was this one: This is a nice clean bright and colorful image – stands out well in a thumbnail and has space in the sky for text or other copy. How can I maximize my earnings from this...
I came across an interesting earnings calculator on Yuri Arcur’s site. It takes account of annual variations of stock sales (ie Late December/early January is not good for earnings) and also that weekends are lower than weekdays to calculate the likely monthly earnings from any point in the month. You can find the Stock Earnings Calculator here. You can add in your own sites as necessary, and so, as an experiment, I have put in the earnings for today from...
