A few years back I did a presentation on Stock Photography to a camera club in Winchester, VA and put a video of it online. I updated the presentation and had a virtual zoom based session with a Northern Virginia meetup group last week and again, the session was recorded. The whole thing lasted 90 minutes including the questions, and so if you have that much spare time, you can find the video on my YouTube channel. I’ve also been...
I mentioned last month that I was trying to work on developing more traction on my Fine Art Portfolio on Fine Art America. I had around 800 images over there and as I have reported here, have had occasional sales. I tried an experiment to lower my prices, but that did nothing much at all, and so I put them back to more reasonable levels: Then, in early December, I decided to spend time trying to get more traffic to...
I got up this morning to work on my annual report of earnings from stock photography, but found that three of my hard drives were missing in Windows (and the BIOS). Back in March I built a new PC with the latest technology. However, the power supply was still in good shape so I reused that. I had some issues at the time because the new motherboard had two power sockets for the CPU and my power supply only had...
This is probably a post with a smaller following than my normal ones, but perhaps a Godox expert will be able to help! As I mentioned last month, after an unfortunate accident between my Canon flashgun and my ceiling fan, I bought a Sony specific flashgun as a replacement, the Godox V1. (affiliate link to Amazon). I bought it with the accessory kit which comprises some nicely made light modifiers that neatly attach with small magnets to the round head...
It has been a quiet month (when is it any different these days) and a few things were on my mind, and so this post is just a collection of things that you might be interested in! First up – I saw a post on the Microstock Group this morning about a search on Adobe which brings up images and videos that have never sold. Thanks to Jo Ann Snover for discovering this. The core of her post was this...
A long, long time ago I wrote about the copyright and model release issues that determined whether an image should be editorial or commercial usage but recently I got a message via my contact form from a photographer in the UK with this set of questions: I have plenty of ideas for stock photos to take but one area I am struggling with is copyright/legal aspects. I could not find any posts on your website about this so wondered if...
I was looking at my recent sales (using Microstockr Pro) and was struck with how often the images that I have created in the past year have shown up in the thumbnails. I usually do this at least once a day as I find that just scanning the sold files gives me a good idea of which themes are selling and also those small size images also give me feedback on whether my images, which might be great on a...
One thing I tried many months ago was to open up the website to questions and I then tried to combine similar questions and answer them in a concise post. So this might be a time to try that again! You can ask a question in the comments below, or send me a message through the contact form. Your question can be anonymous if you like. I’ll wait a while and then start to create some answering posts. So, if...
One of the things we should look for in the news are the signs of events or changes in society that will start to generate articles and commentary in the coming weeks and months. As I have mentioned before, some things are just newsworthy because of the event itself – a riot, or a fire – and that sort of event does not generate ongoing demand for what I call illustrative stock photos and videos. Instead, we are looking for...
I originally wrote about how to shoot photos of fireworks for the Dreamstime blog, but thought this was a perfect time to update it and publish it in time for the USA Independence day fireworks shows. Many countries have extravagant fireworks displays to celebrate major events. New Years is a popular one almost everywhere, Independence Day in the USA and many others. But how best to capture the excitement of those celebrations when everything seems to conspire against us photographers...
