There were multiple questions about keywords in my recent post asking for questions for me to mull over. I’ve thought about how best to do this – copy the questions into this post, or just try to answer as many as I can and you can trust me that I took your questions into account! I think the latter is the best approach, but let me know if you disagree. To complete the circle, I’ll reply to each of the...
I’ll report on this even though it doesn’t have much to do with stock photography. I struggled for months with poor performance from Adobe Lightroom Classic, which seemed to get worse, the longer I used it. I also have the Avast Free anti-virus program running on my Windows 10 PC. I am an active user of Adobe Lightroom which maintains a large database of all the changes that you make to photographs as well as updating the image files themselves...
A colleague of mine suggested that it might be helpful for people to be able to ask me questions and then I gather them together into similar subjects and provide my view on the answer. Sounds like a great idea so I will use this blog post to gather your questions. As it happens, I am also part way through rewriting my book on Stock Photography, and getting a good idea of what sort of questions you have will also...
I’d be the last person to call myself a professional food photographer – the detail required to properly style and light food so that it looks appetizing and delicious to eat is a real skill in its own right. But I’ve been making some progress via those Snapwire requests for photos of three images of takeout or delivery meals from local restaurants that I mentioned last month. Since I started, I’ve completed 7 of the assignments, have 2 currently in...
I joined Snapwire a few years back when it first launched. It was a bit like Image Brief where buyers could define their requirements and photographers would submit images that met that brief. Image Brief offered some pretty good commisions, and, unfortunately I don’t think there were enough buyers willing to pay and they closed down. Snapwire offer much smaller commissions and even with that there are not many requests for specific commissions. As a new contributor to Snapwire, you...
I’m trying, once again, to earn a little from the Dreamstime blog contest. Thanks to your help, I was successful last time with an article on Taking Nature Photos that sell and had $300 credited to my account at Dreamstime. This particular contest was all about color and how to use it in your photos. Being the business person, I immediately thought about how color can be used to make our images more attractive to buyers, rather that just more...
It is the dream of every stock photographer – host your own images on your own site, set the prices you want for the licenses and cut out the ridiculous percentage that agencies take out of the payment. What could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, quite a lot! This post is a run through of the history, and the results, of my own efforts in this space. And, of course, my conclusions! I started this venture way, way back in 2013...
I wrote earlier about my experiences of what sells on EyeEM, and since then I have been thinking of how it could be improved. Of course, some of these things are only developments that EyeEM can make, but if they are not described then nothing is going to happen! EyeEM sells in two main places – one is their own site, although it has been a while since I got some direct sales there. The main source of income for...
Like many of you, I have a large collection of 35mm slides and negative film that I have taken over the years that are currently pretty much invisible. I ditched my slide projectors with the last house move (they were 240V and hadn’t been used in 20 years!) and so all the slides were stored in their boxes for some sort of future viewing! In my early years I took a lot of black and white films and so have...
EyeEM is an interesting site for photographers with some real negatives, but some positive signs on the earnings. I have been with them since early 2018 and I think I saw my first earnings in April of that year. In 2018 I earned $407 and 2019 so far has been $767 for the month through June. So it has become a steady middle of the road earner – certainly beating many established sites with a much larger portfolio. So that...
