We all spend a lot of money on our hobby, so how can you maximize the amount of money you earn from licensing your images via stock agencies? Well, the obvious immediate answer is to take great commercial images that are better than all the ones already out there, but, to be honest, that is easier said than done. There is another way though – maximize your income by making your photos available to as many potential buyers as possible....
It is a long time since I wrote about my workflow and it has probably evolved over time, so an update might be welcome for some newer readers. Here is the essence: I always take my images in Raw format and import into Lightroom. Because I keyword all the images I think are worthwhile, having a structure on my hard-drive with topics or particular shoots isn’t necessary and so I use a simple Year and then Month structure: I have...
It is always a good idea for stock contributors to be ahead of the game when it comes to illustrating subjects that are going to get a lot of coverage in the news and on blogs and sites. Of course some of those are obvious now in retrospect – buying some fake bitcoins to illustrate the seemingly endless rise in their price would have given you lots of opportunities for sales: Since I first bought these “gold” coins back in...
I wrote last week about the Dreamstime Blog Contest and my entry. Well, and this is a bit of a downer, my entry was rejected for not meeting some or all of their guidelines. I checked those out, but am not really sure what I did wrong, but, hey, there are other things in life! I’ll reformat the article and post it here a little later! In the meantime, I do have a favor to ask. My colleague, Alex Rotenberg,...
November certainly was a good month for me this year. Even though we have a US holiday, the sales were good throughout the month and I ended up with earnings of $3177. This is my best month ever (ignoring one special month in December 2014 when I sold an image on ImageBrief for $1060!) This continues a pattern I have seen all year where, almost without exception, the earnings in a month this year have exceeded the earnings in the...
Dreamstime has announced a competition for “best blog” post on their site and so I have had a go at my first blog on the Dreamstime site. **Update** – it doesn’t appear to be visible on the site yet. Perhaps in moderation? *** I decided to write about a tricky subject – how to come up with ideas (and images) to illustrate things in the news. If you have an account at Dreamstime, would you mind having a look at...
Maybe not the highest I have ever got for a single sale, but certainly the highest in a long, long time. I saw that this image of Morgantown in West Virginia has just sold for $105: It just goes to show that images of your own town (especially if they are quite nicely shot in good weather) can sell. In this case I think it might be because Morgantown has a big university (WVU) and it might be used for...
What a strange title! But I realized over the past few days that what I have been doing with editorial shots was not only a lot of hard work – it was unnecessary as well! For the past year, I have been uploading editorial shots to the stock agencies using the guidance in this Shutterstock blog article, Creating the Perfect Editorial Caption. Basically, a perfect caption is like this: It has the date, location, then a description, then the location...
I just read a very detailed and honest account, by Alex Rotenberg, of how he was taken in by people pretending to be interested in showing his work in a gallery, when what it is really about is getting up front payments and keeping the pretense going to get even more money with next to no chance of your work being seen by interested buyers. Another cautionary tale!
I received an email today via the Fine Art America website that said: Subject: ARTWORK Message: Greetings, My name is Anthonio Jack from Oregon.. I actually observed my wife has been viewing your website on my laptop and i guess she likes your piece of work, I’m also impressed and amazed to have seen your various works too,You are doing a great job. I would like to receive further information about your piece of work and what inspires you.....
