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.....
As I think I mentioned, I went on a cruise in September around the Baltic Sea. 11 cities in 15 days! Apart from a cruise being a really relaxing way to spend your time, how does it match against a travel stock photographer’s needs? How do I approach a day in a new city? I thought I would illustrate this with one day’s shoot in Copenhagen – I just finished keywording and uploading this particular set yesterday. As I had...
One lesson you should take to heart – you never know when a chance shot will turn into a nice little earner and so you need to always be ready (with your camera) for those chance encounters. What do I mean by this? I was driving down a small road near my home when I saw a burned out cabin by the side of the road. I’d never really noticed it before, but now it was a burnt out wreck...
Life shouldn’t be all work and stock photographers need to take a break from the creation of “saleable” images sometimes! Yesterday I took a trip to Valley Falls State Park in “Wild and Wonderful West Virginia” with my local camera club – a place that is only 30 miles from my home, but I hadn’t known existed before this weekend! I’m not sure any of these shots are worth uploading to stock agencies, but I enjoyed a pleasant couple of...
I’m very late this month – my apologies! I was off on yet another trip to take stock photos – this time to Southern California. Not as many images to process as my last trip (which I haven’t finished yet), but I now have another 823 to process and eventually keyword the selected images. One thing you need to understand about this business – it is actually quite a lot of hard work going through every image, choosing the ones...
One of the common traits of many stock photographers is a certain carefulness with money – not for equipment in many cases, but in terms of applications that may simplify their lives by saving a bit of time. I must admit to the same feeling – $1000 on a new lens, certainly! $7.99 a month for a service that tracks earnings – no way! But I got to thinking about this – my biggest expense in creating and uploading stock...
