This should really have been titled the best drone I never had… About a month back I finally gave in to my impulse to buy a drone for stock photography and videos. I did a lot of research, and my key requirements were obviously a good camera for stills and video but also something that I could travel with on my jaunts around the world. I’m going on a cruise later in the year and thought lovingly of a great...
Sometimes (often?) you travel to a location for a sunset photo, but the weather just doesn’t co-operate! On my recent UK vacation, we were driving back from visiting friends in Snowdonia National Park and I thought a detour to take a sunset image of the Vale of Llangollen would be nice! The roads up to Panorama Walk are really narrow and steep, but once you are there it all opens up and you get a great overview of the vale,...
I was thinking about this question recently. I have many, many images that I sell via stock agencies and then I have a smaller subset that I try to sell as prints via Fine Art America and also Photo4Me in the UK. I sometimes even print my own images but there is a limit to the amount of wall space I can dedicate to my own prints! So there is a conflict between the commercial calculation of time spent versus...
Some months up, some months down – that seems to be the story of stock photo earnings these days. Overall the month was not bad with earnings so far of $2267. For some reason I am not seeing any sales on Zoonar (when I normally get some sales each month) and that could be a reporting issue on the site, but it is unlikely to shift the dial very much. As a summary chart this month I have included the...
I wrote, a few weeks back, about an experiment using Facebook advertising to drive traffic to Fine Art America to see if I could sell a print of San Francisco: I focused my advertising on people around San Francisco and set the budget at $30 spread over a week. Well, the results are in, and the total number of sales of prints on Fine Art America was
I’ve been spending time adding more “fine art” images to Fine Art America recently, adding perhaps 40 or so in the past month. My latest images can be seen here. But how to “goose” those sales? I decided to try Facebook advertizing for an image that I created in black and white of San Francisco: The image itself needed a bit of work as it was taken using a 200mm lens (on a tripod) from the Marin Headlands near the...
Last weekend I went to Washington DC with my local camera club and, as some of the attendees were new to DC, we mainly covered the popular sites that I have visited many times before. So how to take something new that I could upload to my stock portfolio? The answer for me was to seek out the unusual view of those places that have been covered in thousands of images already. While not many of my readers will visit...
The days shoot by and here I am writing once again about earnings. It has been a busy month for me putting all my Hawaii images online and I’m still going through the videos and uploading those. I took quite a lot of Point of View GoPro images with the camera stuck on the front of the car as we drove around the narrow roads in Maui, so hopefully some of those will sell. Of course, Shutterstock, in its wisdom,...
I seem to be on a roll this month with posts. I think it is because I have finished processing all my Hawaii shots and have got those online and I’m waiting for the next project! That is also giving me some time to look at some of the shots I have taken and trying to improve ones that are worthwhile. The first one could have been a great shot of a proud (and wild) cockerel overlooking his territory on...
I had a 50 minute online chat with the host of ImprovePhotography.com, Jim Harmer, earlier in the week about stock photography. While I think I probably waffled on a bit, it was a good discussion and Jim has now posted the podcast on his site. He also wrote a nice blog post about the subject and the interview, which has done wonders for sales of my book on Amazon! If you have an empty hour to fill, and you always...
