After moving from being a long-time Canon shooter to the Sony mirrorless full frame system last June, I started questioning one of my lens choices. I started with the 16-35mm F4, 24-70mm F4 and the 70-200mm F4 Sony lenses and carried those around in my backpack. Right from the start, I was a bit uncertain about the sharpness of that 24-70mm lens and even had some rejections from stock agencies about lack of sharpness. Even though I did some tests...
There was an update to Microstockr Pro last night that added support for the new Getty/iStock ESP reporting system. I reviewed Microstockr Pro in the past and find it a really useful way to keep a daily track of what is selling on the various sites. It is currently free for desktop users. The latest release picks up the details of the sales of individual images from the ESP site and shows those with thumbnails in the appropriate months: Of...
Like many of you, I have struggled with the move to the Getty ESP, being unable to access the site at all for almost 2 or 3 weeks in February. I mentioned earlier that when I compared the tax forms I got from Getty with my own records of earnings taken each month from the site, it turned out I had earned perhaps $200 more in the year than I expected, and I’m glad to say that has continued into...
These don’t happen very often, but it is always nice to see a sale, especially of a large print, on Fine Art America. Yesterday it was a 36 inch x 21 inch glossy canvas of my images of the Canadian Falls at Niagara. I was walking on the Canadian side of the waterfall, and there is almost always a rainbow there and I waited until the tourist boat was just at the end of the rainbow. It was a single...
Interesting how things change from month to month. February is normally a poor month because of the number of days (although aren’t all months poor months these days!), but this month I actually did better. Quite a lot of that is because I report sales from Getty when they are actually cleared, and so that adds some delay, but overall it was a good month for me with total earnings of $2719. Here is the comparison agency by agency with...
Since my earlier review of StockSubmitter back in December, I’ve really grown to like the system and it really does save time! As I explained last time, my basic process is to keyword in Lightroom (which is alphabetic order) and then to export the files as Jpegs to a new folder structure ready for uploading. Once I open StockSubmitter I first check to see that the categories have been guessed correctly – they generally are, but it is worth a...
I haven’t uploading anything new to Fine Art America recently, but I do get sales from time to time. The latest one this week was for a 24 x 24 inch metal print of some seeds from the Swamp Milkweed plant: They obviously cropped it a bit to get a square format, but I have always liked this series of images – in fact I have two different versions on the wall of my bathroom! This one sold to make...
It is that time of year again for an analysis and report of Stock Photography economics for 2016. What a year….and I’m not talking about stock photography yet! Overall, I didn’t do as well as 2015, which itself was not as good as 2014 so it looks like the best is perhaps behind us! There are some real downers for the year in terms of performance (and yes, Shutterstock, I’m talking about you), but Adobe Stock has really turned Fotolia...
For some reason, I’ve had some high value sales on Shutterstock this month, but that is a story for next week… In the meantime, here is one of the sort of studio shots I’ve been working on this month. I think I made up the words (at least I was thinking of them before I went to sleep one night), but this sort of image is easy to make and sells from time to time. The basic background was a...
Even on Christmas Eve a stock photographer needs to be thinking of saleable images! So here is a shot of my living room decorated ready for a family meal tomorrow on Christmas Day. Also available on Shutterstock, istock……! I also finally joined Instagram (catching up with social media) and so if you are there, please check out my new images. My user name is Steve.Heap. I’ve only added a few Christmassy images today but will add more as time goes...
