Earlier this month I mentioned that it was important to just get out into the fresh air and take photos that you enjoy. With a run of warm weather I got out my bike and took some nature shots around Morgantown and just uploaded them thinking “those will never sell!” As I reported, one sold almost immediately on Shutterstock, and now I see that 5 shots from that trip sold today on Dreamstime: This was part of a larger set...
In my review of Microstockr Pro, I forgot to mention one neat feature that saves a bit of time. If you click on an image thumbnail, you get the screen where the historic sales of that image are displayed. Hovering over the thumbnail on that screen shows two icons – a chain symbol that takes you to the image page on the stock agency, and a magnifying glass. Clicking this opens up the image search page on Google with the...
Although I had heard of the application before, I had never got round to looking in more detail at Microstockr until recently. I’m glad I did! I downloaded Microstockr Pro – the beta desktop version and so far I have been very impressed. There are things they are still working on (a new update came through just this morning), but it is giving me a lot of insight into my portfolio that would be hard to find any other way.
I spend a lot of time thinking about stock photo opportunities, but sometimes you just have to relax and take some photos that you enjoy! They may sell (chances are probably close to zero), but it is just as important to hone your skills on ordinary attractive images! This week has been lovely in West Virginia – unusually warm and the leaves are starting to turn, and so a bike ride was in order:
I was doing an attempt at an ImageBrief brief recently – one about perfectly shaped water drops on a piece of polished wood – and came across the first area where my Canon kit was much better than the Sony A7R! Macro focus stacking. The picture I was attempting needed high definition focus from front to rear: It took me a bit of time to sort out the lighting (which needed to be low and behind the drops to get...
I recently came across an interesting blog post by Craig Dingle entitled Why be exclusive on iStock? His blog is worth following as Craig is an Australian wedding photographer who also does stock photos as an extra income stream, and chose to join iStockPhoto as an exclusive back around the same time I was starting as a non-exclusive. His reasons are valid, but I’m not sure I can get over one of the biggest issues with exclusivity – you are tying...
September is usually a good time of the year for stock earnings. For me, this month, not so much! I must have really hit a bad patch as I ended the month probably just scraping to the $2000 mark. I’m sure many readers would love to get to that point, but I’m only reporting on my experiences with my portfolio. I don’t have my Alamy/Corbis/Getty earnings yet as I submitted to those via a partner, but without those I ended...
Update: See the final paragraph as I discovered a flaw in this approach! As readers of my book know, I have been recommending StockUploader for some time as an easy way to upload your files to many different stock agencies in parallel. Unfortunately the developer stopped supporting the software due to other priorities but he continued to provide a working copy for anyone who had bought my eBook. However, even that arrangement has come to an end and so I...
In my book, I talk at length about using DeepMeta as a way to ease the pains of submission to iStockphoto. iStock has two annoying steps in submission – one is to select a category (which isn’t that hard, although there are a lot of them), but the key annoyance is the matching of your keywords to their controlled vocabulary. They have a unique system of doing their image searches on a standardized set of keywords and so you need...
It is hard to work up the enthusiasm for posting this, but another poor month for me. Shutterstock continued in the doldrums with hardly any single or enhanced sales and total earnings of $610. To think I used to regularly get over $1000 from that site! iStock was poor with an estimated $200 and Alamy/Corbis was not great with $100 – not helped by the closure of Corbis to new sales.
