Just two days ago, I was complaining about not being able to get my earnings above the $2-$3K per month level, but later that day I finished the keywording of my images from a week’s trip to Kauai in early November – looking at those pictures of the warm sunny days made me realize that this is not a bad way to make money! Even better, I got the results of the upload to Shutterstock – 103 images uploaded, 100...
Good months and bad… After a pretty good October when my total earnings reached $2639, November dropped, although at least I stayed above that $2000 threshold – ending the month with $2145. Here is my overall earning chart – getting a little difficult to see now with so many months, so when I get to January I’ll rework it to show fewer years. What do I see as the trends (as far as my sort of stock photos are concerned).
Parts 1 and 2 of this extended post have discussed what to take on a travel vacation and then how to select and process images on your return. I’ll now turn to keywording and uploading the images. I finished processing most of the images in mid October and eventually ended up with 389 images that I thought were worth keywording. I generally follow a simple rule about what is going to be “editorial” and hence only uploaded to my own...
OK – here is reason for my comment about the identical tattoos. Perhaps not visible on the smaller images I posted:
Wow – who would have thought that processing 2000 images would take so long! It is an interesting question in psychology that although I earn a reasonable amount from photography, in my mind I am not “working” when I process images and so it sometimes takes me some time to process them all. However, I think that is an important approach as well – if you just plow on through your images, you will become jaded and start to pass...
Shutterstock has been a big disappointment for a few months, with my earnings dipping well below $1000 month after month. I haven’t done a lot of analysis, but the relative lack of “on demands” and particularly Enhanced Downloads, seems to be a major reason for the fall. So it is nice to sometimes open up the earnings page and see a pleasant surprise: This simple macro shot of a pile of pins sold this morning for $88.50. I’ll start the...
It is a long time since I reported a success on Fine Art America, but out of the blue I got an email telling me that someone had bought a relatively small print of a night time shot of the Riverwalk and Centennial Fountain in Chicago. It was only a 12 x 8 inch print and so my profit was $32, but better than nothing. I could do to revisit some of my more recent “artistic” shots and upload some...
Now that I am back from my vacation in Spain and London, and have started to go through my 2100+ images, I will write first about what I look for when I am travelling and how I approach the processing and selection of images. I’m doing this in parts, as the whole thing could get too unwieldy. I’m writing this now that I am back home, so the first question of what to shoot is me thinking back about why...
Finally, a bit of good news. Shutterstock is still in the doldrums (with earnings this month of $877), but most of the other sites showed some positive improvements so that I ended the month with at least $2375. I say at least, because I noticed that on the first day of September I had a $50 sale in iStock’s partner program, which means that my normal estimates for iStock sales are probably low. What was good in September – 123RF...
I’ve only had one sale since moving to the new design of my personal stock agency, and so I decided to change the license type (from a sort of restricted royalty free license competing with Shutterstock and the like) to a one time use license with an extended option (for resale products) and reduced the pricing significantly. I rewrote my license based on one that Robin (from Symbiostock) uses on his stock site, and changed the pricing so that the...
