Category: Stock Photography
This is a specialized post and only of interest to people who have created their own stock agency site using the Symbiostock plugin and WordPress. I’ve written a couple of posts about how I transitioned from the legacy Symbiostock Theme to the new plugin here. Why Backup: You may have signed up for backup services from your web hosting company, but at the end of the day you will have put 100s of hours into uploading, describing and processing your...
As I mentioned earlier this week, I have been creating a new Symbiostock based personal stock agency for all my images. This was partly because the legacy theme is not being supported any longer and partly because I wanted to simplify my hosting arrangements. To illustrate the issue, someone bought a couple of images from my legacy site last night, I charged him, but the site didn’t send the email with links to the images. Not good… Anyway, I thought...
Talk about being a glutton for punishment… I put many, many hours into creating my own stock site at BackyardStockPhotos using the first Symbiostock wordpress theme written by Leo. We had lots of issues along the way, with Leo battling bravely through each one and constantly listening to the endless demands of the stock photographers and illustrators that were using the theme. As often happens with internet based forums, the whole thing degenerated into name calling and a very antagonistic...
Yes, you are confused! The more you read the normal forum posts, the more it all becomes muddled. If I had a dollar for each time someone said that an image didn’t have a release and so it must be rights managed, or that all RF images are for commercial use I would be a wealthy man… Lets start with licensing. Royalty Free (RF) and Rights Managed (RM) are simply different licensing approaches. RF is a one-time license payment that...
With three awards under my belt, I must be an expert at Image Brief submissions! I thought it might be interesting to talk about how I approach a brief – there was one today that asked for: Signs of a middle-aged person/a couple with plans to go out for a day/eve. Tickets to an event on a table next to car keys or other symbols of leaving home; the supporting text will depict hesitation about going out due to a...
Although I see quite a lot of dissatisfaction about Image Brief on various forums, I still enjoy looking at the briefs (of which there seem to be a lot these days) and thinking about which images might fit the requirement. Many briefs seem to expire without any award, and some take a long time before anything happens. I was surprised to see an email yesterday with details of a new sale – an image that I must have submitted months...
As regular readers know, I have not been a big fan of Fotolia on several grounds. I didn’t like the pricing approach and the way Dollar Photo Club was launched, my rejections have been sky high – perhaps getting a 40% acceptance rate (if that), and their upload process was tiresome and annoying. Then, of course, the sales weren’t great either… Talk about a triple whammy. Fotolia was bought by Adobe and changes are definitely occurring – there is the...
I was mulling over the strange click teasers (if that is an acceptable phrase..) that you see on the internet to try to entice you to click through to the article, and came up with one of my own. The answer, of course, is that I started selling them as stock photos, and creating a lot more as well, and I just noticed that I missed a major event – I passed the $100,000 earnings mark just a couple of...
I’ve been a bit behind in posting new information – mainly because I’m in the process of moving to a different state and getting a house ready for sale is a very big task – you accumulate so much stuff over the years. Anyway, photography took a back seat for the past month, although I did finally manage to process and keyword images that I took during a vacation in Cornwall in England and a short trip to Ocean City...
I took some images of a new golf course in Kauai around sunset and liked the calm and serene feeling of the “18th hole”, and so submitted about four different shots of the green and a sand bunker. I noticed that one of them: sold reasonably well on Shutterstock and the image in the thumbnail immediately reminded me of a heart shape in front of the flag – it starts off well at the top, but loses it! As a...
