Sometimes, on a dark winters night, it is fun to just see what can be created from little bits of photos that are already sitting on your hard drive. Here is one such effort, that I think nicely illustrates the concept of “being adrift” and can be used as a stock image for many leadership (or lack of) illustrations. This could have been a beautifully seen shot with a boat floating on a calm sea, or it could have started...
The Symbiostock network has reached a new milestone – 250,000 images now available to license directly from the artist in a simple straightforward process! My own efforts are slowly paying off as well – since I started my own stock photo agency, BackyardStockPhotos.com, I have now sold 12 images for a total of $120. Things appear to be picking up a bit with two full size sales in March for $20 each. This month I’ve sold the following: It is...
As photographers (dropping the “stock” word for a moment) we all like to create artistic masterpieces that truly capture the grandeur of a place or landscape – especially if the sun is rising or setting at the same time. There is just something about the conjunction of colors that automatically attracts us to sunsets! Often such sites are simply to let friends and family see the best shots we have taken – pointing someone to a stock agency and saying...
I’ve been very slow in posting new information in the past couple of months – but there has been a reason! I was lucky enough to go on a cruise around Australia and New Zealand in late November/December and then a trip to Hawaii in January. As a result, I have thousands of images to process – some of which were completed and uploaded, but the majority are still being worked on. I’m now back at home again and so...
I did a guest post over on Amos Struck’s website Stock Photo Secrets about the life of a stock photographer – a bit hard to cover that topic in a short blog, but I wanted to highlight some of the issues that we face – low commissions – and some of the potential solutions – our own linked Symbiostock sites. The Stock Photo Secrets site is aimed mainly at buyers of images, so perhaps that will strike a chord with...
I’ve decided to write a fuller post on my experiences on Fine Art America as I’ve been increasingly impressed with the sales coming from the site and thought some of my landscape/fine art readers may like to know more about this site and the opportunities for selling non-stock images. Fine Art America is a combination of a social site for photographers and a print on demand site for connoisseurs of good art! There are millions of images from abstract painting...
I’ve been pretty quiet for a few weeks – mainly because I went on a long vacation to Australia and New Zealand, cruising on the Celebrity Solstice from Sydney to Melbourne, across to New Zealand and then around the South and North Island – great relaxation and pretty good for photography. I’ll write more about the issues of taking good photos when on a cruise in a future post once I have processed the 3500 images I came back with!...
I wrote about the electronic magazine Photographing Food a couple of months back – although they are quite expensive at $5 per issue, I enjoyed them coming along at intervals as you could read, absorb and practice each technique as they were published. It was quite rightly pointed out that you could buy a full book about photographing food for less than the price of all the back-issues. However, I still found them useful and entertaining (and gave me some...
Perhaps this is a hopeful title! However, I became very disillusioned with the performance of my personal stock agency site (BackyardStockPhotos.com) over recent weeks with its hosting at BlueHost. I track the response time of the site using Pingdom. This site sends a page load request every 5 minutes and graphs the results. As you can see, there have been some good times, but some horrendous page load times as well: 6 seconds is a long time to wait for...
Why no earnings reports? Partly because I have been busy, and partly because Shutterstock changed their terms and conditions requiring (or at least heavily suggesting) that contributors don’t publish details of their earnings on that site. I hear that some contributors have been approached to stop publishing details and I certainly don’t want to fall foul of them as I earn a big percentage of my stock earnings from that site. Anyway, things have continued to grow in total. I...
