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...
This is a specialized post and only of interest to people who have created their own stock agency site using Symbiostock and WordPress. 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 images on your site. What happens if there is an issue on the server hosting your site and, for some reason, the...
One of the challenges of stock photography is to think of that next subject! Sometimes we think that everything that can be photographed, has been photographed, and is available for sale on all the agencies! When I get to that point, it is always good to open a bottle of wine, relax, and remember that every image can be improved in some way, and that there are ways of seeing things that have perhaps not been done before – and,...
Another month goes by, and another set of earnings. August can be a slow month, and this month was no exception. Most of my sites seemed to have struggled to get anywhere near their best earnings, and the month ended below the $2000 bar that I am trying to always better. Final count is around $1960 this month. Shutterstock was one of those slow sites – I thought it was going to be one of the worst months there for...
I’ve mentioned SymbioStock, the network of independent stock illustrators and photographers before, but things have continued to develop. First up – I got my first sale from my own SymbioStock site – BackyardStockPhotos. Now this is nothing to get excited about, but a buyer found my site, found the image they wanted, registered and bought/downloaded the image with no issues or fuss. It was this one: They bought a small version – which I priced at $3. As I said,...
