One of the smaller line items (but still significant!) in my monthly sales tables is Pond5. This site is one of the leading agencies in stock footage – and since I uploaded my first movies in 2010, I have earned over $850 from the licensing of short video clips. The sales are a bit intermittent, but each one nets around $30 (they sell for $50 to $60), and so a sale makes quite a difference to my monthly earnings. I...
I cover both of these sites in detail in my eBook, but a couple of updates that will be useful if you are uploading to these sites. Fotolia: When I upload to Fotolia, I now click on the “State” heading in “Manage Files” before starting to edit the uploaded images prior to submission. This keeps all the unsubmitted files on the first page of images, and stops you having to keep jumping to later pages if you have uploaded a...
Well, the run of record earnings had to end sometime, and July was the month! The almost zero count of Enhanced Licenses on Shutterstock (only one EL download on 31 July this month), and a much less dramatic performance on Alamy ($98 compared to $248) meant that this was not going to be a record month, but it was still reasonable for a middle of the summer holidays season. Shutterstock actually did OK with $572, and iStock was great with...
The title of this post sounds like a song (although I think that was “flowers..”), but this month has seen a serious drop in the number of enhanced license downloads from Shutterstock for me as well as a number of forum members at the Microstock Group. I normally see four to six EDs from Shutterstock in a month (each earning me $28) and in July this has dropped to just one (and that came on the last day of the...
On hot days (and cold ones in winter) taking macro studio shots can be a great way of building up your portfolio. The main problem with macro images is the extremely narrow depth of field, so you can take a photo of a coin straight on, and get it all in focus, but if you wanted to take a stack of coins laying flat on the table, no manipulation of the aperture would increase the depth of field sufficiently to...
It is an age since I last showed some of my stock photos, but I can assure you I haven’t been idle. I try to upload 50 images a week now – sometimes a few more, sometimes less, but that is my target. I generally pick 25 of those for iStockPhoto each week to try to build up my portfolio there. Here are some uploaded in the past weeks. These are in no particular order, but selected to show a...
Lightroom, especially in versions 3 and 4, has become an essential tool in my workflow for stock images. I can modify exposure and white balance to get the image to its best state, and add description, title and keywords ready for upload. My process for keywording a group of similar images is to get a set of the keywords that describe the basic scene and sync that to all the similar images, and then add some specific keywords that fully...
One of the disappointments of stock photography is that you can sell hundreds (eventually!) of downloads, but you rarely get the satisfaction of seeing them in print, or, even better, knowing that someone else liked the image enough to get it printed for their home or office wall. I did come across one of my images of Overall Run Falls in a copy of the Guide to the Shenandoah National Park, which was nice: But my biggest kick was seeing...
A very good month. I’m not sure how many posts I can make starting with those words, but June has blown all previous months out of the water and is up almost $150 over my May total to end with around $1750. I say around, as two sites are still down from the major storms in Northern Virginia last night – YayMicro and Cutcaster and so I can’t update the earnings from those two sites. So, what was good about...
As I discussed last month, the Enhanced License download on Shutterstock makes a big difference to monthly earnings. I started to publish the images that get selected for an Enhanced License to see if I can see a pattern in what sort of images is attractive to a buyer for these more expensive licenses – $28 to the contributor. Here are the June EL Downloads: This first one is probably an easy one to explain – the image is nicely...
