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...
Shutterstock is the stock agency that earns the most for almost all non-exclusive stock photographers, and the agency has a series of step changes in earnings per download that you achieve once your lifetime earnings have passed that point. Initially you get $0.25 per subscription download, after $500 in lifetime earnings this increases to $0.33, to $0.36 after $3000 and finally, the crowning achievement is to get $0.38 after earning $10000 from the site. Other payments follow suit, with the...
Continuing my weekly summary of stock photos – this week, I have a collection of images from various trips and some studio shots. My first one is a from a test of the Canon G1X taken on a trip to Glen Echo in Maryland. The G1X has an APS-C sensor with a fixed zoom lens, and so far, I have been very impressed by the noise level. The weather was a bit cloudy at Glen Echo and so I am...
Selling photos is certainly getting interesting with another great month in May, easily exceeding my best month to date in April 2012. This month I ended with $1608, after the adjusted earnings for April of $1537. I adjusted April as I later found a reasonable sale on Alamy late on the evening of 30 April and, strangely enough, the same thing happened this month – a $108 sale for a book illustration on the 31st May. That made six sales...
One of the biggest determinants of a good month on Shutterstock is the number of Enhanced Downloads (or EDs). What is an Enhanced Download? Strictly speaking it is an Enhanced License Download – a standard license on Shutterstock lets the buyer use the image for personal non-commercial uses with duplication up to 250,000 copies. If someone wants to print more than that, or use the image in a commercial way – as a print in a hotel, or as an...
