Category: Stock Photography
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...
One of the topics I cover in my Stock Photography eBook is how to get the best placement of your images in the search engines of the stock agencies – with a chapter on advanced keywording and various tips that I picked up about specific sites. One that seemed to make a big difference to my sales was the ability to “Fave” your own images on 123RF. I covered this about 6 months ago, but I suddenly realized that is...
My new year resolution to post images each week has taken a beating this month. It has been a busy month for my non-stock photography activities, with a week’s conference in Chicago earlier in the month and then a few days vacation in St Michaels on the Chesapeake Bay to celebrate my wife’s birthday. Of course, the camera went along as well, but it has taken me some time to finally process and keyword all the images before finishing the...
Isolating an object against a pure white background is one of the challenges of stock photography, especially for light colored objects. If you place it on a white card and boost the lighting to get the card burnt out, the object suffers as well. I set about building a simple approach to the problem using things I have around the house. The project starts with a glass topped table, placed close to a white surface. Under the table you place...
Another in the weekly cycle of stock photos taken and uploaded this week. I decided to try some more isolated product type shots this week, and knocked up a small isolation table to get a good white background. In a nutshell, I took a small glass topped table and put it close to the white painted front door. On the top I laid my Lastolite TriGrip Reflector (which is a triangular piece of translucent material with a hand grip). Two...
A great month – April doesn’t normally outsell other months of the year, but this month I romped home with total sales of just over $1450 – a personal best. The month was helped by three sales on Alamy, for a total of $214, three video downloads on Pond5 for $75 and another great month on Shutterstock of $513. iStock recovered from a poor March to end with $271 compared to $235, and the other sites were OK if not...
This weeks examples of stock photos uploaded to the main microstock sites are a mix of old and new. The new ones first – just a couple of new images for this week – obviously my creative juices must have been low! The first shot is one of a series of teeth shots with metallic fillings, taken with my ring flash adaptor: I followed this with a shot (created from multiple images with the flash gun in different places to...
