Alamy is one of the sites I upload to, and I’ve been bemused for a time when I’m adding some main keywords that major keywords seem to be missing. My recent trip to Kauai brought this home as the keyword “kauai” was missing on the uploaded files. At first I thought I had forgotten to add it, but it was there in Lightroom, as “Kauai”. At first, I thought this was the reason, but no, there is a deeper reason....
Much of the past week has been occupied with processing my images from Hawaii. All told, I have around 1500, but 250 of those were the timelapse movie images that I discussed a few days ago. Amazing how long it takes to review and then process all those images as I always work in Raw and so some amount of exposure/clarity is required on all the images. At the end of the day, I ended up with about 220 keepers,...
As mentioned in a previous post, I’m still working through my 1400 images from a recent trip to Oahu and Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. One of my experiments this time was a timelapse movie that I will upload to a few stock video sites. The steps are not that complex if you haven’t done this before: Set your camera up on a tripod and carefully frame and level the shot Set the quality to Jpeg and, if you can,...
A new year starts in a pretty reasonable fashion with total earnings of around $1150. It isn’t just good enough to keep me on track for my 2012 target of $18000, but there are still plenty of months and plenty of images to upload between now and the end of the year! I added around 100 images this month to most of the stock agencies, although I am still going through the hundreds of photos taken on my recent trip...
Well, my new year resolution to post every week got forgotten last week! But I did have an excuse – I had to go to a conference in Hawaii and tacked a week’s working vacation (taking photographs) in Kauai onto the trip. Over 1400 images later, I am struggling to go through and edit the ones that I think have potential as stock images. I also had my first attempt at a time lapse movie during the week, taking a...
I’m keeping up with my resolution to take and post new images every week! This first one was a real joy to produce. I saw a video on PhotographyTalk forum which showed how to get a shot of wine flowing from a bottle. His example was one where the wine appeared to shoot straight up out of the bottle, but I thought I would try something a bit harder – make the wine go into a glass! The idea is...
Last week I started with a New Year resolution to post once a week with some example stock images taken that week. I did this partly to keep the pressure on myself to take more images and I also hope it will be helpful to give you some ideas. This is the second week, but first an update on some images uploaded last week. I took as set of images of an Apple Macbook (no logos), but was surprised that...
As I mentioned in the annual review, I did think about committing to a stock photo a day target for 2012, but decided against it – too much of a commitment! Instead, I will post, at least once a week, images that I have uploaded in the past seven days. I’m not saying that all these will be great sellers, but it will perhaps give you some ideas of what to shoot. I often find other photos to be a...
I’ve just published my December stock photo earnings results, and thought it would be helpful to review the year – how I did, what changed, lessons learned and thoughts for 2012. First, a graph of earnings per site through 2011: The December results showed the growth in earnings, but in a nutshell, I went from total earnings in Dec 2010 of $429 to $1188 in Dec 2011. Month to month growth over the year of 176%! What did I do...
The December results are pretty good, and also quite consistent from month to month. Although December obviously has two major holidays, and work tends to slow down in many offices, the final sales of $1188 are better than I expected. Shutterstock came in really well with a couple of Enhanced Licenses on Friday (of the coastline of St John), to give total earnings of $507 for the month – a record for that site. The previous high had been $451...
