As a contributor, I rarely follow the approaches that the various stock sites use to market their services. I’m really glad they are doing it, but it doesn’t impact me very much. I was pleasantly surprised to see a new initiative from Fotolia to create a very clear and well put together site to explain why it makes sense to pay for an image rather than seek a free copy somewhere on the internet. I’ve been uploading to Fotolia since...
With the purchase of my first real macro lens, I have been investigating the world of the small! One of the things I learned in my research is that the depth of focus of macro images is very small, and there is a limit to how much you can increase the depth of focus with smaller apertures. As I tried to explain in a long post on Photography Talk, there is a sweet spot for clarity and depth of field...
I came across this tip on the Microstock Group site as a way to increase revenue from 123RF. The link is a post from one of the 123RF staff, and explains how you can highlight up to 5% of your images as favorites (or “Faves”) and that those images are displayed earlier in the search results. The site show you how many you can Fave – it was 81 in my case, and so I went through my images and...
What a month! After a couple of barren months, July roared back to give me both a best month ever and also I finally broke the magical $1000 earning level. As an earlier post detailed, I had a number of great sales – $118 on Alamy and $100 on Dreamstime, a couple of video sales for $25 each, and a few Shutterstock enhanced licenses for $28 each. A surprising entry in the list was iSignStock – a UK based stock...
After a couple of poor months, July has been unusual, to say the least. The month started well with the purchase of the full rights to an image on Dreamstime, followed by a couple of enhanced sales on the following two days on Shutterstock – one of our bengal cat with a mournful expression and one of the city of Abu Dhabi. In the meantime, Pond5 came in with two sales from Kauai – one of the pier at Hanalei...
I was very pleasantly surprised to be asked to give an interview with Matt Antonino, the photographer and blogger at NiltoMil.com. Matt is famous for a very aggressive target for his stock photography – to go from zero to a million dollars from the sale of his images. How is he getting on – not bad! I think he is regularly achieving $1000 months now. Anyway, Matt has a weekly “focus” section on his blog and he chose me to...
In the early days (well at least a couple of years ago!), one of the default settings on Dreamstime was that you would offer to sell the rights for your image at a predefined price of $250, of which you would get $125. As this was the default, I left it like that for many of my early images. The site has changed now, and you need to specifically select this option – which I don’t. I was advised yesterday...
I recently sold the rights to an image, and one of the conditions is that I need to remove the picture from all other stock sites, personal sites and exhibitions. Removing it from all the stock sites I submit to was not an easy process, as I had to find out, for each site, exactly how to do it! Rather than forget and have to learn it all again, here is a summary of how to delete individual images from...
Well, time to dust off the camera and get shooting again! June was not a good month for sales with the total not even hitting the $600 mark, ending at $595. The reasons were pretty clear as I looked at the various sites. Although the number of downloads was pretty similar from month to month, there was a distinct lack of any enhanced or higher value sales. In previous months, I was seeing several $28 sales on Shutterstock and occasional...
I spent Saturday at the Maryland Barn Storming event near Frederick where you get to visit eight historic barns in the area, including a fantastic home created out of an old barn. This event happens every year, and is well worth supporting if you are in the area. For me, this was also a great opportunity to try out my new Promote remote control for real. I took my tripod, used the 18-40mm lens for wide angle shots in small...
