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...
I’ve been doing some analysis of my portfolio to try to work out if the earnings have risen because of the number of images online, or if other factors are coming into play. The answers are fascinating! Although there is a lot of doom and gloom in the stock industry, with the common view that earnings are falling faster than you can put images online, the key point from my analysis is that the earnings per image is actually increasing...
A question that I am often asked is how you can find out where your images are being used online. I use the Google Images search to do that – and here are the steps: 1. Although Google Image Search works with any size of image, it takes quite a time to upload the full size JPEG to their server for the search. It is much quicker if you make smaller copies (800 pixels wide and lower JPEG quality) of...
