I’ve written before about the sky replacement capabilities of Luminar 4 from Skylum, although, of course, the program does much more than that. To be honest, I’m so used to Photoshop and Lightroom that I haven’t had the time or inclination to investigate its other features, but if you are looking for more “One-click” improvements to your images, I’m sure it can deliver! I’ve been playing with its sky replacement functions when I have either a concept in mind that...
2019 has now come and gone and its time to review how the stock business performed during the year. Overall, it was not too bad (and could certainly have been worse) as I ended up with total earnings of $35,595 compared with $35,790 in 2018. I would really have liked to continue with some growth over previous years, but the slow second half of December put paid to that. Here is the trend: As you can see from the above,...
I’m sure you have noticed some premium articles being published. I wanted to reassure readers that I will continue to post other items for general consumption as before. I’m not turning this blog into a subscription only website. I wanted to get a bit of premium content online, but I still plan to report on the 2019 annual results shortly and add more information on stock photography and videos going forward that everyone will be able to read.
For a long time I have wondered whether this blog would be more valuable to readers (and to me!) if I explained what sort of ideas I am having for new stock concepts and how I plan to explore them with still photos and videos. Up until now, I have kept those to myself and mentioned them well after I have had plenty of time to reap the rewards of my creations. The most recent example was with Juul vaping...
Taking a break from some of my other work (and I did finish all my uploads of Portugal yesterday!) and so I decided to look at some of the questions I received but haven’t answered yet. The first one was via the contact page on my site and was: Thank you very much for your website, which is very useful. I wanted to ask you two questions. Bigstock belongs to Shutterstock ?. In the list of StockSubmitter agencies are separated....
Adobe have recently started accepting editorial images from contributors with more than 1000 lifetime downloads, but what does that mean? What is an illustrative editorial image? Firstly, what is an editorial image? It is an image that is intended to be used to illustrate or help explain an “educational” or news or commentary article rather than be used to promote a product or a point of view. To take an extreme for clarity – a picture of an Hispanic person...
I’ve been taking a break from stock for a few days to get ready for Christmas, although I did take the opportunity to photograph my grandchildren in front of the Xmas tree. I rarely use them as models for stock photos – there are possibly too many ways that images can be misused, but certain shots are less likely to be taken out of context and so I do upload those with a model release. This one really caught my...
There were multiple questions about keywords in my recent post asking for questions for me to mull over. I’ve thought about how best to do this – copy the questions into this post, or just try to answer as many as I can and you can trust me that I took your questions into account! I think the latter is the best approach, but let me know if you disagree. To complete the circle, I’ll reply to each of the...
Yesterday I published my video earnings for November 2019, but what was the rest of the story? As I expected, yesterday was a very slow day (which makes 3 in a row as Thanksgiving in the US makes a big dent in my sales). However, the month as a whole was great – I ended up with $3418. I have to recognize that there were a few one-offs this month. A sale on Fine Art America earlier in the month...
It is the dream of every stock photographer – host your own images on your own site, set the prices you want for the licenses and cut out the ridiculous percentage that agencies take out of the payment. What could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, quite a lot! This post is a run through of the history, and the results, of my own efforts in this space. And, of course, my conclusions! I started this venture way, way back in 2013...
