A friend with a deep portfolio on images on his hard drive recently asked me if I had any advice on breaking through the barrier of “just too much to do and not enough time” to get started in selling these images on the various stock agencies. Often, being faced with keywording and describing hundreds or thousands of images, we tend to just put it off for another day! After all, this part of the process is the most difficult...
Earlier in the week I wrote the first of several posts on stock video. Today I’ll move forward to look at the sort of stock videos I’ve been taking and how successful they have been. By the way, if you haven’t read it yet, it is worth looking at the comment added by Vlad Savin to that first post. He provides a very good background to the video industry use of B-Roll to fill in gaps in their productions. It...
I’ve been promising to write about stock video for a while and so this is the first of what I plan will be a series of posts going through my approach to stock video. I don’t pretend to be an expert – in fact I still struggle a bit with the concepts of what a good stock video is – but I’ll give you my thoughts. This first post will be an explanation of what I think you should be...
I’m intrigued by the question of whether Alamy buyers see an image on that site and then search for the same image on cheaper microstock sites and buy it there. If they regularly do that, then you are losing out on a higher priced Alamy license in exchange for potentially sub $1 income from the micro site. I did a detailed analysis last year which didn’t find any evidence that they do that, but I saw a couple of “zooms”...
I had a really good discussion with a budding stock photographer yesterday who offered $75 for an hour’s one on one tuition/advice from me. We discussed his portfolio, talked about improvements and had a good debate on how to come up with ideas for new shoots. He asked me if you could “make it” with just travel photography or whether you needed the second of my three main subject areas (places, things, people) to get a reasonable income. Of course,...
It is a long time since I wrote about my workflow and it has probably evolved over time, so an update might be welcome for some newer readers. Here is the essence: I always take my images in Raw format and import into Lightroom. Because I keyword all the images I think are worthwhile, having a structure on my hard-drive with topics or particular shoots isn’t necessary and so I use a simple Year and then Month structure: I have...
One of the many issues with uploading videos to stock agencies (apart from the sheer size of the files) is the lack of an ability to automatically keyword and describe the files before uploading them. That generally means you need to visit each agency and either upload a csv file with that required information or do a lot of copy and pasting to get each video file ready for submission. On my recent trip to Hawaii I took 31 videos...
I’m still processing images from my recent trip to Maui and Kauai, but as I was going through them I thought about how I find out where to go for the best photo opportunities when you go to a new place. How did I know where to find this lcoation for sunset? I start, before I go, with a guidebook – I know that is old fashioned when you have Google at your fingerprints, but at least I get...
