I’m lucky to be just back from a 10 day vacation in California, starting in San Francisco, a stop in the Napa Valley then on to Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. Tons of snow about still, which makes for attractive mountain shots and I’m now happily processing my “holiday snaps!” I always do my research before I go, searching for best photography locations and I started using an iPad app called Pocket that allows you to keep a download of a...
I’ve been on Fine Art America for a few years now, but it does seem that sales are coming a bit faster in recent months. I’ve not been uploading images very often (I keep telling myself to upload more!), but I get interesting and profitable sales almost every month. So far this year, I have had one sale in February, two in March and now a new one for April! This time it was a large framed print of the...
These don’t happen very often, but it is always nice to see a sale, especially of a large print, on Fine Art America. Yesterday it was a 36 inch x 21 inch glossy canvas of my images of the Canadian Falls at Niagara. I was walking on the Canadian side of the waterfall, and there is almost always a rainbow there and I waited until the tourist boat was just at the end of the rainbow. It was a single...
I haven’t uploading anything new to Fine Art America recently, but I do get sales from time to time. The latest one this week was for a 24 x 24 inch metal print of some seeds from the Swamp Milkweed plant: They obviously cropped it a bit to get a square format, but I have always liked this series of images – in fact I have two different versions on the wall of my bathroom! This one sold to make...
I wish I was feeling better about this business – but January was another disappointing month for me. Perhaps I need to reset my expectations and be happy with getting a regular stream of income – which is considerable, I understand, but the effort of putting new images online and not see any benefit is a bit disheartening. It is a bit hard to see what iStock earnings are going to be as they have delayed the reporting of the...
For some reason, I’ve had some high value sales on Shutterstock this month, but that is a story for next week… In the meantime, here is one of the sort of studio shots I’ve been working on this month. I think I made up the words (at least I was thinking of them before I went to sleep one night), but this sort of image is easy to make and sells from time to time. The basic background was a...
Even on Christmas Eve a stock photographer needs to be thinking of saleable images! So here is a shot of my living room decorated ready for a family meal tomorrow on Christmas Day. Also available on Shutterstock, istock……! I also finally joined Instagram (catching up with social media) and so if you are there, please check out my new images. My user name is Steve.Heap. I’ve only added a few Christmassy images today but will add more as time goes...
A couple of days ago, I started re-ordering my Adobe Stock keywords. As I explained here, most of my keywords are alphabetic, because that is how Lightroom sorts them. I did meet with Julieanne Kost of Adobe last weekend at Nature Visions, and she has put in a request to the Lightroom product team to come up with a solution for this as it doesn’t appear that Adobe Stock will change their approach. The first big question – is it...
There was a post from Mat Hayward (Adobe Stock rep) on the Microstock Group forum reminding people that the first seven keywords are the most important in the search results on Adobe Stock. I’ve always found this a pain with Fotolia and most of my images there have alphabetic keywords. When Fotolia used to be a low earner, it perhaps didn’t matter much, but things are changing. Being a person that doesn’t like extra work, I decided to test if this...
I spent the weekend at the Nature Visions annual photography expo held in Northern Virginia. It is held each November and attracts some of the best speakers in the industry – Bob Krist was great and Julieanne Kost from Adobe is one of the best speakers on Lightroom and Photoshop that I have come across! If you are able to attend one of these Expo’s, it will be worth your while. However, that is not my main reason for writing....
