I was flying on United yesterday and idly watching the screen. They had a quiz about where different airport codes refer to and IAD came up. I knew that one (Washington Dulles!), but when the answer came up, it was superimposed on one of my images of the Washington Monument at sunrise taken from the Jefferson Memorial: Of course I have no idea where they licensed it – hopefully for more than 38c! Still, it’s nice to see an image...
Yesterday turned out to be a great day on Shutterstock. On of the records was much anticipated – I finally passed the $50,000 earnings level after first joining the site in early 2008 – I was $4 short on Monday, but ended Tuesday with $50,159! I’m averaging around $11,000 a year on that site now, and so less than 5 years to my next big threshold of $100,000! So the second record? I got a single sale for $120. That...
We have been battered by the snow blizzard that hit the north eastern USA this weekend, and that gave me a chance to take photos both during and after the storm. As I quickly uploaded these to the various stock agencies, and got rejections, it made me think about the advantages of running my own site and being able to choose which images went into the Symzio agency with no reviewer acting as gatekeeper. For instance, this image was taken...
I had three of my images rejected by Shutterstock today for: Trademark–Image / Metadata potentially infringes on intellectual property rights. Here is one of them: You can see the keywords in the link behind the image as well. I can’t see any trademark issues here – I even removed the small “windows” key from the laptop and the phones are tablets are very generic. Perhaps I need to remove the power buttons next! If anyone can see an issue, please...
For some reason, I was dreaming last night about December sales (sad, I know…) and I thought to those posts on Microstock group that we have all seen. Someone says – my sales are poor this month – any reason? Most often they really mean that they normally sell 8 images a month and this month it is only 6! Then someone else always says – my sales are up this month – BME with 20% more than last month....
Isolating an object against a white background is usually a photoshop task. With selections, curves and the rest, you can easily get rid of flaws in what should be a pure white background. But what can you do if the image includes currency? As I have been finding, Adobe has built some complex algorithms into the latest releases of Photoshop that stop you from opening or editing a photograph that contains even parts of US dollar currency bills. I’m sure...
I first mentioned this last week in this post, but I have been playing with the Impresso Plugin that produces some really nice oil painting effects in Lightroom and Photoshop with very few steps (although there are many options I haven’t fully got to grips with yet!) and after I completed one recent image I went back and looked at the progression from the original shot to the finished item: An artist shouldn’t really show the original photo as it...
My previous posts on building my own stock agency website using the new Symbiostock plugin for wordpress explain the background, and so this post is an update on progress with the project. I have been keen to maintain my own agency, partly from vanity, and partly to give me a way of selling my own photographs directly to users at prices that I think are fair. The developer of the plugin, Robin, has now created an agency that pulls all...
I’m still interested in exploring more ways of selling fine art – and so have revisited Fine Art America again to see if I can get some traction. I’ve had few sales this year. I talked about my pricing strategy at FAA in an earlier post and I haven’t changed that, but I’m investigating uploading more artistic images rather than my normal stock photos. Looking at the recent sales on the site makes me think that people are after a...
I found a fascinating tutorial about creating writing in sand using Photoshop and decided to try my own version. The tutorial dealt with a top down version of the text – ie there is no perspective from the viewer leading towards the sea and waves, so my base photo was somewhat different. I also had to modify some of the settings – it just didn’t seem to give enough texture around the letters, but generally I think it is OK....
