Nothing much to do with Stock Photography, but if you are anywhere near Northern Virginia this coming month, please visit my first public exhibition at the Center for the Arts (also known as the Candy Factory) in Old Town Manassas. The theme of the exhibition is The Nature World and four local photographers are being exhibited. You can see my chosen images – which will be printed and framed up to 30×24 inches – on my fine art website, BackyardImage.com....
It has been a while since I wrote about earnings from selling my stock photographs. Here is a graph I have used before, which tells the story over a number of years: What this is telling me is that things are getting harder! I have continued to add images – both RM ones to Alamy, Corbis and Zoonar, and RF ones to the same sites plus all the various microstock sites I talked about in this blog post, but the...
I was reading an article in a photography magazine that made the point that you are the expert in your own region – you know where the best sites are, you can visit them when conditions are good and you don’t have to get back to your hotel or into the car for the next part of your vacation. Good advice and I took it yesterday to visit the Christmas lights at the Washington DC Church of Jesus Christ of...
I must admit that I am prone to modifying my images to try to tell the story better – I’ve been known to replace a person without a model release with one that I have approval from – but in my mind that is still a great image for telling a climbing story! I went to Bahrain a couple of weeks back and took some images that I really liked, but there were distracting elements. In the first case, a...
I’m not saying that this is a great stock photo (in terms of its commercial potential), but sometimes we have to let our artistic side shine through! I was walking around Regensburg in Germany on my recent river cruise. Cloudy sky, bit of drizzle, certainly not the conditions to create fantastic travel images with a blue sky and billowing clouds. As a result I was looking for details that could enhance a travel article about the medieval town and I...
I wrote about this topic earlier this year after an ocean cruise around Australia and New Zealand. The basic question was whether the organized trips and activities gave a photographer any time to create useful stock images. In the fall, I went on a river cruise from Nuremberg in Germany to Budapest in Hungary, and every day was structured – arrive at a new city, go on a walking or coach tour, see the sights… Nice for a vacation (in...
I’ve not been posting in the past couple of weeks as a result of a trip to Equatorial Guinea in Africa. In most people’s mind, a visit, at this time of Ebola scares, to West Africa is probably very low on the priority list, but I found it to be a fascinating location with a chance to photograph things that are not present in very many stock agencies. I’ve not decided what to do with my images from this trip...
I mentioned Image Brief before as a great source for ideas for future stock shoots, but it is also a potential revenue stream if you are lucky enough to win one of their briefs. You can sign up here if you are interested in joining them. They will check your portfolio so make sure you have a representative set of images available that shows both the quality and range of images you can take. I’ve just been awarded my second...
I’ve had two sales on Fine Art America in the past month or so. The first one was a framed print of fireworks over Washington DC. This sold with a profit to me of $51.70 in late September. This was followed up in October with a very large print (just a rolled paper print) of a stitched panorama I took of Santa Monica Beach in California. This print measured a cool five feet long – 60″ x 13″. My profit...
I mentioned, a few posts back, that I look at the Image Brief site regularly, both to see if I can submit an image for a request, or just to get some idea for another shoot. Earlier this week was a request for outdoors adventure type images, but they were looking for landscape format. I immediately thought of this shot: BUT – the shot is clearly vertical and can’t be cropped into a horizontal format, and I don’t have a...
