One thing that beginners don’t appreciate is how much work goes into stock photography. If you track your earnings per hour, it can sometimes look pretty depressing unless you are taking the photos because it is also something you enjoy doing. As a practical example of what I mean, I recently went on a short trip to Colorado to see some friends and, or course, take some photos, including the climbing ones I blogged about last week. Total time in...
Well, to be more accurate, taking photographs of rock climbers in Colorado… I spent the past week in the mountains of Colorado near Buena Vista both taking in the sights and getting some climbing images (with model releases) for my stock portfolio. I was also trying out my new Canon 16-35mm F4 L lens – the one with image stabilization. I have to put my earnings to something, and I was really impressed with the reviews of this lens and...
After a “dry spell” on Fine Art America, I awoke to a sale of a print of the harvest moon rising over Washington DC this morning. Some great sales on Shutterstock as well this month, so it could turn out to be a great month for earnings from stock photography. More later!
A few months back I wrote about my experience with the Singh-Ray Gold’n’Blue polarizing filter. Some people rightly made the point that it was expensive and the use of filters in Photoshop (or plugins) could do the same. I’m not so sure and recently used it in my trip to Tampa and surrounding area. On the boiling hot and humid day that is a Florida summer, I tend to minimize the equipment I carry and so I put my new...
I’ve been working with Image Brief for about a year now. It is basically an online image request service – a buyer with a specific need in mind posts their requirement and budget and photographers get to upload up to 10 images that meet that brief. I’ve been awarded one brief to date (and got $220 for it) – an image of the Acropolis in Greece that has ended up (I think) in a travel magazine. One key thing to...
My previous post covered the first two days of my recent trip to Tampa and how I approached it as a stock photographer. This post expands on the opportunities around Tampa if you are there for some other purpose (as I was) but have a bit of free time. I was still searching for a good sunset, and so on the Tuesday evening after dinner I decided to try the city again, so back in the car and down to...
I had an opportunity to visit Tampa last weekend because of a business trip to the area, and so decided to travel early and spend a couple of days shooting the sights (and sites) to extend my portfolio. This long post (which I might break into two) is intended to give a photographer’s view of the area and the best places I found to take iconic photos of this area. I must first give a word of thanks to Andrew...
As I’ve mentioned before, I set up a Symbiostock based stock photo site about 12 months ago. I’m steadily adding my backlog of images to the site – although I have focused on adding all new ones, and then the older portfolio images as I get time. My approach these days is to put any image that has un-released people or objects on Alamy, Corbis, Zoonar (under the RM license) and on my own site, BackyardStockPhotos. Images that I think...
Back last November and December, my wife and I flew to Sydney to join a cruise ship (with Celebrity cruises) down the east coast of Australia, across to the South Island of New Zealand and around the southern tip and back up the east coast of NZ to end in Auckland. It was a wedding anniversary trip and really enjoyable (I would truly recommend Celebrity for a cruise like this), but I had questions in my mind about whether the...
I didn’t get around to posting earnings at the end of April. It was an OK month with total earnings of $2203 – a big drop from the $2729 earned in March. The biggest reasons for the drop in earnings was a few sites with large earnings in March not following through in April, and Shutterstock was unfortunately down to less than $1000 again. I plan to do a bigger analysis of earnings per site and will post about that...
