In the early days (well at least a couple of years ago!), one of the default settings on Dreamstime was that you would offer to sell the rights for your image at a predefined price of $250, of which you would get $125. As this was the default, I left it like that for many of my early images. The site has changed now, and you need to specifically select this option – which I don’t. I was advised yesterday...
Well, time to dust off the camera and get shooting again! June was not a good month for sales with the total not even hitting the $600 mark, ending at $595. The reasons were pretty clear as I looked at the various sites. Although the number of downloads was pretty similar from month to month, there was a distinct lack of any enhanced or higher value sales. In previous months, I was seeing several $28 sales on Shutterstock and occasional...
I spent Saturday at the Maryland Barn Storming event near Frederick where you get to visit eight historic barns in the area, including a fantastic home created out of an old barn. This event happens every year, and is well worth supporting if you are in the area. For me, this was also a great opportunity to try out my new Promote remote control for real. I took my tripod, used the 18-40mm lens for wide angle shots in small...
I have always known that Dreamstime have the unique approach of boosting the cost of an image as it become more popular, and so after 50 downloads, an image moves into the highest price category (Level 5.) I have one of those: This one sells well on a number of sites, and as there appears to be no end to the foreclosures in the US, I hope it will continue to sell. The photo is OK, but not great, technically,...
Blur, or camera shake, occurs when there is some movement of the camera (or the subject) when the image is being captured. In this post, we will ignore the subject movement and concentrate on avoiding blur in the camera. I have only tested this on my Canon camera/lenses, so I am not 100% sure if it is an issue with other makes. Back in December, I was taking images of our newly decorated Christmas tree with all its lights and...
I came across this simple tip in a magazine, and thought I would pass along. It also will help me remember it as well. This tip works in Photoshop to quickly and easily add some POP to your photographs. Use with caution with iStockPhoto as they don’t tend to like over filtered images, but it certainly adds some mid tone contrast and clarity to the right images. The first photo is the original image after the normal adjustments in Lightroom...
I saw an article in Professional Photographer last month about a new site that is aimed at creating a community of artists displaying and selling their works of art. The team behind it is quite new – it launched in January – but it appears to be very professionally created and organized. The initial membership is free and you can upload and share 2GB of files. Each one is restricted to 15MB. The images are “Right-click” protected, and the terms...
I’ll start this post early, as I have already had two enhanced downloads from Shutterstock. Last month was a record with over $800 in sales and so this month has a hard target to beat. Luckily, these two downloads from Shutterstock at $28 each, have already pushed the earnings from that one site to $110 after 6 days in the month. The first was yesterday, and is a photo of a Buddha statue on a wooden platform in a small...
I have a professional site on Smugmug, which I use to host my best photos at a high resolution, and, although I keyword the images and make them available for search, I had pretty much given up any hope of selling images via the site. I had set the pricing at about 50% more than the cost of the prints, and was extremely pleased to see an order placed this last weekend for $90 worth of prints. Some were simple...
Another record month in April in selling my images on Microstock! The total in the month grew to $836, compared to earnings of $788 in March and $371 in April 2010. It definitely shows that a focus on taking more images and getting them online really pays off. This month I had a great run on Enhanced Downloads on Shutterstock with six of these $28 downloads in April – I’ve updated my post about the best selling images in April...
