Earning from Photography February 2021

Always an interesting month – just 28 days, but it follows a usually slow start in January. This month followed that pattern with a growth from January, a growth over Feb 2020, but still a middle of the pack sort of performance. The final score was a total of $2812 for the month.

This is all becoming very stable (which is good), but the growth of years gone by seems to have stopped. Not surprisingly, bearing in mind the pressure that agencies are applying to the commissions and the apparently endless growth of free agencies. Still, it is what it is!

To achieve this, I have around 16,000 assets for licensing:

As I mentioned last month, I seem to have almost a full time job editing and creating the graphics for the opera that my son has written. I never knew that creating a 25 minute video would be so much work – I seem to spend 6 hours a day for 6 days a week to try to meet the schedule of one new episode every three weeks. The latest one (which I must admit gets better technically each time) will be published next Friday and can be found (with closed captions now) at the Steel City Opera company website. As a result, I have added very few images in the month – just 20! However, the good news is that earnings haven’t been affected – yet!

Highlights of the month

Well, our favorite agency staged a bit of a recovery from less than $500 to just over $600 in February. This was helped by some great, higher priced sales, led by this image of a Moderna vaccine which sold for $60:

This was one of a series of images I took of my “mocked-up” vaccine bottles and syringes set against the logo of the company. I did a set of these for the six major developers of Covid-19 vaccines and, although I wish I had taken them a few months earlier, they have made reasonable money. All told, they have made about $120. If I had only acted on the plan I had to create them in the fall, I think these could have been a much more successful series. It just goes to show that you need to act fast to get a good position in the search engines!

However, even this great sale was dwarfed by a $75 sale of this old image. I can’t remember exactly where I took this image, but I’m sure glad I did:

I also sold a nice autumn leaves shot for $30 which helped achieve the monthly total:

iStock also did very well in February (actually January) with total sales of $525. I don’t know what I did to get such results from Getty, but I’m not complaining. No big images sales (in fact nothing over $10, but some video sales that I will come back to later.

Adobe Stock is off the boil for me – $489. This is definitely an improvement on January but well below the numbers I was seeing last fall. Alamy did pretty well, as well, with total sales of $309. There were four images that sold for over $50 including two from my trip to Shanghai in China:

Everything else was pretty much aligned with the normal levels. Dreamstime at $106, DP at $105, 123RF at $50 and so on. I’ll do a full list in my quarterly report in a couple of months.

Stock Video improves…

My video sales were pretty poor in January, but things did pick up in February to reach $172:

This was helped by a $50 sale of my opioid tablets from Pond5, plus this one on Adobe for $28:

I also had a couple of $12 sales on Shutterstock including this one:

This one was a drone shot. Not sure I have sold enough yet to pay for the drone, but it is good fun! These prices all show how much video has dropped as a good source of stock income. I am sure those who focus on high quality video imagery with people are doing better, but my heart isn’t really in video stock just yet.

Well, I think that rounds out the month for me. I hope you are also showing some signs of improvement as we head into 2021. Now back to video production…