Earnings from Photography in December 2022

Another year draws to a close (or, strictly speaking, has closed) and it is time for a review of December’s earnings. I have already reported on a part of this – the fine art sales, and those are incorporated in this overall view of earnings in December 2022. December is normally a pretty slow month, but this year was a bit of an exception to that with total sales of $2869.

My portfolio online didn’t change much during the month and so I will just include the same graph as I showed last month:

Stock Agency Sales Performance

The number one agency, once again, is Adobe Stock with total sales of $612. Shutterstock follows with $510 and then there is a very close race between iStock with $433 and Fine Art America with $427. Very interesting to see that site so high up the rankings, but as I reported a day or so back, my efforts in boosting my print sales have been paying dividends.

Then as usual, we drop down pretty quickly to $221 for Alamy and $174 for Canva. It is disappointing to see Canva dropping month by month. I don’t know what they have changed, but each month now seems to be lower than the one before. There is nothing particularly interesting in the rankings of the lower selling agencies. I haven’t dropped anyone and still submit to them (when I have images to submit) and collectively they do a pretty good job of boosting earnings each month.

Video Sales

I treated myself to a new camera for Christmas – the Sony A7R5 which now can do 8K video… Will I do any of that – well perhaps, but I’m not as invested in video as I am in still photography. Just what I find interesting, I guess. I might try some next time I am on a cruise ship in rough weather – those probably will sell well! My video sales in December reflect my interest in video – just $106. The highest seller at $25 was a video of the front of a ship going through some stormy waves! Now in 8K that might be special! I did sell the same clip for $0.38 on Shutterstock in the month – just goes to show the range of prices that are out there, even in the same agency.

Interesting Photo Sales

The first thing I noticed is that there are no really high-priced sales this month. I did have one from Getty that was reported in December for $41:

This was from a shoot that went wrong – the idea was for a well-executed red wine in a glass against a white background, but the background fell onto the glass and shattered it as you can see. So, this became my image to describe the issues of drinking too much!

My cat images continue to sell nicely. It has earned $4800 in total over its lifetime and in December got a $34 sale on Shutterstock and a $26 sale on Adobe Stock. It has been on Adobe for years and has earned $20 in that time, but I recently extracted it from its background (not easy!) and submitted it as a PNG with transparency to Adobe. It has already earned $30 in its first month as a PNG.

A friend asked me to photograph some LED bulbs that he sells on Amazon in the UK, and I put a few of the images on the stock sites. This one sold for $29 on Shutterstock. Just goes to show that a stock photo doesn’t need to be complicated. Not many countries have bayonet fittings and so this is probably a bit more unique.

Incidentally, I created the image in sections – the base to get the best lighting on it, the body was a straightforward photo, but I removed the markings, and the bulb part is created in Photoshop using the pen tool and then a gradient inside it to show a nice reflection.

Finally, there were 5 sales on Alamy where my share was between $15 and $30. Nothing special – just images I have taken around the world that someone decided they needed.

I’ll do an annual report for 2022 in the next week or so. Hope you had a reasonable 2022 and here’s to a better 2023 (once we get through the dismal period of the resetting of levels at our favorite agency!)