Earnings from Photography in July 2022

Middle of the summer and maybe a recession in the offing. What does that mean for my earnings from photography this month. I’ve dropped the word “stock” because my wall art sales did pick up a bit in July so I’m trying to be a bit more inclusive. So, at the end of the month (with EyeEM missing in action), I ended with $2876. This is not a record, although the highest month was in 2019 with just $100 more, so this is not a month with big swings in earnings from year to year. Here is the graph:

And the files that generated that earnings total:

The change this month was that I actually added some images to the agencies (and four videos)! I had a cruise in Alaska in June and have almost finished editing and describing the images, and so in the month I uploaded a total of 200 images of which around 130 were commercial and the rest editorial usage. So these agency numbers are up on last month’s count.

Of course, there have been few sales of Alaska assets as it seems to take some time these days for images to get into the search engines. A total of $36 to be exact! Although there was a very nice sale on SS of this image:

It sold for $31.43, but I am a way off counting this cruise a profitable venture!

I had $340 from sales of images for more than $10, which is nice to see. This was from 13 sales of 13 different images. The best seller was one of my cat pictures:

This sold for $63.25 on SS. Interestingly, it is one of the few images that have actually started to sell more, rather than just die away:

Then there was a $42.48 net sale on Alamy of the interior of the Domus Aurea in Rome. One of the sort of images that Alamy tends to do best at, I think. I did get a $30 sale on Alamy as well, but it was refunded later in the month.

Then, surprise, surprise, a $40 sale on 123RF. Almost unheard of!

SS also came up with a sale at $35 for this image of a green and mossy swimming pool (which was my own before I cleaned it at the start of the season.) Just goes to show that pictures don’t have to be pretty to sell. Journalists want to write about tasks that come up each year and cleaning a pool is one of them! Altogether this has earned $620, so it was a worthwhile photo shoot.

Video Sales

Video sales represented $198 this month (I add the Getty ones in later). The nicest results were two sales of the local lake here in Morgantown for $42 each on Adobe Stock. This is one of them, and was from my drone:

The other one at $42 was something that I don’t recall making – a timelapse of the same lake:

Pond5 was pretty good this month with $93, including this shot of smoke and steam from a power station and also a recent video of someone adding new shingles to a roof near my home. As I say, always be on the watch for interesting activities!

Agency Results

The highest earner this month was again Adobe stock with $693. Then SS came along with $555 and iStock with $389. Canva came in with a respectable $224. Then we are down in the lower amounts as usual.

Fine Art Sales

I listed the recent sales over on my website aimed more at buyers than photographers – Backyard Image. The numbers are interesting though. Altogether in July 2022, I sold prints that gave me a net income (profit) of $305. Not enough, in my mind, but certainly a nice bonus on top of my stock sales. This came from six sales on Fine Art America, although 3 of them were quite small 10×8 size framed prints that don’t have much profit, and one was a phone case! The other sale was for $153 net from a site I haven’t mentioned before – TurningArt. This site focuses on some big cities in the USA – New York, Washington etc. and offers framed prints on loan to people and offices as well as prints that can be purchased. I have had 5 of my images of Washington out on loan (4 now) and I get a monthly payment of about $14 for those. That has been going on for about 8 months now. Then there is a partnership with a company that sells larger prints via various online stores under the name of Perigold and they sold my San Diego reflections image (in the Backyard Image article) for a total of $615 for which I got $153. Nice result! I keep adding more images to both Fine Art America and to Pictorem so hopefully I will get more sales! My referral link for Pictorem is here if you are thinking of joining them as an artist. I like their site and the free shipping in the US and Canada should help sales.

That’s it for July. Hope you are continuing to sell!