Earnings from Photography in October 2022

I made a subtle change to the heading this month – not just stock photography but my other attempts are increasing my income seem to be paying off a little as I will explain.

Overall, the month was pretty good again. Last month crept up to $3039 after I realized I had missed a couple of entries in my spreadsheet and this month was not very far behind with $3003.

As you can see from the chart, this was well ahead of 2021, where I failed to hit $2500 but way behind 2020. I checked back in my records – that was a “Normal” month with no special one-off payments – just really good across multiple agencies! But I can’t complain about hitting the $3000 mark again!

Files uploaded to each agency

I have been busy this month, uploading around 160 new images from my trip to see the fall colors in Vermont in the first week of the month. I would have thought I would get rejections for similars, but so far, not very many, and so far I have sold 16 of those images (for a fantastic $3) but at least it is a start. Again, with fall season behind us in most places, I thought the sales would come next summer hopefully. We were really lucky with the weather and conditions, so I did capture a mix of gorgeous colors and some nice aerial shots of various locations with my drone. As a result, here are my current totals:

Agency Performance

After the startling performance at SS last month, I was not expecting more of the same, and I wasn’t disappointed. SS dropped back to $577 which is still pretty reasonable. So Adobe retook the crown with a monthly income of $664. iStock improved from a poor couple of months to reach $489 and Alamy had quite a number of reasonable sales in the month to end with $375. My disappointment came with Canva which dropped from the normal $250+ to $208. Hope that is a one-time drop, but there is no way of knowing what is being used on that agency. So, each month is a mystery! The rest of the agencies hit their normal levels.

Fine Art to the rescue

It will come as no surprise that I have been putting effort into both building and marketing my fine art portfolio at Fine Art America and Pictorem. I did write an article here a few days ago about my analysis of some of those social media efforts, which didn’t give the results I expected!

But whether my social media efforts helped or not, I did manage to sell five items on Fine Art America this past month for a total of $230.87. I wrote about the prints that sold here on Backyard Image. After sales of $240 in September and now $230 in October, this is worth continuing with! I also noticed some improvements with a somewhat unusual site that leases images to clients for a monthly fee. My portfolio at TurningArt is mainly of Washington DC imagery as I think they have a customer base there and I noticed that this past month I went up from 6 images out on lease to 15. I will see the new income in a couple of weeks, but I hope it will be around $40 a month.

Highest Earning images in October 2022

So, what brought in the dollars in October?

Two pictures of my local area sold on Alamy for $80 net each. Both are drone images and it reinforces what I have said before that your local area is probably the most valuable city to visit and take photographs!

Then this one of downtown Morgantown:

Alamy also came up with $70 net for this image from Pittsburgh, PA:

Shutterstock also provided a nice $84 for this old image:

Adobe doesn’t tend to have really high selling priced images, which perhaps makes it more reliable each month, but I did sell two at $20 each and I show them to remind you that any local event or disaster (a fire in this case) is worth photographing and uploading:

I then had my usual collection of stuff – a $34 video of a 2017 tax return sold on Pond5. Maybe there is a story about 2017 tax returns somewhere, yes, I know, Donald Trump is being forced to give his tax returns to Congress and they needed to illustrate that!

Altogether, I had 15 downloads for more than $10 in the month and they totaled $563. Makes a big difference to the month’s earnings without a doubt!

Well, that is the round-up. Hope you are continuing to show some stability, if not actual growth in earnings.