Earnings from Photography in September 2022

Much delayed report on earnings from photography in September 2022! I do have an excuse though – I just got back from 9 days in Vermont taking photos of the fall colors as they reached peak in that almost perfect location for the autumn. I now have about 2500 images to wade through, although my drone takes 3 shots at varying exposures with each image and so it isn’t just as bad as it seems. This trip brought home just how big the USA is – almost 2500 miles driven in those 9 days!

But back to September. I had a feeling this was going to be a good month as I had seen some good single sales as the month went along. The daily averages are a bit lower than they used to be, but those larger sales really swung the balance and so I ended up with $2966.

As you can see, this is not my best September, but it did beat 2021, which is seen as a success these days. Still much better than the previous months during the summer. For those keeping track, here is my summary of files or assets in the main stock agencies to generate this income:

No change there from the previous month – I didn’t upload anything in September! I have a suspicion that October will be different!

Agency Performance

The biggest surprise this month was with Shutterstock, which came in with almost $900 – $897 to be precise! I had seen a few months when Adobe Stock was the leader of the pack, but Adobe this month delivered a still great $596. I have seen several months of upper $600s and $700s this year, and so I hope Adobe will be back on top again soon. iStock was a disappointing $360 – that seems to be the range these days after a few months in the upper $400s. Canva delivered again with $266 – as usual I have no idea what is selling but I hope it continues! Then we are down in the lower agencies, but they all add up in the end. I have an approach that I support as many agencies as Stock Submitter allows me to as there is next to no effort involved in uploading and those smaller agencies help each month with the $20 – $100 sales. I will do a quarterly summary soon where I look at each agency in turn.

Print on Demand Sales

I was complaining last month that I had zero sales on Fine Art America in August, but things picked up in September to give me $210 from 4 sales – two prints and two small products. Hopefully this is the start of the shopping season for fine art! I have written about the sort of images that sell over on my “artistic” website – BackyardImage, and I will write a post this week on the latest sales of print products.

Significant stock photo sales in September

Without a doubt, my best seller on the stock agencies was this one, which earned $126 on Shutterstock:

I took this image of Morgantown to create a 5 foot wide print for the wall of a local dentist to match an old 1919 panorama that they already had. And now it earns $126 in a single sale for stock – very nice!

Shutterstock also took the number two position with this simple composition for a medical image:

This one sold for $73 and has earned $178 in total.

The next image, also on Shutterstock, shows the importance of carrying your camera and taking advantage of any locations you visit. We stayed in Alexandria near Washington DC for a wedding anniversary as it is a lovely little town to just stroll around, and a photo on the wall of the hotel room was of a view of Alexandria from the river. My mind instantly tried to work out where it was taken from, and it turned out to be a walkway alongside the Beltway bridge over the Potomac and so with sunset approaching I made the two-mile hike to this point and took my own images and panoramas of the city of Alexandria. And this one sold for $44:

Incidentally, this was the image that I was trying to reproduce – moody and with some color changes!

Then I had a $57 video sale of an opioid bottle on Shutterstock – altogether, my income from images and videos that earned more than $10 reach $681 from 22 assets. As I am sure I have said before, it is these unexpected high earners that make all the difference between a good and a lousy month. I hope this is a sign of a good October, but I have already earned $285 from >$10 sales in October – including two $80 net sales from Alamy. And what do you think the subject might be – yes, views of Morgantown! I did an article about the benefits of being a big fish in small pond by photographing your own location. It is certainly paying off for me!

I have a lot of photo processing to tackle now and so this is all for now. Check back for my quarterly summary and also check out BackyardImage.com for information about fine art sales.