How much did I earn from stock photos – March 2020

Another month goes by and what a month to remember! Although I doubt if we will feel any better at all about April (and May…). However, on the stock photo front, things really picked up for me. I ended the month with $3141 which is the best result for quite a few months. For various reasons (mainly to do with having $600 in video sales), March 2019 was way better than this at $3675, but with all that is going on in the world, this is a nice surprise.

Each of the agencies did pretty well, but the standouts were undoubtedly Shutterstock and Adobe Stock:

Shutterstock beat the $1000 mark with earnings of $1112 and Adobe Stock beat all previous records with $758 in the month. For those who are asking, here are the number of assets that generated those sales:

I’ve continued to upload images – I think I added just short of 200 assets in March to the various agencies.

Video was a big disappointment in March, so it wasn’t that which was driving my sales:

Just over $100! And $40 of that was from a studio shot of my pretend opioid tablets using the Edelkrone slider system. I also got $28 from some old fireworks shots from Washington DC, but video was pretty much dead. Nothing at all from Pond5. Shutterstock was around 60% of this total with Adobe Stock and iStock making up the rest.

So what did kick up my earnings? Of course, you probably know the answer – the coronavirus! My image of the cinema billboard modified to show the guidance to avoid catching the virus has sold continuously. Mainly on Adobe Stock and Shutterstock, that one image has earned $350 and has sold 440 times.

Incidentally, I got into a very long discussion on Petapixel with a photography teacher about the ethics of not saying that this image was modified in Photoshop. It is worth reading, although I think one of his better posts has been removed as “spam” which is very strange. But regardless of that, he made some good points and I renamed the file on Shutterstock and Adobe Stock to make clear it was an illustration not an editorial shot.

My coronavirus shots in general have sold well and continue to sell. I have some ideas for some new ones, but so far the ones online have earned $492 in March. I also was ahead of the game in having images ready to go for the change in the tax return submission date in the USA to July 15th. Even though I only did two or three simple shots (one modified in Photoshop) they have earned $25 and hopefully will continue to sell as we get closer to the new date. It just shows what a bit of forward thinking can do!

I still seemed to sell travel shots as the month went by. Some of my most recent drone shots from Hawaii seem to be catching on – probably because they are not views that are seen very often. I’m nowhere near the point of paying for the drone, but it is slowly making money. I did get a commission from a local dentist to reproduce an old 1919 panorama of Morgantown in West Virginia that was framed on his office wall:

The two houses in the center foreground are still there, but there are different homes where the photographer must have stood and of course the trees have all grown taller since then. So I went down there with my drone and took a series of shots to stitch into a panorama to show how things have changed:

This was taken just above those old houses and is around 15,000 pixels across, so plenty of detail to print up to the 60 inches required. I used Hugin panorama maker to create different perspectives of this – interesting how different each one looks if you are interested in such things!

I also did some shots of changing my air filters in the air conditioning system. The older versions sell pretty well and so some different angles will always help! You need to be thinking all the time of taking new images whenever you do any household tasks. Next time you are cleaning the toilet, get out your camera!!

I think that is all for me – I need to get back to adding all the applications back onto my new PC! It is amazing how many different software packages you use! I hope you stay safe in the weeks to come!