How much effort does stock photography take?

One thing that beginners don’t appreciate is how much work goes into stock photography. If you track your earnings per hour, it can sometimes look pretty depressing unless you are taking the photos because it is also something you enjoy doing. As a practical example of what I mean, I recently went on a short trip to Colorado to see some friends and, or course, take some photos, including the climbing ones I blogged about last week. Total time in Colorado was 4 days and we were pretty active, starting with sunrise shots in Denver:

Followed by a long stroll through the city spotting stock opportunities along the way:

Then a drive through the mountains to our destination – Buena Vista:

Then a few side tours to see places of interest – in this case, Cottonwood Pass just outside Buena Vista:

The climbing came next, but also an opportunity to watch expert kayakers in the white water playground that runs through the center of the town:

And, finally, a couple of hours drive to see the Great Sand Dunes National Park – luckily I grabbed a few shots from the road leading to the park as the clouds then came over and we had a very poor end to the day – no sun, no shadows…

OK, so good. In the 4 days I took just over 1000 images – of course, some were stitched panoramas, some were HDR shots, and so that wasn’t 1000 unique images, but I ended up with 200 appropriate stock images from my editing process. So I had to process each one, take quite a number of the climbing ones into Photoshop to remove marks and designs from the climbing helmets, belts, shoes, shirts because although I had model releases, they were not really released without the removal of trade marks. Although I didn’t accurately track my time, I probably spent about 30 hours over the next 10 days processing and fixing the images in Lightroom and Photoshop. To give you some idea, out of the 200 images, about 75 needed to have some cloning or other work in Photoshop in this batch. Even so, 200 photos in 30 hours is about one every 9 minutes! Then I have to keyword them. Because they form quite a varied collection – I don’t want too many images of the same basic subject – the keywording isn’t a matter of doing one and copying to a big group of similar images. As a result, I have spent probably another 15 hours in total in describing and keywording each image. I use the Microstock Group keywording tool to help with this process, but even so, I try to keep my images a bit different to the most popular keywords for similar shots.

Then, I need to upload and get them accepted into the various sites. I haven’t done that yet, but I suspect that I will spend another bunch of hours on that in the coming days and weeks. Overall, a three day vacation and shoot turned into 200 saleable images after probably 50 hours of work. Bear that in mind if you are looking at this purely as a business venture.