This month started very slowly and I thought this could be one of my worst months, but it ended with a bit of a bang and so crept into the middle of the road category of earnings! The bang was a sale of a 6 foot (almost 2m) wide print on wood of this panorama from Hanalei on the lovely island of Kauai: I received the email late on the 31 January and so it really made a difference to...
A few years back I did a presentation on Stock Photography to a camera club in Winchester, VA and put a video of it online. I updated the presentation and had a virtual zoom based session with a Northern Virginia meetup group last week and again, the session was recorded. The whole thing lasted 90 minutes including the questions, and so if you have that much spare time, you can find the video on my YouTube channel. I’ve also been...
I mentioned last month that I was trying to work on developing more traction on my Fine Art Portfolio on Fine Art America. I had around 800 images over there and as I have reported here, have had occasional sales. I tried an experiment to lower my prices, but that did nothing much at all, and so I put them back to more reasonable levels: Then, in early December, I decided to spend time trying to get more traffic to...
Time to look back at a very unusual year and not just in Stock Photography! It is fascinating to think about all the changes that we have lived through in just one year with some pretty major changes impacting us all in our profession (or hobby) of trying to make money from our photography. Of course the biggest change that impacted newer and smaller contributors significantly was the decision by Shutterstock, with little notice, to completely rework their contributor payout...
I got up this morning to work on my annual report of earnings from stock photography, but found that three of my hard drives were missing in Windows (and the BIOS). Back in March I built a new PC with the latest technology. However, the power supply was still in good shape so I reused that. I had some issues at the time because the new motherboard had two power sockets for the CPU and my power supply only had...
Another year, but perhaps not a very different year… Firstly, I was amazed at how badly the year has started at most of the agencies, Shutterstock in particular thanks to that terrible decision to reset everyone’s level on January 1st. I can’t believe the open way they are just boosting their income yet trying to say it is “good for creativity”. However, let’s see if we can come up with some new creative ideas for 2021 and start to make...
A month to end a year that we would all like to forget, I guess! And I will get back to the full year in my annual review of stock activity that I will write in a few days when the final results are in. But lets start with a world first (for me…). For the first time in my 14 years of writing about stock photography (and talking about it at this well reviewed introduction to stock photography video)...
After a focus this year on stock photos (with some great results), I decided to try to boost the sales of prints of what I call my Fine Art Collection! I mentioned that I was going to try an experiment of lowering my prices to see if that would juice the sales. Well, I gave it two months and nothing much happened, and so I reverted to a new pricing plan that was closer to the ones I have used...
This is probably a post with a smaller following than my normal ones, but perhaps a Godox expert will be able to help! As I mentioned last month, after an unfortunate accident between my Canon flashgun and my ceiling fan, I bought a Sony specific flashgun as a replacement, the Godox V1. (affiliate link to Amazon). I bought it with the accessory kit which comprises some nicely made light modifiers that neatly attach with small magnets to the round head...
Today, I have a few ideas to give you that I haven’t actually done myself, and so there are no example images. I plan to work on them in the coming week or so, but I am also focusing on getting my fine art work up to date on Fine Art America after a couple of sales this month. I mentioned the number of times that I have seen a relatively simple image of a vial for a vaccine with...
