I’ve discussed, in the previous post, the importance of reading the news with one thing in the back of your mind – is this subject going to get more coverage, and particularly more comment articles, in the coming months? Immediate items of news – riots or a disaster – are going to get a lot of coverage but most of the time they will use real footage or imagery to illustrate those articles. Longer term subjects (and the opioid epidemic...
One of the things we should look for in the news are the signs of events or changes in society that will start to generate articles and commentary in the coming weeks and months. As I have mentioned before, some things are just newsworthy because of the event itself – a riot, or a fire – and that sort of event does not generate ongoing demand for what I call illustrative stock photos and videos. Instead, we are looking for...
Each quarter I do a slightly deeper analysis of my earnings from selling stock photos and videos online and so the quarter 2 results are in. Overall, the quarter from March to June 2020 was not too bad – ending with $8966 of which $755 came from video sales. Q1 of 2020 was slightly lower at $8458. The historical picture is here: What is interesting about this graph is how the last 3 years have been “reasonably” stable. The end...
I’ll do these posts from time to time when I see a new offer that looks interesting on the two main products that I regularly use (besides the Adobe suite). The first up is Luminar 4 from Skylum with its very clever sky replacement feature (and quite a lot of interesting things about adding large moons to empty skies at night). The latter might not work for stock images (because you don’t own the copyright on the moon image), but...
A great month for me, thanks to a number of factors that all came together in this one month. Of course, the issues with Shutterstock clouded the month and it would have been even better if I hadn’t suspended my account, but the final earnings count of $3235 exceeded all my expectations. Here is my normal graph: As you can see, June 2020 is towering over the previous earnings for that month in earlier years, although I would be foolish...
I originally wrote about how to shoot photos of fireworks for the Dreamstime blog, but thought this was a perfect time to update it and publish it in time for the USA Independence day fireworks shows. Many countries have extravagant fireworks displays to celebrate major events. New Years is a popular one almost everywhere, Independence Day in the USA and many others. But how best to capture the excitement of those celebrations when everything seems to conspire against us photographers...
It has been a while since my last premium article, although I hope you found the more general topics I have been writing about useful as well. After a lull in creativity, I’ve been quite active again as you can see from the green screen work and I encourage you (as I will explain) to think about using yourself and some older images to create new concepts that might sell. I’ve continued my green screen work (it is so easy...
I wrote about my tests of Green Screen extraction plugins for Photoshop a month or so ago, and then went through a lull in creativity and didn’t do much more. My chosen solution at that time was Key36, a unique approach that seems to combine actions that run in Photoshop with some on-line control. They offer both online extraction where you upload the file to their servers plus this Photoshop action and their payment system is quite unique as well...
This is the follow up article to the one I published earlier this week about the value we put on our art“. Although I talk a lot about “images”, I’m using that as a bit of a shorthand to include videos as well. The key message that I ended with in that article was the following: Your aim should be to maximize the earnings of your portfolio with the minimum effort needed to achieve those earnings Exclusivity – a club...
I was recently pointed to a discussion on the Alamy forum that mentioned a post of mine on whether selling an Alamy image on microstock sites was a good idea. It is actually a very respectful discussion bearing in mind some of the tensions between those that think that the microstock sites have ruined photography and those that think that is just an old fashioned view and it would have happened anyway. But reading the various comments made me think...
