I wrote, just three days ago, that it is a long time since I had a sale on Fine Art America. In fact my previous one was back in June. It must be magic that just writing those words caused someone to buy one of my images for their wall as yesterday I got the email saying this this image of Woodburn Hall at West Virginia University had sold as a massive 40 x 24 inch metal print: The profit...
A slow month all round – slow in earnings, and definitely very slow in terms of the effort I put into stock this month! I did have a side line in photographing images for a friend of mine who sells LED lightbulbs on Amazon and he wanted to improve his store – so we did a deal where I would create new images for his store and upload them. If you are in the UK and need an LED lightbulb,...
I’ve not been very productive at producing my own new images recently, but I continue to think about what might be successful and also track my own results to see what is selling. Interestingly, Microstockr Pro has had a big upgrade over the past few days that makes it easier to see how much individual images have earned by just clicking the image in the main sales page. Before, you used to see how much that image sold on the...
It is always interesting to see how my earnings compare month by month and also with the same month in the previous years and this month was no exception. I didn’t expect to get anything like the June results, because I had some great one-off events that month that I didn’t expect to be repeated, but even so, July came in pretty solidly with $2895. That compares with the $3245 in June and $2950 in July 2019, pre-Covid! As I...
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...
