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...
The change in contributor earnings announced just 6 days ahead of the operative date of June 1, 2020, has set the world of the contributors alight. Currently there are almost 6000 posts on the forum on this topic alone (and some have been deleted by the administrators), Facebook groups have been formed to organize action and there is a plan to have D-day on June 15th where contributors around the world will deactivate their Shutterstock portfolios. Why all this angst?...
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been neglecting my stock portfolio in the past few weeks with very few images being created and uploaded. Sometimes I feel a bit bad about doing that, but always remember that creative activities are not something that you can just force yourself to do – you need to feel creative to be creative, I think. I have some ideas kicking around in the back of my mind for illustrating financial issues as...
In these troubled times, it is important to perhaps take a break from feeding the stock machine and see if you can process some of your better images for sale as prints or on other products. I upload my best shots to Fine Art America (always), Photo4Me (sometimes) and Society6 (from time to time). I was reminded of this with another sale earlier this month on Fine Art America – this time a large metal print (36 inches x 24...
I know this is quite early in the implementation of the changes, but after 3 full days of the new pricing when the reporting was being properly displayed, there is enough consistency in my subscription earnings to at least estimate its impact on me, as a Level 5 image contributor. I’ve focused on image earnings partly because I don’t really understand how I will see the changes on video payouts and also my video sales are pretty variable from month...
At a time when we seem to be being driven into the ground by Shutterstock and Getty/iStock are hitting us with 1c downloads of images, we should look towards agencies that are doing this right. I just looked back at my April results for iStock and while the month was good at $460 or so, I had 106 downloads that paid less than 10c. All the way down to one at $0.01. And I had three $0.03 videos! In contrast...
Well, Shutterstock started their new earnings schedule as promised on June 1st. Well, to be honest, they screwed that up and didn’t start until half way through that day and even then didn’t properly report the earnings in the correct areas of the earnings report on the site. And so on day 1, we had regular subscription sales for 38c (for me), the Single and Other earnings representing normal single sales plus a mix of 10c earnings. Later in the...
