It will take me a bit of time to get my earnings together and I like to do an end of year report as well. It also looks like EyeEM will not be back from the holiday celebrations until January 6th! Nice for some! So I’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year and hope we can all look forward to some sales in 2020. The image I chose to illustrate this post (which I was quite impressed...
Taking a break from some of my other work (and I did finish all my uploads of Portugal yesterday!) and so I decided to look at some of the questions I received but haven’t answered yet. The first one was via the contact page on my site and was: Thank you very much for your website, which is very useful. I wanted to ask you two questions. Bigstock belongs to Shutterstock ?. In the list of StockSubmitter agencies are separated....
After much effort, I have completed the updating of my eBook – Getting Started in Stock and published the 2020 edition. I’ve extended the title a little for this edition – adding the word Photography to avoid it getting mixed up with books about stocks and shares on Amazon! The book has been brought up to date and I’ve added my latest thinking throughout the book, including a new chapter on what to take and what to think about when...
Adobe have recently started accepting editorial images from contributors with more than 1000 lifetime downloads, but what does that mean? What is an illustrative editorial image? Firstly, what is an editorial image? It is an image that is intended to be used to illustrate or help explain an “educational” or news or commentary article rather than be used to promote a product or a point of view. To take an extreme for clarity – a picture of an Hispanic person...
I’ve been taking a break from stock for a few days to get ready for Christmas, although I did take the opportunity to photograph my grandchildren in front of the Xmas tree. I rarely use them as models for stock photos – there are possibly too many ways that images can be misused, but certain shots are less likely to be taken out of context and so I do upload those with a model release. This one really caught my...
I wrote about Luminar 4 and its AI driven sky replacement capability a couple of weeks or so ago and have been playing around with it from time to time in between other tasks! I am thinking of applying to Archangel book images (I will write about that if/when I get accepted) and wanted some moody images to go with their general house style. Not sure these are “winners” yet, but the ability to quickly change the sky alters the...
I wrote about my experiences with doing the paid shoot with DoorDash using take-out food from local restaurants, and ended up shooting 11 restaurants (I think…) for $385 in fees, plus obviously I got to eat the food that they paid for. The shoots are organized by Snapwire and you need to have a certain level in terms of points before you can apply for these sort of shoots. You get points by submitting images to their various challenges that...
There were multiple questions about keywords in my recent post asking for questions for me to mull over. I’ve thought about how best to do this – copy the questions into this post, or just try to answer as many as I can and you can trust me that I took your questions into account! I think the latter is the best approach, but let me know if you disagree. To complete the circle, I’ll reply to each of the...
I’ll report on this even though it doesn’t have much to do with stock photography. I struggled for months with poor performance from Adobe Lightroom Classic, which seemed to get worse, the longer I used it. I also have the Avast Free anti-virus program running on my Windows 10 PC. I am an active user of Adobe Lightroom which maintains a large database of all the changes that you make to photographs as well as updating the image files themselves...
A colleague of mine suggested that it might be helpful for people to be able to ask me questions and then I gather them together into similar subjects and provide my view on the answer. Sounds like a great idea so I will use this blog post to gather your questions. As it happens, I am also part way through rewriting my book on Stock Photography, and getting a good idea of what sort of questions you have will also...
