The discussion about the graph I published yesterday about my return per image is interesting over on the Microstock Group. I thought it might be interesting to explain how I calculated this, what alternatives there are and to show one area of good news! So what is Return per online image? Simply put, it is the earnings you get from an agency divided by the number of files you have. The interesting question is how do you count those files?...
This is an old post but I left it here because the comments are still very interesting and hopefully useful! If you are looking for the eBook, it is here: eBook – Getting Started in Stock.
2018 is behind us and thank goodness December has gone! This was one of the worst months for sales for a couple of years and I ended up with $850 less than in December 2017. Total earnings for December 2018 turned out to be $2350. A bit disappointing after all the effort in getting new images and videos online. Still, it is what it is and I need to look forward now to a great January! As this is also...
Not everything I buy turns out to be useful (or, even better, pays for itself in earnings). I remember thinking how great a carbon fiber monopod would be and I think it has been used once since I bought it at a photography show! But one of my better buys has been the Edelkrone Surface One. It was not cheap – over $800 with the flex head, but I have earned at least $1400 in video sales since I bought...
I don’t normally do this (and especially after writing my last post about not wasting money on new camera bodies), but I noticed that there is a sale on the Sony A7Riii and Sony A9 bodies at both B&H and Amazon in the USA. I have the A7Riii and find it to be a great camera. The A9 has some excellent video features. But I’m not here to sell you on the particular bodies – just to let you know...
As a stock photographer you need to be more than a photographer – you need to be a clear-thinking businessman or businesswoman at the same time. In a new blog post on the Dreamstime website I explore the question of what you should buy in the way of new camera equipment. But rather than list equipment that would be nice to have, I wrote instead about how to approach spending money on what will make you more money. After all,...
Way back in 2015 I did some research on the pricing of images that had sold on Fine Art America. I’ve stuck with that pricing ever since and I have had sales as I report here, but am I leaving money on the table? So I decided to repeat my research and see how pricing of a representative sample of images that had sold this week on FineArtAmerica had changed. What I found was intriguing!
I wrote a long post about how I manage RF, RM and editorial images in response to a question from a reader. I admitted that I wasn’t great at that, but that I could see in the Stock Submitter interface which images were editorial and which were commercial. However, I thought this was just a visual thing – the editorial ones had a block of “Orange” which indicated that they could not be uploaded to Adobe, Canstock etc. So if...
I’m still working through my images from China, but recently put together this high resolution panorama (10,500 pixels) of the skyline of Shanghai as the sun started to set. Nice photo, but definitely editorial as all the buildings have various sorts of signs on them and it was too much work to remove them. So being in a playful mood I decided to try a painting instead and used the Jixipix Watercolor Studio plugin for Photoshop to create a more...
I’m a big proponent of watching for what is in the news and trying to think of what the next big story will be. I use Flipboard for this and I like the way the site comes up with the general stories, but also illustrates them with images that may trigger my creative juices! I curate a stock photography oriented magazine with Alex Rotenberg if you are interested in that. I thought it might be interesting to see how my...
