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...
I’m asked whether it is worth having a paid subscription to Fine Art America from time to time. With a free account, you can upload 25 images only. For $30 a year, you can have unlimited images and more analytics tools. I currently have 760 images as I find that I have no real idea of which of my many files will actually sell! So I upload all the ones that I personally like and hope they will get some...
UPDATE: The 30 days upgrade timeframe turned out to be wrong – the upgrade was done yesterday. Not perfectly, it must be admitted, but everything is now good and the sites are performing well. The tech I was working with last night was very good. I decided that research before signing up for the first package is critical. If I had chosen the VPS from the start and simply migrated my sites there, I think all would have been well!...
I was asked a question recently through my contact page which essentially asked how I manage what I have in each agency and whether it is RF, RM or exclusive? For those relatively new to the game I wrote a post a few years back about the difference between all these “licensing terms” that might be worth reviewing. So, how do we manage all our images (and videos) without drowning in paperwork?
All good records must come to an end! For the first time in 18 months, the earnings in November were less than those in the same month the previous year! Not bad, just not good enough! Overall, I earned $3073 from photos and videos – but less than the $3177 in November 2017. So at least the pressure is off in future months! This is what the picture looks like: Well above previous Novembers but I was really on a...
