Backyard Silver Latest Posts

Canva – what sells there?

This has been a tricky question to answer as the website does give a list of all images sold in date order, but it doesn’t show a thumbnail of the sold image. There is a tampermonkey script (search Canva tampermonkey on the Microstock Group forum to find details) that shows those thumbnails against each sale, but even then you are just eyeballing a long list of sales. However, Microstockr Pro has now added the agency to their list of supported...

Earnings from Stock Photography in May 2018

No clickbait headlines from me this month! However, the earnings were probably worthy of a headline like that. Certainly not as good as April with its $3500 total, but certainly better than May 2017 with a total of $2954: What is very nice to see is the continuing trend (which started last August) of the current earnings being higher, in some cases much higher, than the trend had been in the same month in previous years. This month was no...

Interesting new feature on Microstockr Pro

You may already have seen this, but I had been talking to the developers of Microstockr Pro with ideas for new features and asked for the ability to be able to sort the images in the download section to show images ranked by the sale value rather than just by the date of the sale. My idea was that if you have been away for a few weeks, it would be good to look back at the higher selling images...

This photographer decided to sell his photos – the results will amaze you!

OK – sorry for the clickbait title. I always avoid clicking on posts like this, but I guess some people must click on them otherwise we wouldn’t see them everywhere! However, the results this month will amaze you – at least I was pretty pleased with them! Historically, April has marked the start of the down months for my stock earnings – a slump that lasts until August. But this month has knocked that tradition out of the ballpark with...

Did my junk shop typewriter earn its keep?

Back in February, I wrote about the ideas you can sometimes get from objects in a junk shop – specifically a typewriter which cost me $15. I was asked to report on success – did it pay it’s way? After 2 months of sales, I can report that it did! Total earnings from the typewriter shots now that my iStock results are available are $47 – so a solid $32 profit! I must admit that the sale that pushed it...

Stock Video – Part 3. How I do it…

The earlier posts on this subject have covered the basics of what stock video is, and then more detail on the sort of clips I have been producing. Now I’ll focus on some details about how I go about getting the clips taken, edited and uploaded to the five agencies I support: Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Pond5, Storyblocks and iStock. The first step obviously starts in the camera. I’ve been choosing to shoot in the PAL standard of 23.98. There are...

Difficult to find the time to start in Stock Photography?

A friend with a deep portfolio on images on his hard drive recently asked me if I had any advice on breaking through the barrier of “just too much to do and not enough time” to get started in selling these images on the various stock agencies. Often, being faced with keywording and describing hundreds or thousands of images, we tend to just put it off for another day! After all, this part of the process is the most difficult...

Quick tip – how to remove sun flare

I’m still working through all my images from Spain and Italy and just processed one that made me thing that it would make a good quick tip if you come across the same conditions. I was at an overlook over a square in Rome and the sun was straight ahead and directly in my field of vision. It was late in the afternoon and the shadows in the square would make for an interesting shot and so I wanted to...

One of the good days

Today is one of those days that only comes round very rarely. Once in a blue moon as my parents used to say. Total sales for the day are a cool $200. Why? Three very nice sizeable sales! First Shutterstock with a pretty boring shot I took in the English Lake District on a cloudy day for $69.81: Hardly a fine art print, I’m afraid! But then Alamy came in with a sale at $89 gross which netted me $44.50

Earnings from stock photography (and video) in March 2018

March turned out to be a pretty decent month for earnings, with a total of $3099. Now that I am focusing more on video, I can report that $198 of that was from video sales! For a change, here is a quarter view of earnings with a very colorful approach to brighten your day: As you can see, the final quarter of 2017 was my best ever, but this first quarter was not far behind. Most of the sites did...