One lesson you should take to heart – you never know when a chance shot will turn into a nice little earner and so you need to always be ready (with your camera) for those chance encounters. What do I mean by this? I was driving down a small road near my home when I saw a burned out cabin by the side of the road. I’d never really noticed it before, but now it was a burnt out wreck...
Life shouldn’t be all work and stock photographers need to take a break from the creation of “saleable” images sometimes! Yesterday I took a trip to Valley Falls State Park in “Wild and Wonderful West Virginia” with my local camera club – a place that is only 30 miles from my home, but I hadn’t known existed before this weekend! I’m not sure any of these shots are worth uploading to stock agencies, but I enjoyed a pleasant couple of...
I’m very late this month – my apologies! I was off on yet another trip to take stock photos – this time to Southern California. Not as many images to process as my last trip (which I haven’t finished yet), but I now have another 823 to process and eventually keyword the selected images. One thing you need to understand about this business – it is actually quite a lot of hard work going through every image, choosing the ones...
One of the common traits of many stock photographers is a certain carefulness with money – not for equipment in many cases, but in terms of applications that may simplify their lives by saving a bit of time. I must admit to the same feeling – $1000 on a new lens, certainly! $7.99 a month for a service that tracks earnings – no way! But I got to thinking about this – my biggest expense in creating and uploading stock...
One of the things that proved invaluable on my travels was the ability to take great images in dark indoor spaces. Of course, it would be nice to use a tripod and a low ISO, but almost all churches and palaces don’t allow tripods and there are few places where you could even rest your camera or use a small portable tripod. Modern cameras are getting better each year in terms of noise performance, but for stock images, the agencies...
It is a long time since I posted, but I do have an excuse. I was on a cruise around the Baltic sea (and to save you reaching for Google Maps, the ship went from Sweden to Finland, Russia, Estonia, Poland, Germany, Denmark and finally Norway). I’ve come back with 2270 images and am slowly working my way through them to try to get the best stock photos out of the voyage. However, I came back to some nice earnings...
One of the issues with Alamy is that while you can look at a page of sales with small thumbnails, it is hard to understand how much you actually earned as it shows the gross sales price. I’ve become a keen user of Microstockr Pro over the past 6 months – to be honest, I didn’t think I would as I’ve never been one to pore over the sales, but I actually have found it pretty instructive to see when...
Another month end comes round. Is it just me, or is time speeding up? Anyway, this month is following the usual trend – add more images, earn the same money! I still think it is a viable way to earn money, it is just different to what it was a few years ago when adding more images resulted in a growth in earnings. Now it seems like the time spent on adding more images results in a continuation of earnings...
I’ve converted my recent blog post on creating new stock photos into a Bored Panda article. It is my aim to get picked up in their “Trending” area and get more viewers of my blog via that! If you wouldn’t mind, please “Upvote” on the article
Earlier in August I did an analysis of all the zooms on Alamy in the first half of the month to see if a buyer then searched for, and bought, that image on one of the microstock sites. This post continues that analysis for the rest of the month. I only uploaded these images from Equatorial Guinea to Alamy and Getty (via Corbis).
