I’ll start with a confession. Eight years ago, I spent $216 on a carbon fiber monopod and I’ve used it maybe twice in all those years! It just goes to show how we are always seeking something to provide stability in those difficult lighting conditions that travel photographers both seek and struggle with. A tripod is great, and I almost always take one on vacation with me, but that doesn’t mean to say that I always have one with me!...
This July 4th, I went up to Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania to see and photograph the fireworks display over the city. Although only 70 miles away, we decided to stay for a couple of nights both to get the best idea of where to shoot the fireworks and to get some other images of the city as well. As I started to realize, getting everything right about fireworks, especially if you want to position them with the city itself to give...
The months seem to fly by and now I’m writing again about earnings from stock photography (and video) at the end of the second quarter of the year. June really felt like a slow month as I was tracking my earnings on Microstockr Pro. One downside of them adding more agencies (Canva was the most recent) is that there is much less of a surprise when I finally put my spreadsheets together, but I was caught out by how much...
We have all been there – we travel to some location, perhaps on vacation, and then the weather isn’t really that good for photography. Do you still take your photos and then what do you do with them on your return? I recently went to New York City for a couple of days and although it was generally dry and a partially sunny, we took a trip to Staten Island on the (free) ferry past the Statue of Liberty and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
