A friend of mine wrote a blog post about entering for the Travel Photographer of the Year contest as a way of expanding beyond stock photography. I think that is a great objective and I’m certainly going to look into it myself. Interestingly, after the digital entries are refined down to potential winners, you need to submit physical prints of your work – a great choice I think! What struck me about the competition rules was the very comprehensive section...
With the constant pressure to create more saleable stock images, it is easy to forget that we also do this because we enjoy photography! I talked about some great images I managed to capture on my final evening in Kauai, and I kept thinking about how best to show what I think is going to be one of my favorites. The answer, of course, is to print it! We get so used to looking at things on the screen, but...
I’m still processing images from my recent trip to Maui and Kauai, but as I was going through them I thought about how I find out where to go for the best photo opportunities when you go to a new place. How did I know where to find this lcoation for sunset? I start, before I go, with a guidebook – I know that is old fashioned when you have Google at your fingerprints, but at least I get...
Update: I’ve updated this post with new information and reworked photos. You can find the new version of a Sunset cruise along the Na Pali coast in Kauai here. For something different, I thought I would post a review of a sunset cruise I recently took in Kauai with Na Pali Coast Hanalei Tours and illustrate it with some of the images that will be finding their way onto stock agency sites in the near future! I’ve been to Kauai...
There is a lot of bluff and misdirection in the world of stock photography (a bit like politics?) but I came across a site from a fellow stock photographer who is willing to post what he actually earns, and he also maintains a pretty comprehensive site where you can buy prints of his portfolio as well as copies of books of his best images published each year. The photographer in question is Glenn Nagel and you can find his site...
A steady performance during May – ending up with $2448 compared with $2469 in April. I am continuing to maintain my monthly earnings chart to see how my performance has varied by month over the years and it is showing some interesting results: What I hadn’t really noticed before is that the early months of the year have been showing a steady increase year by year. So the 2017 results are generally higher than 2016, 2015 etc. May is slightly...
I was reading a discussion about the Adobe Stock Contributor Portal and a few people were complaining about how their sales had fallen since Adobe took over Fotolia. I was under the impression that my sales had gone very strongly in the opposite direction and so I decided to look at my stats and see what my experience was. As I suspected, the results have been very positive: Adobe announced the purchase in December 2014 but not very much...
Another month quickly goes by and it is time to add up all those earnings again! I didn’t need as big a calculator this month as Shutterstock seems to have dropped back into its old ways. After a great March with almost $1000, I’m back down at $597 on that site. Not a single enhanced license in the month! Overall, things are back to their normal levels as well (normal being “not so good”) with total earnings in April of...
I’m lucky to be just back from a 10 day vacation in California, starting in San Francisco, a stop in the Napa Valley then on to Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. Tons of snow about still, which makes for attractive mountain shots and I’m now happily processing my “holiday snaps!” I always do my research before I go, searching for best photography locations and I started using an iPad app called Pocket that allows you to keep a download of a...
I’ve been on Fine Art America for a few years now, but it does seem that sales are coming a bit faster in recent months. I’ve not been uploading images very often (I keep telling myself to upload more!), but I get interesting and profitable sales almost every month. So far this year, I have had one sale in February, two in March and now a new one for April! This time it was a large framed print of the...
