I was just playing with some photos I had taken at Coopers Rock overlook near Morgantown in West Virginia and was pretty unimpressed with what I saw: Pretty bland colors and the sky is very dull – not blown out but uninteresting.
One month I’m going to be really excited about reporting earnings again, but this isn’t that month! Here is my overall graph: Overall, I didn’t even make the $2000 benchmark, with sales ending the month at $1966.
I noticed a relatively prominent sensor spot on some of my images after my last field trip – one of the potential issues with mirrorless cameras is that there is nothing between the lens opening and the sensor and so changing lenses is always going to have the risk of introducing dust. Anyway, I used my trusty Visible Dust Arctic Butterfly which works by using static in the fine brush strands to pick up the dust from the sensor, but...
Earlier this month I mentioned that it was important to just get out into the fresh air and take photos that you enjoy. With a run of warm weather I got out my bike and took some nature shots around Morgantown and just uploaded them thinking “those will never sell!” As I reported, one sold almost immediately on Shutterstock, and now I see that 5 shots from that trip sold today on Dreamstime: This was part of a larger set...
In my review of Microstockr Pro, I forgot to mention one neat feature that saves a bit of time. If you click on an image thumbnail, you get the screen where the historic sales of that image are displayed. Hovering over the thumbnail on that screen shows two icons – a chain symbol that takes you to the image page on the stock agency, and a magnifying glass. Clicking this opens up the image search page on Google with the...
Although I had heard of the application before, I had never got round to looking in more detail at Microstockr until recently. I’m glad I did! I downloaded Microstockr Pro – the beta desktop version and so far I have been very impressed. There are things they are still working on (a new update came through just this morning), but it is giving me a lot of insight into my portfolio that would be hard to find any other way.
I spend a lot of time thinking about stock photo opportunities, but sometimes you just have to relax and take some photos that you enjoy! They may sell (chances are probably close to zero), but it is just as important to hone your skills on ordinary attractive images! This week has been lovely in West Virginia – unusually warm and the leaves are starting to turn, and so a bike ride was in order:
I was doing an attempt at an ImageBrief brief recently – one about perfectly shaped water drops on a piece of polished wood – and came across the first area where my Canon kit was much better than the Sony A7R! Macro focus stacking. The picture I was attempting needed high definition focus from front to rear: It took me a bit of time to sort out the lighting (which needed to be low and behind the drops to get...
I recently came across an interesting blog post by Craig Dingle entitled Why be exclusive on iStock? His blog is worth following as Craig is an Australian wedding photographer who also does stock photos as an extra income stream, and chose to join iStockPhoto as an exclusive back around the same time I was starting as a non-exclusive. His reasons are valid, but I’m not sure I can get over one of the biggest issues with exclusivity – you are tying...
September is usually a good time of the year for stock earnings. For me, this month, not so much! I must have really hit a bad patch as I ended the month probably just scraping to the $2000 mark. I’m sure many readers would love to get to that point, but I’m only reporting on my experiences with my portfolio. I don’t have my Alamy/Corbis/Getty earnings yet as I submitted to those via a partner, but without those I ended...
