Another month goes by so quickly. It has been a strange month here in the wilds of West Virginia – very cold early on, and then pretty hot for the last week. With moving into a new house we are still snowed under in boxes and lots to be done around the house and so almost no photography to speak of for at least 2 months now. I’ve not uploaded very much either as a result, so it is interesting...
Is this an April Fools Joke or what – earnings in April were down to a new low and Shutterstock, normally one of my more reliable agencies, failed to even reach $750 this month – ending at just $736. The last time I had earnings so low at Shutterstock was in February 2013 – over 3 years ago, when I had just 3664 images online at that agency compared to 5800 now. I don’t know if the buyers are voting...
At my old camera club, we had competitions each month and I entered this shots as a 16×20 matted print: I’ll never forget the judge’s comments – “I’ve never seen a sky like that – really overdone…” and she gave it a poor score.
I’ve been very quiet of late, and haven’t been paying much attention to my stock photo work – mainly because our planned move to Morgantown in West Virginia finally happened after we sold our home in Virginia. So we have had 4 weeks of packing things into boxes and now four weeks of unpacking things and wondering where on earth they will go in a smaller house. I’ve taken a few shots when I can find the time – there...
First a word about February – although this is a short month, it didn’t turn out too badly for me, my Stock Photographer’s Lament notwithstanding! Total earnings ended at $2511 and some of the Zoonar and iStock earnings have still to appear. Bright points of the month were with iStock, where I had five Extended licenses bought on the same day – all variants of this shoot: Fotolia/Adobe is continuing to grow – I reached $192 from that site in February,...
I don’t know if this is a result of changing my pricing on FineArtAmerica, but I have had my second sale of the month today. The image that sold as a 30 x 18 print was this one: It sold as a gallery wrapped canvas print and profit on this was $77. Nice to see, and I hope this is just the second of many. I reported my first sale this year via FAA here.
Hooray – a sale on FineArtAmerica! Back in December I decided to reduce my pricing on FAA and explained the logic at that time (it was based on the average pricing of people who had had sales recently). Nothing happened immediately, but I did get a sale this week: This sold as a framed and matted 24 x 20 inch print, and my profit was $63 under the new pricing. Still worthwhile, but I’m hoping the sales will come a...
As I jokingly suggested in this post about a stock photographer’s year, January is never a great month for earnings and it didn’t let me down. It wasn’t too bad, to be honest, with the earnings ending at $2213, but compared to last January which had $2314, I am hardly making progress. And I uploaded about 1200 images in the past year as well. So it looks like the general rule is becoming that you need to continue working hard...
I was flying on United yesterday and idly watching the screen. They had a quiz about where different airport codes refer to and IAD came up. I knew that one (Washington Dulles!), but when the answer came up, it was superimposed on one of my images of the Washington Monument at sunrise taken from the Jefferson Memorial: Of course I have no idea where they licensed it – hopefully for more than 38c! Still, it’s nice to see an image...
Yesterday turned out to be a great day on Shutterstock. On of the records was much anticipated – I finally passed the $50,000 earnings level after first joining the site in early 2008 – I was $4 short on Monday, but ended Tuesday with $50,159! I’m averaging around $11,000 a year on that site now, and so less than 5 years to my next big threshold of $100,000! So the second record? I got a single sale for $120. That...
