Backyard Silver Latest Posts
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...
We have been battered by the snow blizzard that hit the north eastern USA this weekend, and that gave me a chance to take photos both during and after the storm. As I quickly uploaded these to the various stock agencies, and got rejections, it made me think about the advantages of running my own site and being able to choose which images went into the Symzio agency with no reviewer acting as gatekeeper. For instance, this image was taken...
Although we have only been live for a few weeks, the new Symzio stock agency is gaining traction among contributors (over 20,000 images now) and is making headway in that key constituency – Google Image Search. I did a search for my favorite combination of words – “lonesome bengal cat” on Google images and Symzio.com comes up with 8 hits out of the first 40 images. For some reason 123RF always seems to come up well in these sort of...
I had three of my images rejected by Shutterstock today for: Trademark–Image / Metadata potentially infringes on intellectual property rights. Here is one of them: You can see the keywords in the link behind the image as well. I can’t see any trademark issues here – I even removed the small “windows” key from the laptop and the phones are tablets are very generic. Perhaps I need to remove the power buttons next! If anyone can see an issue, please...
I’ve written about the new independent stock agency Symzio before – it is linked to the Symbiostock personal agencies and basically you choose which images to send to the new agency and how much to charge for the full size image. The developers have started a new blog aimed at stock illustrators and photographers and a recent post caught my eye: 5 Tips on becoming a stock photographer! I’m sure many of the readers of my blog will know most...
