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...
For some reason, I was dreaming last night about December sales (sad, I know…) and I thought to those posts on Microstock group that we have all seen. Someone says – my sales are poor this month – any reason? Most often they really mean that they normally sell 8 images a month and this month it is only 6! Then someone else always says – my sales are up this month – BME with 20% more than last month....
I am trying hard this year to get my own stock agency, Backyard Stock Photos off the ground. This is based on wordpress with the free Symbiostock plugin – I wrote about the way I migrated from my old site in this earlier post. The developer of the plugin has created agency where all the users of the plugin can choose to include their images (on a one by one basis if you want) and choose the price for the...
Another year ends, and time to review where I am against my plans to continue to grow my stock photo business. Well, the results are in and it turned out to be an OK year – solid, but no growth over 2014 even though I continued to add images to my portfolio: What this is showing is thatÂ
Isolating an object against a white background is usually a photoshop task. With selections, curves and the rest, you can easily get rid of flaws in what should be a pure white background. But what can you do if the image includes currency? As I have been finding, Adobe has built some complex algorithms into the latest releases of Photoshop that stop you from opening or editing a photograph that contains even parts of US dollar currency bills. I’m sure...
I’m putting effort into my Fine Art America images by adding the digital art paintings created by the Impresso Pro plugin. I decided to look at my pricing at the same time and spent some time this morning looking at the pricing of images that had recently sold on the site. I focused on photographs and checked the pricing on about 24 of them. This table shows the sale price of a basic print in three sizes on the longest...
I first mentioned this last week in this post, but I have been playing with the Impresso Plugin that produces some really nice oil painting effects in Lightroom and Photoshop with very few steps (although there are many options I haven’t fully got to grips with yet!) and after I completed one recent image I went back and looked at the progression from the original shot to the finished item: An artist shouldn’t really show the original photo as it...
