My previous posts on building my own stock agency website using the new Symbiostock plugin for wordpress explain the background, and so this post is an update on progress with the project. I have been keen to maintain my own agency, partly from vanity, and partly to give me a way of selling my own photographs directly to users at prices that I think are fair. The developer of the plugin, Robin, has now created an agency that pulls all...
I’m still interested in exploring more ways of selling fine art – and so have revisited Fine Art America again to see if I can get some traction. I’ve had few sales this year. I talked about my pricing strategy at FAA in an earlier post and I haven’t changed that, but I’m investigating uploading more artistic images rather than my normal stock photos. Looking at the recent sales on the site makes me think that people are after a...
I found a fascinating tutorial about creating writing in sand using Photoshop and decided to try my own version. The tutorial dealt with a top down version of the text – ie there is no perspective from the viewer leading towards the sea and waves, so my base photo was somewhat different. I also had to modify some of the settings – it just didn’t seem to give enough texture around the letters, but generally I think it is OK....
Ever so often I look at some of my photos and think – that would be great on a wall in a large scale print! That triggers me to look at some of my shots and export them at full resolution for upload to Fine Art America to see if I can entice someone to buy a print of mine! I’m still pricing at the levels that I explained in a post on FineArtAmerica pricing a couple of years back....
New Symzio stock photo agency pulls together chosen images from each contributors own website and offers them with 80% commission under a common license and pricing structure
I was looking at the images that had sold recently on Canva and came across the very small thumbnail for this image: I sat thinking – why on earth would someone use that in a design? But then I saw the main shapes of the two trees – the large one very dominant, the smaller one cowering off to the right and thought that an image without the house and fence could illustrate themes such as domineering, oppressive, overbearing etc....
Just two days ago, I was complaining about not being able to get my earnings above the $2-$3K per month level, but later that day I finished the keywording of my images from a week’s trip to Kauai in early November – looking at those pictures of the warm sunny days made me realize that this is not a bad way to make money! Even better, I got the results of the upload to Shutterstock – 103 images uploaded, 100...
Good months and bad… After a pretty good October when my total earnings reached $2639, November dropped, although at least I stayed above that $2000 threshold – ending the month with $2145. Here is my overall earning chart – getting a little difficult to see now with so many months, so when I get to January I’ll rework it to show fewer years. What do I see as the trends (as far as my sort of stock photos are concerned).
Parts 1 and 2 of this extended post have discussed what to take on a travel vacation and then how to select and process images on your return. I’ll now turn to keywording and uploading the images. I finished processing most of the images in mid October and eventually ended up with 389 images that I thought were worth keywording. I generally follow a simple rule about what is going to be “editorial” and hence only uploaded to my own...
OK – here is reason for my comment about the identical tattoos. Perhaps not visible on the smaller images I posted:
