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...
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....
