Wow – who would have thought that processing 2000 images would take so long! It is an interesting question in psychology that although I earn a reasonable amount from photography, in my mind I am not “working” when I process images and so it sometimes takes me some time to process them all. However, I think that is an important approach as well – if you just plow on through your images, you will become jaded and start to pass...
Shutterstock has been a big disappointment for a few months, with my earnings dipping well below $1000 month after month. I haven’t done a lot of analysis, but the relative lack of “on demands” and particularly Enhanced Downloads, seems to be a major reason for the fall. So it is nice to sometimes open up the earnings page and see a pleasant surprise: This simple macro shot of a pile of pins sold this morning for $88.50. I’ll start the...
It is a long time since I reported a success on Fine Art America, but out of the blue I got an email telling me that someone had bought a relatively small print of a night time shot of the Riverwalk and Centennial Fountain in Chicago. It was only a 12 x 8 inch print and so my profit was $32, but better than nothing. I could do to revisit some of my more recent “artistic” shots and upload some...
Now that I am back from my vacation in Spain and London, and have started to go through my 2100+ images, I will write first about what I look for when I am travelling and how I approach the processing and selection of images. I’m doing this in parts, as the whole thing could get too unwieldy. I’m writing this now that I am back home, so the first question of what to shoot is me thinking back about why...
Finally, a bit of good news. Shutterstock is still in the doldrums (with earnings this month of $877), but most of the other sites showed some positive improvements so that I ended the month with at least $2375. I say at least, because I noticed that on the first day of September I had a $50 sale in iStock’s partner program, which means that my normal estimates for iStock sales are probably low. What was good in September – 123RF...
I’ve only had one sale since moving to the new design of my personal stock agency, and so I decided to change the license type (from a sort of restricted royalty free license competing with Shutterstock and the like) to a one time use license with an extended option (for resale products) and reduced the pricing significantly. I rewrote my license based on one that Robin (from Symbiostock) uses on his stock site, and changed the pricing so that the...
After an extended vacation in Spain and then in London, I am back at home with around 1600 images to process and sort for my stock library. I thought I would write a long blog post about how I approach that, what I look for in terms of a useful stock photo from travel images and also how I go about keywording them. I have only just finished importing them into Lightroom, so it will be a little while before...
After a great set of earnings in August (OK, perhaps that isn’t altogether true…), I decided the time was right to build a new computer for my photography. My current PC was bought refurbished in 2010 and although I added more memory, it was increasingly slow when I wanted to move between the panels in Lightroom and even loading an image for editing seemed to take a few seconds. Frustrating! I saw this article by a fellow photographer Nasim Mansurov...
August seems to have been the worst month for a long time for me. Shutterstock was a disaster – just $786 and that includes a $96 sale in the Single on demand area in the final week of the month. Without that, it would have been less that $700! Back in January and February, I was regularly hitting $1000+ – since April it has been downhill all the way. It just goes to show that diversification is important – if...
Success at last… Well, in a small way I guess. Just 3 weeks after I launched my new improved stock site based on the new Symbiostock plugin and theme, I had my first sale: Admittedly it was for the smallest size image and I only earned $2.00, but you can’t help but get excited at a 100% royalty sale! Hope there are more in my future!!
