I’ve written about food photography before – recommending the series of books that Taylor Mathis has produced, but here is a free, very comprehensive guide from the Serious Eats website. Full of detail and examples of the techniques they are recommending, you can find it here.
OK – this is really about my sort of stock photography, which focuses more on travel, outdoors and some still life studio shots rather than people, but hope you find it useful. Counting down from number 10: 10: Spend time on keywording Too often we enjoy the photography but not the mundane keywording. Don’t over-stuff keywords, keep to the facts of who, where, what type of questions but outlining some conceptual words is OK if that is what the image...
We often get worried abut the $0.33 sales on Shutterstock, but the “on demand”, enhanced license and now the “Single and other downloads” can make a tremendous difference to the month’s income. I noticed today that my total had shot up, and found a single download for $126.77. This image – a stitched panorama of the landscape in north wales – was the one chosen. Its great to see these higher value downloads!
Nothing much to do with Stock Photography, but if you are anywhere near Northern Virginia this coming month, please visit my first public exhibition at the Center for the Arts (also known as the Candy Factory) in Old Town Manassas. The theme of the exhibition is The Nature World and four local photographers are being exhibited. You can see my chosen images – which will be printed and framed up to 30×24 inches – on my fine art website, BackyardImage.com....
It has been a while since I wrote about earnings from selling my stock photographs. Here is a graph I have used before, which tells the story over a number of years: What this is telling me is that things are getting harder! I have continued to add images – both RM ones to Alamy, Corbis and Zoonar, and RF ones to the same sites plus all the various microstock sites I talked about in this blog post, but the...
I am sure you have noticed that the theme of the website is very different! I realized that my old theme was not mobile friendly and I needed to move with the times. Along the way, I wanted to have a site that is easy to read and doesn’t give too many distractions – hopefully this one will work.
I was reading an article in a photography magazine that made the point that you are the expert in your own region – you know where the best sites are, you can visit them when conditions are good and you don’t have to get back to your hotel or into the car for the next part of your vacation. Good advice and I took it yesterday to visit the Christmas lights at the Washington DC Church of Jesus Christ of...
I must admit that I am prone to modifying my images to try to tell the story better – I’ve been known to replace a person without a model release with one that I have approval from – but in my mind that is still a great image for telling a climbing story! I went to Bahrain a couple of weeks back and took some images that I really liked, but there were distracting elements. In the first case, a...
I’m not saying that this is a great stock photo (in terms of its commercial potential), but sometimes we have to let our artistic side shine through! I was walking around Regensburg in Germany on my recent river cruise. Cloudy sky, bit of drizzle, certainly not the conditions to create fantastic travel images with a blue sky and billowing clouds. As a result I was looking for details that could enhance a travel article about the medieval town and I...
I reviewed this earlier in the year – I really enjoyed reading each of the issues of Taylor Mathis’ Photographing Food series. I haven’t seen his videos (to be honest I don’t like watching instructional videos much), but I thought the separate eBooks were interesting and thought provoking, but expensive. I noticed that Taylor has a special Black Friday sale on his site with 55% off – Friday through Monday. If you are interested in having a relaxing read and...
