I took some images of a new golf course in Kauai around sunset and liked the calm and serene feeling of the “18th hole”, and so submitted about four different shots of the green and a sand bunker. I noticed that one of them: sold reasonably well on Shutterstock and the image in the thumbnail immediately reminded me of a heart shape in front of the flag – it starts off well at the top, but loses it! As a...
I always find it interesting to see what sells – especially on the more expensive sites like Alamy. I check that site from time to time to see if I have any sales. Most times, no, but today I saw that I had a $245 sale (of which I get 50%) for an RF images of this: Well, that is a “sort of interesting” shot… I remember taking it on a hike in the Smoky Mountains, and I thought at...
One downside of posting regularly is that older posts that are still relevant get lost. So I’ve created a page (under the About heading in the menu) where I will list posts that are useful for new readers. I’ll add more as I think of them!
As I’ve probably mentioned before, my main camera kit is a Canon 5D Mk3, with the 24-105mm F4, 16-35mm F4 and 70-200mm F4 lenses. I also normally carry a 1.4x converter and 50mm F1.4 lens as well. All in all, quite a load on my back, but I like the flexibility that I can get with the lenses and the high quality of the results, even at higher ISOs and if I need to crop. The trip to Equatorial Guinea...
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.
