I’ve been very slow in posting new information in the past couple of months – but there has been a reason! I was lucky enough to go on a cruise around Australia and New Zealand in late November/December and then a trip to Hawaii in January. As a result, I have thousands of images to process – some of which were completed and uploaded, but the majority are still being worked on. I’m now back at home again and so...
I did a guest post over on Amos Struck’s website Stock Photo Secrets about the life of a stock photographer – a bit hard to cover that topic in a short blog, but I wanted to highlight some of the issues that we face – low commissions – and some of the potential solutions – our own linked Symbiostock sites. The Stock Photo Secrets site is aimed mainly at buyers of images, so perhaps that will strike a chord with...
I’ve decided to write a fuller post on my experiences on Fine Art America as I’ve been increasingly impressed with the sales coming from the site and thought some of my landscape/fine art readers may like to know more about this site and the opportunities for selling non-stock images. Fine Art America is a combination of a social site for photographers and a print on demand site for connoisseurs of good art! There are millions of images from abstract painting...
I’ve been pretty quiet for a few weeks – mainly because I went on a long vacation to Australia and New Zealand, cruising on the Celebrity Solstice from Sydney to Melbourne, across to New Zealand and then around the South and North Island – great relaxation and pretty good for photography. I’ll write more about the issues of taking good photos when on a cruise in a future post once I have processed the 3500 images I came back with!...
I wrote about the electronic magazine Photographing Food a couple of months back – although they are quite expensive at $5 per issue, I enjoyed them coming along at intervals as you could read, absorb and practice each technique as they were published. It was quite rightly pointed out that you could buy a full book about photographing food for less than the price of all the back-issues. However, I still found them useful and entertaining (and gave me some...
I spend a lot of time on Stock Photography, looking for images that may meet a particular commercial need, but what about Fine Art Photography – does that get a look-in? My local camera club is part of a group of Northern Virginia clubs that organize a large Nature Photography Expo each November. We get some great speakers – this year the lead is Bryan Peterson, have multiple workshops and then host a competition for the best nature images from...
Perhaps this is a hopeful title! However, I became very disillusioned with the performance of my personal stock agency site (BackyardStockPhotos.com) over recent weeks with its hosting at BlueHost. I track the response time of the site using Pingdom. This site sends a page load request every 5 minutes and graphs the results. As you can see, there have been some good times, but some horrendous page load times as well: 6 seconds is a long time to wait for...
Why no earnings reports? Partly because I have been busy, and partly because Shutterstock changed their terms and conditions requiring (or at least heavily suggesting) that contributors don’t publish details of their earnings on that site. I hear that some contributors have been approached to stop publishing details and I certainly don’t want to fall foul of them as I earn a big percentage of my stock earnings from that site. Anyway, things have continued to grow in total. I...
As I mentioned before, I uploaded about 500 of my images to Fine Art America. This is a site that provides a way for the general public to find your art and have it printed (and framed) for their home. I was slightly worried that people could easily copy some of my best stock work (at least for website use), and so I have removed some of the obvious stocky isolated shots from the site. September brought me two great...
This is a specialized post and only of interest to people who have created their own stock agency site using Symbiostock and WordPress. Why Backup: You may have signed up for backup services from your web hosting company, but at the end of the day you will have put 100s of hours into uploading, describing and processing your images on your site. What happens if there is an issue on the server hosting your site and, for some reason, the...
