Backyard Silver Latest Posts
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...
One of the challenges of stock photography is to think of that next subject! Sometimes we think that everything that can be photographed, has been photographed, and is available for sale on all the agencies! When I get to that point, it is always good to open a bottle of wine, relax, and remember that every image can be improved in some way, and that there are ways of seeing things that have perhaps not been done before – and,...
Another month goes by, and another set of earnings. August can be a slow month, and this month was no exception. Most of my sites seemed to have struggled to get anywhere near their best earnings, and the month ended below the $2000 bar that I am trying to always better. Final count is around $1960 this month. Shutterstock was one of those slow sites – I thought it was going to be one of the worst months there for...
I’ve mentioned SymbioStock, the network of independent stock illustrators and photographers before, but things have continued to develop. First up – I got my first sale from my own SymbioStock site – BackyardStockPhotos. Now this is nothing to get excited about, but a buyer found my site, found the image they wanted, registered and bought/downloaded the image with no issues or fuss. It was this one: They bought a small version – which I priced at $3. As I said,...
I’m sure this has happened to you – you make an effort to go somewhere to get some fantastic sunset shots, but the weather is just not right – too cloudy, too hot, too misty, you name it, it has happened. One of the wonders of digital cameras is that they can often see an image better than you can, if you spend the time to get the best out of it. A recent trip to Newark (I know, I...
Somewhat belatedly, here are my earnings for July 2013 from the sale and licensing of stock images. Overall it was a pretty good month – not a record, but solidly above $2000 again. I ended the month with $2149 after counting the partner program earnings from iStock which came in on time this month. Shutterstock was its usual good performer at $924, iStock is struggling (apart from partner sales which are strong) and Alamy came out of its shell to...
Note: Significant updates to post following release of V2 of StockUploader. In my book, as well as in numerous posts on my blog, I have pushed the benefits of Lightburner – where you upload once to their site and they handle the uploads to all the stock agencies. I have also said that I would be willing to pay for the service as I found it so helpful. Well, my wish came true – they introduced a pricing plan, but...
