I don’t know how many of you follow the Microstock Forum, but there has been a flurry of activity around the creation of a wordpress theme to allow the display and licensing / downloading of stock images from a wordpress site. One very clear advantage is that it costs nothing to run your own site (apart from hosting) and you can take advantage of all the plugins and SEO help that wordpress provides. The other thing that is unique about...
Although March is supposed to be one of the best months of the year for the sale of stock photos, this month was good, but not great for me. I have continuing worries about the volatility of Shutterstock earnings – and I’ll do a separate post on that shortly – but the month ended up with a total of $1980. Definitely good, but with all the efforts at unloading images in late Feb/early March, I was hoping for a little...
An eye-catching title…but what can we do to increase our earnings potential from images already in our portfolio and online. I was thinking about this recently when looking at some of my better selling images on Shutterstock. One that caught my eye was this one: This is a nice clean bright and colorful image – stands out well in a thumbnail and has space in the sky for text or other copy. How can I maximize my earnings from this...
It isn’t very often that I do a bit of “advertizing”, but one key thing that persuades a new reader to purchase my eBook and get started on the road to Stock Photography are the reviews posted by other readers. If you have bought the book from Amazon or the Apple store, please help me by adding a short review on those sites. Anyone can also add a review comment to this website – here or on the book page...
Not a great month! Sometimes this business can really knock you back, but I think the message is to just ignore the fall and get back on the bicycle! I did spend some time wondering if the work of uploading was worth the hassle, but am now back keywording and processing as before. So, what happened? Shutterstock was extremely slow in February – especially later in the month. I particularly noticed an almost complete lack of the Single downloads that...
The latest set of earnings from selling digital images shows a return to form! December was a little bit of a disappointment (although it is a month with a lot of holidays) and I ended that month with earnings of $1735. January started slow, but it picked up as the month progressed to give me a total of $2180 – not a best ever, but pretty close. As usual, Shutterstock was in the lead, followed by iStock, and then 123RF...
I came across an interesting earnings calculator on Yuri Arcur’s site. It takes account of annual variations of stock sales (ie Late December/early January is not good for earnings) and also that weekends are lower than weekdays to calculate the likely monthly earnings from any point in the month. You can find the Stock Earnings Calculator here. You can add in your own sites as necessary, and so, as an experiment, I have put in the earnings for today from...
One of the issues of normal “stock” photography – especially studio and people/lifestyle images – is that they tend to remove the opportunity to add an artistic flair to the image. Pure white isolation, room for editorial copy, deep depth of field – all these are part and parcel of a stock image. Photographers are driven by other aims though – the ability to create an image that wows the audience, or takes their breath away, but is it possible...
The end of December is a time for reflection and setting of new targets for the coming year and so I decided to pull out all the stops and do a detailed analysis of how my efforts in the Stock Photography business are going. This is going to be a long posting, so relax and take the information in stages! First, how did December pan out. Not great (although in perspective for the whole of 2012, it was a reasonable...
Lightroom 4 introduced a new (and not well publicized) feature – the ability to edit 32 bit images using the sliders and tools we know so well! So what, you may say! However, a 32 bit image, created by combining the exposure values from a number of shots taken at different exposure levels, contains an enormous amount of information about the dynamic range of the scene, and we can bring out hidden details in the shadows and reduce over-exposed highlights...
