One of the disappointments of stock photography is that you can sell hundreds (eventually!) of downloads, but you rarely get the satisfaction of seeing them in print, or, even better, knowing that someone else liked the image enough to get it printed for their home or office wall. I did come across one of my images of Overall Run Falls in a copy of the Guide to the Shenandoah National Park, which was nice: But my biggest kick was seeing...
A very good month. I’m not sure how many posts I can make starting with those words, but June has blown all previous months out of the water and is up almost $150 over my May total to end with around $1750. I say around, as two sites are still down from the major storms in Northern Virginia last night – YayMicro and Cutcaster and so I can’t update the earnings from those two sites. So, what was good about...
As I discussed last month, the Enhanced License download on Shutterstock makes a big difference to monthly earnings. I started to publish the images that get selected for an Enhanced License to see if I can see a pattern in what sort of images is attractive to a buyer for these more expensive licenses – $28 to the contributor. Here are the June EL Downloads: This first one is probably an easy one to explain – the image is nicely...
Shutterstock is the stock agency that earns the most for almost all non-exclusive stock photographers, and the agency has a series of step changes in earnings per download that you achieve once your lifetime earnings have passed that point. Initially you get $0.25 per subscription download, after $500 in lifetime earnings this increases to $0.33, to $0.36 after $3000 and finally, the crowning achievement is to get $0.38 after earning $10000 from the site. Other payments follow suit, with the...
Continuing my weekly summary of stock photos – this week, I have a collection of images from various trips and some studio shots. My first one is a from a test of the Canon G1X taken on a trip to Glen Echo in Maryland. The G1X has an APS-C sensor with a fixed zoom lens, and so far, I have been very impressed by the noise level. The weather was a bit cloudy at Glen Echo and so I am...
Selling photos is certainly getting interesting with another great month in May, easily exceeding my best month to date in April 2012. This month I ended with $1608, after the adjusted earnings for April of $1537. I adjusted April as I later found a reasonable sale on Alamy late on the evening of 30 April and, strangely enough, the same thing happened this month – a $108 sale for a book illustration on the 31st May. That made six sales...
One of the biggest determinants of a good month on Shutterstock is the number of Enhanced Downloads (or EDs). What is an Enhanced Download? Strictly speaking it is an Enhanced License Download – a standard license on Shutterstock lets the buyer use the image for personal non-commercial uses with duplication up to 250,000 copies. If someone wants to print more than that, or use the image in a commercial way – as a print in a hotel, or as an...
One of the topics I cover in my Stock Photography eBook is how to get the best placement of your images in the search engines of the stock agencies – with a chapter on advanced keywording and various tips that I picked up about specific sites. One that seemed to make a big difference to my sales was the ability to “Fave” your own images on 123RF. I covered this about 6 months ago, but I suddenly realized that is...
My new year resolution to post images each week has taken a beating this month. It has been a busy month for my non-stock photography activities, with a week’s conference in Chicago earlier in the month and then a few days vacation in St Michaels on the Chesapeake Bay to celebrate my wife’s birthday. Of course, the camera went along as well, but it has taken me some time to finally process and keyword all the images before finishing the...
Isolating an object against a pure white background is one of the challenges of stock photography, especially for light colored objects. If you place it on a white card and boost the lighting to get the card burnt out, the object suffers as well. I set about building a simple approach to the problem using things I have around the house. The project starts with a glass topped table, placed close to a white surface. Under the table you place...
