Travel or studio stock photos?

I was at a loose end this morning (there is a limit to the number of studio based stock images I can think of!), so I decided to look at some of the trends that I could see from Microstockr Pro. I signed up to this app many years ago now, and I find it invaluable for tracking where I am in the month (which is interesting, but not something you can impact), but more importantly, to look at the trends of what is selling to see if I can think of additional concepts to build on those trends. It is also amazing how many times I look at a thumbnail of an image that has just sold and it gives me an idea of how to process it differently, or composite some new information into the shot to create a new concept.

But what I wanted to think about today was to review how well my various studio concept shots do compared to travel images. For me, studio means still life shots – not model related studio work, so lets start with that clarification. I don’t shoot model shots (except for myself!) as I’m not that good at it, and also the margins are potentially so small on microstock these days that paying for a model and the time taken to really get good people shots is probably not worthwhile for me. I know a lot of people create fantastic model shots – and good luck to them!

Microstockr Pro has a neat “collections” section where you can create your own collections of sold images and videos and add to it by searching for certain keywords. As far as I know, it only searches the description (and maybe the title) of the images, not the keywords that are used on the agency sites to find them, so you need to be careful with the words you use, but for most of my subjects, I have always tended to put the main words in the description to give them an extra chance of being found. You simply search for those words and add the appropriate images and videos into the collection. Once you have the collection, you can then look at sales by year, by agency, and, if you add in a production cost (ie the cost of creating the images), it will show you the gross profit. One thing I can’t seem to find is to split the earnings between still photos and videos, so if the developers read this, that would be a good feature to have!

As you can see from this snapshot, my coronavirus related images continue to sell well. The number in brackets by the agency tells me how many unique images have sold on that site (ie 46 for Shutterstock), then you see downloads and finally earnings. This now includes the iStock downloads from March, but of course no information from that site for April. We don’t see those until the 20th of the next month.

But what I wanted to look at was how travel related images did over time. As regular readers know, I like to visit Hawaii when I can, and you would think that those islands are already well represented in the stock libraries. After all, photographers have been going there for years and they are naturally attractive places to photograph. What surprised me was that my images (and videos) of those islands have sold very well over the years and continue to do so, even with our present troubles.

I was surprised (and very pleased) to see that I have almost reached $10,000 in sales of these travel shots! I’ve never worked out what the cost of my various trips has been and so it is probably false to suggest that these visits are profitable in the normal sense, but it is great to see my images standing up well against all the competition that is out there. When you go on vacation to somewhere, you are at the mercy of the light conditions and weather during your visit, which makes travel stock photography more difficult for a temporary visitor compared to someone who lives there, but luck sometimes comes to the fore! For instance, this shot is starting to sell quite well – it was raining over the mountains to the left as the sun set which gave this common view a bit of a more unique edge. This was taken in February this year and I got soaked running back to the car, but it was worthwhile!

I also looked at my images of cities and whether those earned their keep! I used to live about 30 miles from Washington DC and so was able to visit and take photos from time to time. Those have actually done very well – mainly because Washington is always in the news for one reason or another:

As you can see, the return from a popular city destination is far more (almost double) the earnings from a vacation place. And, of course, the cost for me to take these was considerably less. So there is perhaps a learning point that if you can get to a place that is going to be in the news, or in articles and web posts, then you should try to capture as many of the key scenes as you can. Even if they have been taken thousands of times before – the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court etc. – your view of them might be just what someone is looking for. So try unusual angles, different weather (especially interesting clouds) and get as many of them online as you can. But can you capture enough images to make a trip to a city worthwhile? I’ve been to London a few times, but always for short periods of time usually associated with a business trip (remember those?). When I went, I usually tried to get out in the evening, or perhaps at the weekend and took both popular and less obvious shots. My London shots are nothing like as profitable as Washington, but even so, they have earned over $1000 and as you can see from the image below, many of them are typical London scenes (many of them editorial)

So can you do as well with studio shots? I think you can. The trick is to get in early with a concept if it is a new one (like the virus) but also to think of things that happen year after year and try to illustrate those concepts. I know people who do really well with illustrations of the main holiday events such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and so on. I’m not great at those for some reason, but I started to focus on a US tradition – rushing to get your taxes filed by April 15th each year. Even if you don’t live in the USA, you can easily download the forms and print them out and create your own versions of these sort of shots. The US is a big market for stock images and so don’t ignore the main US activities just because it isn’t your home country.

Each year I also update the best selling ones with the latest year on the forms (in Photoshop sometimes) and I also check the exact date that the returns are due for that year. This year I was ahead of the game in expecting that the returns would be delayed by the virus – they were and so my July 15th images have sold reasonably well and cost next to nothing to produce.

So if you can’t travel, think about some of these perpetual subjects and see if you can’t come up with an approach that is a bit different to the ones that are already out there. I’ve found that it is almost impossible to dislodge a well selling image with something that is simply a copy of it, but a different approach can get you much higher in the search terms.

Good luck and stay safe!