In June I was lucky enough to visit Poland for almost a week and had several photographic trips around the old Town. Warsaw was destroyed in the Second World War – dynamited and shelled to the ground, and in the following years, the center of the town was rebuilt using the same designs and techniques as had existed before. The old town now looks just like a typical old European city with an ornate town square and delightful colorful houses. I walked many miles around the old streets and probably saw everything that a tourist could see! I had planned to take a 4 hour photographic tour of Warsaw, but the tour was canceled on the evening I was free, but I think I made up for it using my own research and feet! The full set of photographs is online at BackyardImage but I have pasted a couple in below. My current plan is to create an e-book entitled “A Photographers Guide to Warsaw” which will outline a complete tour of the city of Warsaw, Poland with illustrative photographs of the main sites and hopefully save any future tourists from having to do the research I undertook. If you have any interest in this please leave a comment below. {Update – the book is now finished and available as a downloadable PDF entitled “A Photographer’s Guide to Warsaw”
Night shot of the Barbakan in Warsaw
The Syrena Mermaid Statue in the Old Town square in Warsaw
Old colorful homes in Warsaw
November has been a great month for stock photography – a total of $367 in sales. This was helped by $75 in video sales, and also a new site – DepositPhotos – which is paying stock photographers $0.02 per picture to upload, up to a maximum payout of $100. It will be interesting to see if it attracts buyers, but it is a relatively easy way to make $100!
I also spent a lot of time over the Thanksgiving Holidays at perfecting my use of indoor flash to create isolated images. I’ll add a blog entry when I get some time on how exactly I did this, but you can see some examples below in my latest photos on Shutterstock. If you decide to follow me in this hobby, please use my referral links which are in the headings of this article on Making Money from Stock Photography.
I mentioned, a few posts ago, that Jacqui was building a business making jewelry – with a focus on delicately encasing semi-precious stones with sterling silver wire. Her work is now for sale on an Etsy store and we maintained the Backyard theme by naming it BackyardArtisan.com! It is interesting to learn how best to make use of these stores – the search engine seems to favor newly entered items, and they are also displayed for a time on the landing page of the site. We found that the items got more page views in the few days after they were added for sale, and that slowly drops away over time. We made the mistake of entering all the items at once when the store was first set up, but now we add one item a week to maintain some status in the search process. The current plan is to try to get some traction on the site before Christmas.
The activity – which has since evolved to creating ornate and intricate bracelets – has led to an interesting opportunity though. Jacqui has been invited to become a teacher of wire-wrap jewelry at a local craft store. We will see how that develops.
