It is amazing to me that I have been able to keep this up for more than 2 years now, with one, or occasionally two or more posts every month. If only I had followed all my own ideas – I could have retired! This is a difficult month to forecast new concepts that might catch fire, when the news is full of the invasion of Ukraine. As I have mentioned in the past, only certain hot topics are suitable...
I’ve been a bit indisposed of late and hence not my normal productive self. After two vaccinations and finally a booster shot about 10 days ago, I finally caught the virus. I wish I could have thought of some smart stock photo ideas of that event, but nothing came to me. My wife was first (and we are not at all sure where it came from as we are both mask wearers in public areas) and was quite ill for...
I’ve been promising this for a while, but only recently have I been able to sit in a chair long enough to actually put pen to paper due to my strained back. It is surprising how long these apparently simple injuries can take to heal. Of course, playing golf last week may not have been the best idea… Building my Portfolio But back to social media. I have continued to build my portfolio on Fine Art America and now have...
Always an interesting month – just 28 days, but it follows a usually slow start in January. This month followed that pattern with a growth from January, a growth over Feb 2020, but still a middle of the pack sort of performance. The final score was a total of $2812 for the month. This is all becoming very stable (which is good), but the growth of years gone by seems to have stopped. Not surprisingly, bearing in mind the pressure...
Time to look back at a very unusual year and not just in Stock Photography! It is fascinating to think about all the changes that we have lived through in just one year with some pretty major changes impacting us all in our profession (or hobby) of trying to make money from our photography. Of course the biggest change that impacted newer and smaller contributors significantly was the decision by Shutterstock, with little notice, to completely rework their contributor payout...
A month to end a year that we would all like to forget, I guess! And I will get back to the full year in my annual review of stock activity that I will write in a few days when the final results are in. But lets start with a world first (for me…). For the first time in my 14 years of writing about stock photography (and talking about it at this well reviewed introduction to stock photography video)...
Apart from hide your head under the bed covers as the US election comes to its logical conclusion, that is… So here is my usual summary of themes I have been working on and what I think might be interesting topics for the upcoming weeks and months. It is definitely getting late to upload election related themes, but possibly there might be opportunities for the chaos that will follow election day as the results are counted, different totals are reached,...
A long, long time ago I wrote about the copyright and model release issues that determined whether an image should be editorial or commercial usage but recently I got a message via my contact form from a photographer in the UK with this set of questions: I have plenty of ideas for stock photos to take but one area I am struggling with is copyright/legal aspects. I could not find any posts on your website about this so wondered if...
Once again, a very reasonable month. I know that we are probably in the final stages of this industry in terms of whether a single contributor (as opposed to a group of artists continually uploading new content) can make a reasonable living from stock, but usually the death of an industry takes longer than you think! In this case I think the major impact on earnings is the pressure that is on the stock agencies to get buyers to pay...
I was looking at my recent sales (using Microstockr Pro) and was struck with how often the images that I have created in the past year have shown up in the thumbnails. I usually do this at least once a day as I find that just scanning the sold files gives me a good idea of which themes are selling and also those small size images also give me feedback on whether my images, which might be great on a...
