Kings Troop, Polzeath.

The Kings Troop horses were down on Polzeath beach, Cornwall today. I went down to see if I could get some pictures for editorial use. They can't be regular royalty free as they have people with no model releases. I'm familiar with how this works with Alamy, just set them as rights managed, but it will be a learning curve with the microstock sites. They all have editorial libraries now. It will be interesting to see if my pictures are good enough to be accepted and sold.

The conditions were quite tough, the horses are dark and the background (the sea) bright. I couldn't use any flash as I didn't want to be the idiot that spooks the horses. I learnt a lot, think I  could do better if I had another try. It's quite interesting to see what you can come up with, everything happens very quickly and there are a lot of people getting in the way. Below are a few of the better pictures, I got very wet to get these viewpoints.

Schoolboy license error!

Another kind person at microstockgroup just reminded me that if an image is RF at one agency it needs to be so at all agencies. Since I used to only upload to Alamy, all my images there I put as RM. I've only sold one, which isn't on any other site so the problem isn't as bad as it could be. I've found the hard way that once you set a license option at Alamy it can't be changed. I've just had to go through the emotional task of deleting the 50 odd images that are on other sites as RF.

In the long run it will be worth it as I wanted to tidy up my Alamy portfolio, which is the result of 5 years of sporadic uploading. Let others learn from this...

Back to work deleting and uploading and keywording!

Found bought file!

The good people at the microstockgroup forum helped me find one of my photos. It was cool to see it in use. Looking for the other's now. Where and how they are being used is really useful for directing future shots.

Potatoes in sack

Two Downloads = $0.29!!!

Had a couple of downloads today from Istockphoto, not going to set the stock world on fire with the $0.29 I earned. I think it's a move in the right direction though, interesting to see which pictures are useful to people. Below are the images:

$0.10. Must have been a small file.

$0.19








Also making some progress on my workflow. Managed to use the lightburner software to upload a batch of pictures to Dreamstime and depositphotos. Also used their prostockmaster software to copy and past bulk keywords to one set of images. Strangely my Nikon viewnx software would not pick up the keywords but lightburner and the stock agencies did. Worked well, had to do some finishing off with Dreamstime though. Have my base batch of pictures on most sites now, just a bit of categorising to do tonight.

Uploading, keywording, uploading....

Over the last couple of days I've been going through a list of top microstock sites and applying as a contributor. Once accepted I've been busy laboriously and inefficiently uploading and keywording my images.

I've found Yuri Arcurs' keywording tool useful so far.

I'm now working through each agency at a time to get them all up to date with my base portfolio of 60 odd images that have been accepted by Istockphoto.

I can see the need to workout a more efficient workflow so that I'm only keywording once. All the agencies differ in how time consuming the process is, but each would be easier if I had the metadata sorted on the computer first. I'll be researching this once I have the first set of uploading done.

Agencies I've applied to are:

Dreamstime - Accepted
Bigstockphoto - Accepted
Fotolia - Accepted
Crestock - Accepted
Depositphotos - Accepted
Shutterstock - Declined. Have to wait 30-days to resubmit.

Starting Point....

As it stood at the end of August 2011 I had the following number of images and sales:

Portfolio Size & Earnings End August 2011:

Agency	Size	Downloads	Total Earnings $
	334	1	22
Istockphoto	67	5	5.90

Introduction: My Background....

After reading Steve Heaps blog, where he describes his progress in microstock, I was inspired to try the same thing. The rewards are modest and the work hard, but the freedom of this type of work is very appealing. In short I think its worth a go.

I'm an amateur photographer so this will be done in my spare time. This isn't a guide as such, but a record of my learning. I'll share the fruits of my research, my workflow, and a truthful record of the amount of time I've put in and the results I get.

It would be great for people to join in and share their experience.