March Totals

Record moth with total commissions at $60.61, helped by a sale on Alamy. Dreamstime is my best site apart from Alamy, although 123reg has started to pick up. Also had a few sales from isign.

I found out that my images are not for sale with extended license on Fotolia, I'm stuck on an asking price. I'll have to ask in the forums and see what the going rate is.

I'm consistently missing my upload targets. I'm just going to try and get as many as possible so as not to get too down hearted. I have to be realistic with work and other responsibilities. On Dreamstime, which is pretty average as far as acceptance goes, I'm averaging 21 uploads a month. Well below my 80 target. I'm going to stay positive and as long as the commissions are increasing I'm at least happy.

January Totals

January, the first month of my new resolutions. For the most part I stuck to my regime. I've process 72 photos and uploaded to all the sites I'm submitting to. A mixture were accepted/rejected so I think across the sites all 72 appear somewhere. I'm quite happy about this effort and will get down to business again in Feb.

Earnings down this month to $22.84, although the last two months were skewed by extended license sales. I think this is a good progress. I'm hoping to build on this in Feb with my new images online.

 

New Years Resolutions!

Following slack uploading and picture taking in the last couple of months of last year, I have made some New Years targets. Armed with a diary and plan of 20 shots per week uploaded, I am going to try to get a 1000 images by the end of the year.

I've learnt the need to be more systematic and to plan the shoots before had. I'm going to list 52 subjects to shoot twice a week, uploading, hopefully, 10 from each session. I'll plan these a few weeks in advance to give time to get props and learn the techniques needed, and try to keep the pace throughout the year.

So far this year, having a couple of weeks off of the day job, I have been able to complete three shoots uploading around 30 images, all of a decent standard.

I also have the goal of joining Shutterstock, so far I have been refused 3 times. With the new shooting schedule I'm hoping to have enough new and quality pictures to be accepted by them.

Lets see what happens.......

December Summary

December saw only modest uploads. A mixture of work and the holiday season meant I didn't get around to taking many pictures. I did however have a surprisingly good month (for me). Down on last month but another Alamy download of $21 gave me a Dec total of $36.97.

November Totals

I'm fealling very pleased with myself this month. I've gone from $6 odd last month to over $50 this month. This was due to an extended license sale on istock and a repeat purchase of a file sold last Dec on Alamy. I'm happy but know there will be a drop next month. I've uploaded a few more files with an extra 100 across all sites. I really need to pick this up for next month. Almost time to make some new year resolutions.

October Summary

This month my total earnings were $6.55 with 1069 pictures online across 11 sites. Up on last month. Still very modest but in the right direction I suppose.

I set myself a loose goal to upload 10 images a week. I kept to this for 2 weeks, but I'm struggling to keep this rate up. A busy couple of weeks at work and a lack of inspiration have been my biggest problems. I purchased a new flash this month to help with some studio shots but a delay in delivery and me not being able to work out how to get both my flashes working together has slowed me down. 

Looking to November, I'm going to try to upload a total of 20 good images this month, but more importantly work out a shoot list and do the research needed to take the pictures. I'm finding I'm really limited by my technical capabilities at the moment. I need to try to divide my time between coming up with concepts, researching shooting techniques, shooting, key wording and uploading. 

These are my graphs:

September Summary

My first month of microstock. It's been a busy month of applying to agencies, uploading, keywording and settling on a workflow. Below are a couple of graphs with my image totals, downloads and earnings for September. Not very impressive but a start I guess.

In Summary: 3 downloads totaling $1.52.

I've been spending a couple of hours a night processing the images I already had and getting them organised. I've now got to work on a routine of coming up with shoot ideas, getting the pictures, processing and uploading. I'm setting a goal of 10 images a week uploaded & accepted.

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.