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.