This is the last post of the Introduction to Microstock Photography series. I hope that this series has been helpful. In this post, I will go through the final set of examples.
This is a panorama of the Jerusalem city walls at night. The taking of the shot has an interesting story itself. I took this with my Sigma 80-400 4-5.6 OS at 400mm and 5.6. When I first submitted the shot, it was rejected due to softness. I was quite surprised at this because I used a tripod, mirror lock, and a remote shutter release. The tripod itself was on sturdy concrete. How could it be soft?
To my surprise, when I examined the shot at 100%, it was soft. The simple fact was, the Sigma was too soft at 400mm and 5.6. As a result of further investigation, I sold this lens because I could no longer depend on it. Eventually I will buy a new telephoto, but right now I rarely need one and I’m waiting for Canon to improve on their 100-400mm lens.
The next step I did was shrinking the size of the picture down. This often works when the shot is a bit out of focus. Shutterstock accepted the picture and it is a good seller. IStockPhoto rejected the shot – and it is an interesting point why.
In this post, we will continue with the examples we started earlier. We will start with what most people want from microstock photography…
This image was rejected for poor lighting. It is a complete isolation that took me some time to accomplish. I took this picture explicitly for stock. The result… I wasted my time. This is an example of why you should only take the pictures you like, rather than take pictures just for stock. If you take only the pictures you want to take, only the extra time spent adding keywords will be wasted if the image is not accepted or does not sell.
Interestingly, some time after this shot was rejected I post processed it a bit more and it was accepted.
In this post I’ll mention a hodgepodge of strategies that I have found useful for microstock photography. Keywords are extremely important. I typically spend more time getting the keywords right than I do post processing the image. Always make sure you get these right – because they’ll strongly affect whether the picture sells.
Often the best selling pictures are those others haven’t thought of. Try to be a bit inventive and try some new things. Some of my best selling images were ones where I thought “let’s try this”.
However, my best selling images by far are those I took on vacation. Sometimes I have even paid for a good portion of the vacation itself. Especially if you go somewhere exotic, always remember to bring your camera with you and think about stock when taking photos. Very often I see a shot that I wouldn’t have thought to take otherwise – but I feel it may be worth a try as stock. Sometimes the sales of the shot shock me. Just remember when shooting outdoors to try to take shots during the late afternoon or early morning. Often this means I have to get up quite early on vacation, but I always find the pictures are worth it – whether or not I sell them as stock.
Shutterstock was the first microstock site I signed up on and I must admit that I have mixed feelings about it. Regardless of my views on it, it is probably the best microstock site for earnings available today. Shutterstock was the first to pioneer a subscription plan. The basic principle is a customer purchase a ’subscription’ for each month, several months, or an entire year. During the subscription period, customers can download up to 25 images a day. Initially, Shutterstock would pay twenty five cents to the owner of the photograph for each download. Over time, as the subscription fees have increased so have the payments. Nowadays, your earnings depend on how much money you have made at their site – starting out at twenty five cents and moving up to thirty eight cents.
Recently, they also added an on demand service for customers that do not need as many images. This is closer to the model at IStockPhoto and other sites. Downloads of this type pay several dollars each to the photographer.
Shutterstock also supports enhanced license sales, the payouts for which depend on your earnings level at Shutterstock. Generally though this is $20-$30 – though these sales are far less frequent. Finally, they offer an archiving service that pays the photographer five cents for each image archived (in addition to the payout when the image was originally sold).
Shutterstock’s success is based on a rather simple principle that I and a number of others have disagreed with.
Well, to be honest, this month sucked! My sales fell considerably with approximately a 24% decrease. Right now, I’m not currently sure what the reason for the falloff is, but I suspect that it is seasonal. Last year between March and April at Shutterstock I had a 24% drop in sales. I noticed that the sales drop seems to affect all sites – not just a single one. If the pattern from last year holds, then I should see improved sales in May as last May was a very good month for me. The good news, though, is my real estate jobs have been picking up, more than making up for the slack in stock sales.
The following are breakdowns of how each site did.
This month was quiet on the submissions side – most of the month was spent with either myself or one of my kids sick. Also the weather at the end of the month reduced the amount of time I was able to shoot. Nevertheless, I still had a record month thanks to some extended sales at the beginning. I exceeded the $350 mark for the first time and I am slowly approaching my goal of $1000 a month.
The following are some details I noticed about each site this month.
I had thought due to the fact that February is shorter, I would have a more difficult time getting good numbers. This turned out to be far from the truth, as a I had a new best month ever. My previous goal was to make $250 this month, and I wound up with $321, breaking the $300 barrier for the first time. I have decided, however, to not set my goal in March to $350, but instead to set it at repeating $300. The following is how each microstock site did for me.
There has been much debate about sites such as Shutterstock and IStockPhoto and whether they threaten the traditional stock photography business. The issue is of extreme concern to many photographers, who fear that traditional licenses fees of fifty to several thousand dollars per image are threatened by fees as cheap as a few cents. Many of those who make a living from traditional stock photography fear that their livelihoods will be replaced by amateur photographers who don’t know the value of their own photography. Many of those who have debated on this subject have focused on the price difference – people are more likely to buy an image for a dollar than an only slightly better one for five dollars. However, from my experience I don’t believe the issue is that simple.
Last year I started selling pictures on different microstock agencies. When I started, I didn’t really figure that the money would amount to much, but over time it has grown rather significant and now is the primary source of funds for new lenses. For those interested in also selling pictures – or those who belong to different sites, I decided to compare how each site did this month. The following is a chart on how each of the five sites I post to did.
The following are more detailed result from this month and my opinions of the different sites.
IStockPhoto (47.5%) – I had my best month ever at IStockPhoto in January and my pictures are really beginning to take off. Perhaps in the future I may go exclusive with them but right now I would only make about 20% more going exclusive and given the fact that IStockPhoto is still less than 50% of my sales this doesn’t make sense. This was the first month that IStockPhoto was my top producer. Of all the different stock sites this one is probably my favorite as they are the most cordial and consistent with their reviews. It can be difficult to get pictures accepted, but when I look at the rejected pictures based on their reviews the rejections tend to make sense.
Shutterstock (36.1%) – Shutterstock had a decent month for me in January, though it was not a record month. However, this was the first month that Shutterstock did not take first place. They were the first microstock that I started submitting to and I have by far more pictures there than elsewhere. Although my sales are decent there I’m not particularly fond of them. Whenever I’ve had to deal with them directly they have been very rude and they do not seem to care about their photographers. Also, their reviewers are wildly inconsistent. Whenever I submit a large number of pictures I will pray for a decent reviewer. Some reviewers are very accepting while others reject everything – even those that were accepted at much tougher sites like IStockPhoto – with the rejections not making sense.
Fotolia (8.0%) – Fotolia still seems to be recovering from a massive blunder several months ago when they upgraded to a new version of their software. My sales have been slowly picking up there though and at the beginning of the month I wondered whether they would beat Shutterstock. Fotolia has become much tougher with their picture selections – however they have the fastest review turnarounds. Their reviews seem for the most part to be fair. They are now a bit tougher in acceptances than Shutterstock, but not as tough as IStockPhoto.
Dreamstime (7.2%) – Dreamstime is one of the newer sites I have applied to and it was only this month that I submitted most of my photos. This is a nice start and I suspect that Dreamstime will be a stable, though not top, earner. Of all the sites they have some of the most helpful blogs on their main page and they have very interesting photo contests, though I don’t take part because the images tend to sell better on IStockPhoto and Shutterstock (their contests require the images to be exclusive to them).
StockXPert (1.1%) – I am currently quite disappointed in this site, even though I just joined. They seem to be paranoid about taking any shot that has the tiniest potential for copyright – so they reject pretty much any building. A number of other photos that have done fine on other sites and which even IStockPhoto didn’t have a problem with were rejected. Still, I have a large enough number of pictures there that the sales should be higher. I will likely submit some more this month and fix up the image groups to see if I get more downloads. If I don’t, then I’ll probably stop bothering with this site.
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