artalicious

Man, I've been slacking on the blogging. I blame it on the bad weather.

March has been ok. Actually it's been pretty good considering the lack of uploading and photographizing.

Shutterstock

We had 16 photos accepted and 9 photos rejected. So we're up to a gallery of 246. Downloads were pretty consistent, though we had more zero download days compared to February. We totaled $20.59 in sales and earned another payout! I wasn't sure if we would hit the $20 mark this month. I know I'll need to step up the submissions for April for sure. We're also less than $30 away from increasing our payout from .25 per subscription download to .30! It doesn't seem like a huge raise, but those extra nickels can add up fast!

Here's a favorite from March's uploads.

That's Ali, a model we've worked with a few times. She's sweet, easy to work with and very good at expressing subtle emotions.



Big Stock Photo

I didn't submit anything to BSP. But we still had three downloads for a total of $2.

Dreamstime

No submissions to this site either. We had 4 downloads for a total earning of $4.13

Vector Stock

This is a new site for us. I saw them mentioned online and went to check them out. They accept and offer only vector files and signing up was easy. Uploading is a little slow, so I don't have many files online yet and no downloads. So we'll see how they work out.

Goals for April

Almost identical to March! Upload more! I'd also like to get accepted to iStock, at least in the vector department. Some kind members there have looked at my work and I think I need just one more illustration to complete my application.

I stole today's GPP from Katie. It was too cute to pass up!


Granted, you do have to search a little to find the pet. That's O'Malley, doing his best impression of an Ottoman Gremlin. Or else he's playing hide and seek, it's a little hard to tell.

~JML

Posted in: Big Stock Photo, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, Stock Images, Stock Recap, Vector Stock on April 2, 2009 at at 12:10 PM 1 comments    

Well, it's been another month!

Robert and I did hardly any shooting this past month, and I really slacked on the photo editing. Despite all of that, we still had ok sales.

Shutterstock

We had 34 photos accepted and 9 photos rejected. Our gallery now has 230 images! Overall, we had a total of $23.51 in sales. We also had at least one sale for every day except the 28th! That's great as generally sales drop off to zero on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Here's a favorite from February's uploads.

It's actually an illustration I did a long time ago for a logo. It didn't end up being used and I randomly found it on a hard drive a couple weeks ago and thought I might as well upload it! So far it's earned me a dollar.

Big Stock Photo

I had one image accepted (the above) and none rejected. We also had zero sales. Nothing too exciting there, but not unexpected since I don't do much with BSP right now.

Dreamstime

I had one image accepted and none rejected. We had 4 downloads which equaled $5 in sales! A bit better than last month, especially considering that I'm not very active with this site.

Goals for March

Upload more! We still have 85 bazillion images, some of them need to end up online! I've also been working on my stock inspiration binder and we're just about ready to try some still life shots and see how those turn out. I'll post those images once we finish with them.

And now for the GPP! For those not in the Southeast, it snowed buckets yesterday. Which meant it was time for Snow Dogs! Here's a brief glimpse of what our day looked like.

nom nom nom. snowball. nom nom nom.


back the f@$% off, small dog. my snowball.


did someone say something?


what's that food lady? did you say…


SNOWBALLZ? sproing.


SUPER SPROING.


snowball crisis has been handled. i will now pose majestically in the snow.


The entire snow set can be found here.

~JML

Posted in: Big Stock Photo, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, Stock Images, Stock Recap on March 2, 2009 at at 2:50 PM 1 comments    

I'd like to start posting a recap of how many uploads, acceptances and sales we've had at the end of each month.

January was pretty good! I've stayed motivated and have been uploading images pretty often. Not as often as I like, I still have tons to go through, but we're doing at least 10-20 every weeks.

Shutterstock

We had 68 photos accepted and 21 photos rejected. Some of those rejected images were resubmitted and then accepted (I did some bad isolations and uploaded an incomplete model release). So our gallery grew from 128 to 196 during January.

We had a total of 73 downloads during January which earned us: $23.19. Not our best month ever, but pretty close! My goal is to end up with 73 downloads per day, rather than per month.

Here's one of my favorites for January.



Big Stock Photo

We didn't upload here at all. Mainly because I hadn't yet found a generic model release. We've been using Shutterstock's MR, and obviously BSP won't accept that. I also didn't feel like harassing our models to make them sign 3 different releases.

So, no growth in our portfolio, but we made $5 dollars in sales! It's $5 we didn't have before.

Dreamstime

There were also no uploads here, for the same reason.

No portfolio growth, sales earned us $1. (I gotta say, it's a lot harder to get excited about that $1.)

Goals for February

We now have a more "universal" model release, that, supposedly, all the agencies accept. Which means we can start to upload more model photos to all the other agencies, not just SS.

I'd also like to start doing more planned shoots. Right now we're just finding models, having them do their own hair/make-up/outfits and shooting them. That's ok, but those photos don't sell crazy well because the models aren't clearly doing or selling anything.

And now, to end with a gratuitous pet photo! Today's GPP is of O'Malley, he's Keira's boyfriend and is owned by our good friends Katie and Rhiannon.


He's a cutie!

~JML

Posted in: Animals, Big Stock Photo, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, Stock Images, Stock Recap on February 3, 2009 at at 10:50 AM 2 comments    

I think I've mentioned on here that Robert and I submit photos and illustrations to various micro stock sites.

*Warning, the following may be very boring if you have no interest in stock photography.*

For those whose eyes just glazed over, a micro stock site, is a place like Shutterstock, where people (mostly graphic designers) buy royalty free images for between $1-$50. They are different from the macro stock sites (Getty Images being probably the largest and most well known) where images are sold as either royalty free or rights managed and typically prices start around $100 and go WAY up from there.

The other difference is that most macro stock sites (like Getty) hire professional photographers, models, make-up artists, stylists, etc. While the mirco stock sites (like Shutterstock) have photographers and illustrators go through an application process, and then accept the images that they feel are up to their standards. Which means if you're not very good, they're not going to take very many of your photos. It also means that if you're an amateur, this is a good way to make a little money while improving your skills.

Both micro and macro stock agencies pay their photographers some set amount per image sale. This fee ranges for anywhere from .25 to several hundred dollars. The most we've ever earned on one photo for one sale was $28. And that only happened once!

Now that's an incredibly simple description of how stock sites work. I could go on and on, but 1) that would be boring and 2) I'm also no where near an expert in this area.

Ok, so boring explanation over, here's some of what Robert and I have been doing in the studio lately. Mainly we've been working with different models and perfecting taking portraits over a white background. These are useful to designers, as the white background ads a lot of versatility to the image. When we first started out taking photos of models, we didn't have the set up we have now, so we had to hunt around for backgrounds. This meant we have a lot of photos like this:


And it means that these don't sell very well. She's a pretty girl, but her outfit and her setting aren't clearly selling or stating anything. Compare it to this image, which can sell just about anything, by photographer Yuri Arcurs (who, by the way, is probably the top selling micro stock photographer out there):


See the difference? Now that's not to say that images without a white background will sell like crap. They don't, but the background needs to support the overall look and message of the image. Something that our random bricks weren't doing.

So now that we have a "for real" set up, I'm hoping that images like this one:


Will earn more sales. The model above, by the way, is one of our favorites to work with. She's got a great personality and is so comfortable in front of the camera. Two great qualities when you're spending 3 hours locked in an 11x19 foot studio with someone!

The other kind of image that sell really well (and that I need to make more of) are vector illustrations. They're great because designers can pull them apart, edit them, scale them to any size, etc. Our top selling vector illustration is this one:


It's not sexy, but it's handy and it's earned over $100 since it's been accepted at various stock sites.

So our goals for this year are to shoot, shoot, shoot, edit, edit, edit and illustrate whenever we can. I've currently got a backlog of at least 500 images to go through (of which probably only 70-100 will be stock-worthy, and of those, probably only 50-60 will be accepted by the sites we submit to).

The sites that we currently work with are: Shutterstock, Big Stock Photo, and Dreamstime. I'm in the process of getting us accepted and set up with a host of other sites. I really need to get us going with iStock.

Ok, I'm stocked out for now. I need to get back to practicing some fine art. I'll be thinking more about that in the coming days.

~JML

Posted in: Big Stock Photo, Dreamstime, Getty Images, Illustration, iStock, Models, Portraits, Robert Hill, Shutterstock, Stock Images, Studio on January 14, 2009 at at 10:12 AM 2 comments