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Just a quick poll for curiosity, feel free to share as much or little as you want.

I don't personally tend to shoot for the season, I'll have a list of the subjects I want to shoot and will do them as and when, I do occassionally hold images back and upload them at an appropriate time of the year, but I'm not a huge 'holiday theme' type of shooter.

My assistant asked me today how many stock shooters do shoot for specific seasons or holidays, all I could tell her is that I know some do and some don't and that some shoot nothing but holiday images.

So did you get up in the loft this weekend and dig out the tinsel or will you wait till March?

 

Almost never. If an image is only likely to sell for 2 months of the year then it needs to sell 6x better during that time than a non-seasonal image to justify the production time/costs. The market seems fairly saturated too as so many contributors do target those markets.

I wasn't sure how to respond.  I used to shoot specifically for holidays, but now I have so much material for every holiday that I rarely plan holiday themed shoots anymore.  I may stick a Santa hat on models during an otherwise generic shoot. 

I don't shoot but I do render for christmas. But if you shoot models outdoors like me, it's gonna be seasonal too anyway. : ) The one year lag is not cool tho : )

Seasonal images sell all year round, less than during their main season, but they sell.

I create them all year round and upload all year round. I used to try to time my uploads (three months before the event), now I don´t bother anymore. I still upload xmas images on xmas day (and sometimes they sell two weeks after xmas)

I think a lot of projects are prepared many, many months in advance. Xmas merchandise reaches the shops end of August, so the preparations for flyers, designs, packaging, cards, calendars must be at least 6-9 months in advance.

It is a very competitive field though with lost of copy cats. So unless you have a really strong portfolio or very unusual niche, I think it is difficult to get into now.

Depends how I feel around each season.  Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.
http://bit.ly/q5GNjO

^ Traditionally stock shooters would target the advertising industry for a 6 month lead in, that would mean for instance getting your Christmas shots uploaded to the site in by March because it would take three months to get them in the system.

But your answer answered my question, and as far as I can see the answer is no you're not a 'season' targeting photographer (but I knew that about you anyway  ), you do them few and far between as and when, like a lot of us.

My question was a qualified No, because I do all nature/landscapes.  So I don't target the holidays, but when the leaves start turning colors, or when the grass starts getting green, I do go out and capture that, which I suppose is seasonal.  But I don't think that was the point of the question, so I answered No.

But I'm curious about the point gostwyck was making.  I don't have any 'santa claus hats' or 'mistletoe kisses' in my portfolio, so I don't really know, but is it virtually impossible that during those 2 months the photos will sell 6x faster, like you said was necessary?  Is that a phenomenon that anyone actually DOES see?  I'm asking because I remember on the keyword trend tool on SS, 'christmas' shot WAY up.  Perhaps well above 6x higher than many other keywords you might be reaping.  I'd love to use some numbers here, but that SS tool doesnt seem to be working right now for me.  Does it work for anyone else?  http://submit.shutterstock.com/darkroom/keyword_trends.mhtml

Sorry I should have been more clear, and you're right despite the title of the thread being in the "General Stock Discussion" category it could easily confuse someone into thinking it was a thread about guns, or maybe even young plants but I thought as this was a thread in a forum mainly discussing stock photography I wouldn't need to elaborate on the term 'shoot'.

Out of interest what terminology do you think would be best to describe the process of 'planning, arranging and commiting to a period of time during which you take a set of photographs based around a particular theme or subject'

ok I got the SS tool to work:

http://submit.shutterstock.com/darkroom/keyword_trends.mhtml?time_span=12_months_ago&searchterms=flower&searchterms=christmas&searchterms=uniball&searchterms=&searchterms=&search=

that links to my search (i hope).  flower was searched, because thats often stated as "the #1 search."  "christmas" was searched, and the third keyword is "uniball" (because I wanted to make sure the bottom of the graph was basically zero, so I looked around and saw a uniball pen next to me).

If you look at the area under the curve, aka total searches, ... well I'm not getting out my ruler but it looks like flower is about four "boxes", and and christmas seems to be well over four "boxes".  So this means total demand throughout the year for christmas is greater, even though for much of the year it is below flower.  I know its dangerous to link searches with sales, but this is the best I can do.  If you want to follow the "peak" metric, it also surpasses the "6x" yardstick, it looks to be about 7.5x as popular.  Thoughts?