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Messages - steheap
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1176
« on: December 01, 2012, 22:51 »
Great month for me - easily a BME with total earnings over 10% more than the previous best (October 2012). I ended the month with $2216, helped by a regular set of sales, four EDs and a $70 single sale on Shutterstock, solid sales on iStock, some nice big sales on Alamy, and a pretty good month on most of the other sites. I now have 3300 images on Shutterstock and its interesting to note that only 10 months ago in January I ended up with $400 in sales on that site - $970 this month. As usual, more graphs on my blog, but here are the headlines:   Lets hope that December continues this run - that will make for a fantastic 2012 for me. Steve
1177
« on: November 21, 2012, 20:54 »
I've been adding files regularly to Fotolia for the past 4 years (of course they also reject a lot of my non-studio shots!) and over the past 2 years I went from 924 files online to 2101. My earnings have never been great ($84 last month), but I plotted the earnings per online file and it has stayed sort of constant over that period. Looked like things were going well at the start, but it has been down and flat ever since.  I don't really track which images are selling - I see their emails with each sale but rarely give them much thought. So, not a great site, but not going backwards (at least over the past 15 months or so) Steve
1179
« on: November 17, 2012, 12:12 »
37% is looking at my total income (since day 1), last 4 months 36.25% Interesting - wonder why we have such different results. Is it that you get more PPs or I get better results from the main collection? Who knows!! Steve
1180
« on: November 17, 2012, 12:04 »
I agree - they have a clear view of what they want - isolations, people food as Luis says. I have a high acceptance on those, but only 15 out of 84 on my recent St Martin's images. Funnily enough, my best sellers are travel and landscape shots - exactly the ones they reject! Even got an extended one this month for $25:  Steve
1181
« on: November 17, 2012, 11:56 »
I'm assuming that this is PP income divided by total income from iStock. Mine is a much lower 21% when measured over the past 4 months.
Steve
1183
« on: November 11, 2012, 21:58 »
Do you use Lightroom or Photoshop? I think I probably spend 2 mins per image in Lightroom to just adjust white/black level, bit of clarity and saturation. Finally, any straightening/cropping that is necessary. That's normally it. Only go to PS if I need to clone something out of the image.
Keywording takes longer because I think it is important not to skimp on that step, but even then the basic keywords can be sync'd from one image to another and then add a few unique ones.
Steve
1184
« on: November 07, 2012, 22:13 »
I've given up on new uploads. Just too much work with little reward.
Steve
1185
« on: November 07, 2012, 12:24 »
I set my videos at $50 or $60 and my images at $12. The videos seems to sell OK - normally one or two a month, and the images have started to sell (I've only been there with images for 3 months or so)
Steve
1186
« on: November 07, 2012, 11:45 »
Leaf asked a good question in the Earnings thread this month - do we need to add new images to maintain our earnings, and so I decided to analyse my Shutterstock earnings a bit to see how those have changed as I added new files, and how the percentage of earnings from the different categories of download changed over time. I then started a bigger bit of analysis to look at how the earnings per online file at the main agencies has changed. I use online files per agency as the indicator here, not total available images, as I know that some agencies (Fotolia and Dreamstime) don't like certain types of image and it seems wrong to penalize their performance because of that. I could choose not to upload certain types of image, but it is easier to upload the lot and then let them reject the ones they don't like. Anyway, fuller analysis is on my blog as usual, but here are the highlights:  This graph just shows my earnings activity on Shutterstock - hard to see much detail, except that I have been working hard!  I then looked at how the earnings changed by category of download, and then turned that into a percentage graph to see if things had changed much over the past 2 years:  This seems to show that, on average, subscriptions give me 50% of earnings, ODs around 30%, and, although my EDs have dropped off since June 2012, Single downloads have picked up to make up the remaining 20%. It varies a bit from month to month, but the basic pattern holds. My final graph is a work in progress as we are only one month into Q4 of 2012, but this shows the earnings per online file at the main agencies (and then a total for the "rest"). Again, there are ups and downs, but the basic pattern of $0.60 to $0.70 per online image per month is being maintained.  I'll come back to this analysis in January 2013 once Q4 is complete, but it appears to show a reasonably straight line relationship between online images and income. Add more images, get more money - things are neither getting better or worse for me in the microstock game in terms of income per accepted file. Steve
1187
« on: November 05, 2012, 08:01 »
I take a middle ground. My native images are 23MB and I always resize the output JPEG down to a long side of about 4600 pixels (perhaps 15 - 20% down). That is the basic image I upload to Lightburner and it goes from there to all the main sites at full resolution. Lightburner lets you selectively downsize images on a site by site basis, and so I downsize my ones going to SS to 6M as the majority of sales there are subscriptions.
Seems to work for me.
Steve
1188
« on: November 04, 2012, 20:05 »
impressive Steve, very nice indeed!
are you were including referral earnings in your statistics? if I have 1$ per month from that is a lot, stopped blogging 1 year ago and I was never very active too Thanks! I feel good about last month, and this month is off to a great start with one of those famed $70 downloads on Shutterstock! I do count referral income in my totals, and I've started adding in Zazzle as well (although I don't try hard there). Most of the sites are negligible in terms of referral income, but 123RF really surprised me. The contributor must be really selling well to result in me getting $60. It built up over the past 3 months as well so I don't think it is the combined efforts of a lot of people. Steve
1189
« on: November 04, 2012, 19:53 »
Looks like I am following a similar trend to others - easily my BME with sales just over $2000, compared to $1676 last month and a previous best in June of $1766. Shutterstock easily beat all previous records with $826 compared to $686, and iStock was not bad with $326. The unlikely star for me this month was 123RF with sales of $226 (compared to a previous best of around $120) and referral earnings jumping up to $66. So whoever signed up to the site using one of my links from my website - congratulations on a fantastic month for yourself and thanks for helping me out! I'll work on the earnings per image and update my spreadsheets with that, but in the meantime, here are the headline graphs and totals of files per site. As usual more details on my blog. Steve 
1190
« on: October 15, 2012, 10:57 »
Monday morning review - 25 out of 27 rejected. I used to have such a good record at Shutterstock!
Steve
1191
« on: October 06, 2012, 08:45 »
Same for me yesterday - 56 uploads, 51 rejected. All perfectly reasonable travel shots, most of which were accepted by Dreamstime.
Steve
1192
« on: October 04, 2012, 12:22 »
You prompted me to work out my rpi as well (where "i" is the number of images I have online with Istock, not the number of uploads). I get about 80% acceptance these days so they are not too far apart. Also, the number of images is the total at the end of each month which skews the results down a bit.
Anyway, caveats out of the way, I currently have 1744 photos online having grown to that number from 700 at the start of 2011. Income per online file was around $0.12 in early 2011, but went to $0.20 in Aug 2011 (Photo+?) and has stayed around that level ever since as I have grown my portfolio. September 2012 was exactly 20c.
I would like more, of course, but I don't find iStock to be that much incremental work (I use Deepmeta), and it is normally my second best seller.
Steve
1193
« on: October 01, 2012, 15:22 »
Pretty good month for me - not my best (which was driven in June by some great Alamy sales), but my second best with total earnings of $1632. Shutterstock, as usual, was the best by a long way, iStock shot up in the past few days to $343, but i"m not sure why. I saw a post above about credit card sales - perhaps it is that. Best site for rapid growth was Warmpicture - our artists co-operative site - with earnings of $29. Much better than many commercial sites and I've only been there a month. If you are an image buyer, please check out Warmpicture. Pond5 photo sales are also doing OK with a better payout than I used to get when I was submitting to them via 123RF. Here are a couple of graphs. More details as usual on my blog. Steve 
1194
« on: August 29, 2012, 10:50 »
You could always go to Warmpicture.com: http://www.warmpicture.com/ - that is where the happy contributors are these days!!  Steve
1195
« on: August 26, 2012, 08:09 »
I have been very active on SS since March, I have 820 images in the portfolio and over 500 sales in these months, but no ED...is that because almost my entire portfolio is made of Editorials? Why else? I suspect your editorial focus makes a big difference. As I understand EDs, they are needed for high print runs and for resale licenses - which almost always are commercial in nature. So an editorial images tends to restrict itself to news, comment and educational purposes - not normally high print runs or resale opportunities. Not sure that is right, but on the flip side, you probably would get more single downloads from people who just want a particular image for an article. Steve
1196
« on: August 24, 2012, 20:04 »
I used to download SS to around 6Mpixels (using the downsize functionality in Lightburner), but then I began to wonder whether the buyers of singles and Enhanced licenses would prefer something bigger. So, I stopped the downsize and have a general approach that an image from my Canon 5D MkII would be reduced to 4600 pixels on the long side. That seems to work for all sites and I rarely have rejections for technical reasons.
However, SS does have a very strange view of narrow depth of field - they really like to see a lot of the image in focus, even if it may work artistically or commercially to have a narrower band of focus. No amount of downsizing would make much difference in those cases.
Steve
1198
« on: August 22, 2012, 08:40 »
So does the camera take a shot and the flash doesn't go off, or the camera doesn't take the shot? If you have the lens set to AF and the liveview can't focus (I always focus manually in live view), then the camera won't take the shot because it can't focus. Try going to manual focus on the lens and try again.
Steve
1199
« on: August 21, 2012, 10:29 »
We talked about this last month, but the pattern, for me, has continued. After getting 5 or 6 EDs a month regularly in 2012 through June, but then I got one in July and none so far in August. Am I alone in this or is this common to most contributors? I don't normally check the SS forum, but has any explanation been forthcoming?
Steve
1200
« on: August 21, 2012, 08:29 »
This is not 100% helpful a reply, but I have had the Canon 5D Mks II and III and had no issue with triggering flash in live view. I have used both the ST-E2 trigger as well as a flashgun in the hot shoe triggering other flash guns and never a missed shot.
I don't recall any setting that needed to change (in the camera). You need to make the flashgun the master, although that is independent of the live view bit.
Just to pin the issue down - it works when you are not in live view, but no trigger when live view is activated?
Can you try a flashgun in the socket and see if that works?
Steve
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