Thank you for your responses.

Cobalt; thanks for the honest guidance although I would question the comment about travel images.  I do go to some fairly remote locations where not that many people have been before.  As for quality?  Well that will have to be decided by the buyers .

Semmick; Thanks, I have looked at you portfolios and see that you have a high percentage of 'travel' photos.  It's excellent to hear that you can still earn a reasonable amount from them.  You have some excellent images there by the way

Pauws99; I do see this as a slow train.  It will take me many months to upload my current 'back catalogue'.  At the same time I shall study what is selling and tailor my new images accordingly.  The 3 year tip is a good guide, thanks.

BaldricksTrousers; I did realise that it would drop off but maybe not quite by that amount . I don't really have a target in mind and I will not be dependant upon the income  so I will just have to work hard at it while I can and live off the declining income as long as it lasts

Sean; I'll just give up now then shall I?  Obviously none of the thousands photos I have taken in wild remote locations on various Land Rover expeditions are original or remotely as good as what's already online!  Thanks for the encouragement

The problem with remote locations is just that they are remote and probably have little demand. The idea behind microstock is to sell in volume. If you catch a native tackling a Bengal Tiger in a remote location then you probably have something. Not trying to be negative, just realistic. You can try it and you will figure out what works over time. Do a search for your locations and see what type of downloads they are getting.

Christian I haven't seen you here in a while!  I think you went exclusive with Istock?  If you can believe it I was just speaking about your work last week when at a resort in Cancun.  I was at a wedding with all these beautiful young people.  I asked the bride if she thought her striking bridesmaid might model for a few shots on the beach.  There were 38 in our group and by the next day I think everyone had asked about stock photography.  I brought up your beautiful beach photos and your lovely wife in the white bathing suit and broad rimmed hat, and although we never see her face, she is in perfect zen mode and makes me want to jump on a plane!  THEN I went back to my room and opened a drawer - I'm sure it was her on the front of the tourist guide sitting there.  Hope all is well with you.  Enjoyed your facebook page!

Hi Lorraine,
Nice to hear from you! We are fine, hanging in there. We have a 3 year old son, so our hands are quite full. We went exclusive in 2010, when it made sense to go exclusive. Income immediately doubled, now we are back to what we were making pre exclusivity. I don't have high hopes for the direction things are heading with stock. The smart move for us is to look for another main source of income, with stock as a side gig. Adding a ton of material seems futile with the amount of images coming in.  Funny you found my wife on the tourist guide. That happens a lot here in the islands. A while back I was trying to explain what we do for a living to a group of 8 people we just met on a boat trip. Not everyone understands what stock is.  We walked into a bar and on the counter was a BVI tourist guide, anyway there was a about 10 photos of my wife in there. It was funny because of the timing, they all thought she was famous...

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Nice. What interval were you using?
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I don't remember exactly, maybe 5-7 seconds. I shot everything in manual mode, Raw with 5d2 over 2-3 hours. important to set white balance manually also. If the clouds are moving fast then use shorter intervals. The problem with shorter intervals is you end up with a really high iso by the time it's totally dark depending on how much ambient light is available. If you have something higher like a 10sec interval you can have a longer shutter at lower iso by nightfall.  I'm guessing you can get better results shooting in a city at night than in a rural area, or milky way stuff. I haven't tried to use any noise reduction, or stabilizers yet for post correction. I know After effects cc warp stabilizer vfx works wonders for any camera movement. Starting shutter speed for Promote control needs to be no faster than 1/20th of a sec for accuracy, ending shutter is somewhere around 4 minutes in rural areas. ND filters are mandatory for starting in the daytime to achieve 1/20th shutter at a reasonable aperture. Best to have the removable sliding filters, which I don't have. Promote control will prompt you to remove the filters as it gets dark.  The nice thing about promote control is you can make minor adjustments during the shoot to compensate for unforeseen lighting changes, these adjustments are then made over the course of your choosing, maybe 30-60 frames.

Right, not the end. Those that need to make more money to survive will do something else, only to be replaced by those that need less. The agencies still make their money, people need images so microstock continues on. Many predicted what is happening now many years ago, not a surprise really. I feel fortunate to have enjoyed a great lifestyle with no boss, good times!...hope it continues.

Sad to see all the buyers in the last couple of years going to shutterstock. It's just really hard to make a lot on a good seller.. My best seller on Istock made over $21,000 since 2011. This is probably pretty low compared to the best selling images. I don't think there is the traffic anymore to support these kind of returns.  Shutterstock being the leader of the pack is not a good thing, it just means less money for contributors overall.

To actually make any money doing this will take some time, a lot of leg work and a lot of experience. It's a tough market especially in a high traffic, high turnover location (which is where you want to be). Most everything is printed in China, so to be competitive you will need to keep your printing costs low and quality high. We print in the USA with different companies, but lose out on some money doing so, oh well. We sell cards, calendars, prints. Wouldn't even consider selling cards only, waste of time, too little money for the work involved. It also makes sense that once you have an account it's easy to supply them with other products, so why not. A lot of the cards are supplied by multi-artist distributors, especially postcards and at the prices they sell them for, you'll need to sell a truck loads to make money. It's taken 3 of us working at this for 5 years to get our level of income up to a respectable level. I think we barely made beer money the first couple of years. The good news is, it's growing every year and we have some control, unlike the stock.

It can be done, but it's a lot of work and many growing pains along the way. Take good care of your accounts, and hopefully they give you good store placement and push your products...The PR end is huge!!

Go with the second image.

Thanks everyone! 
It was a nice surprise to find out about that. Yeah, too bad about it not being on the front page anymore. That's ok though, it's nice to get any kind of recognition amongst the mob of contributors.

@tubed
No regrets, I'm one of the few happy exclusives at this point, it was a smart move for me. Definitely not happy about the site being a mess right now though.

Quote from: lisafx on January 03, 2011, 12:32

Quote from: cdwheatley on January 03, 2011, 09:29

Beauty has its price, we love it!! but it's not for everyone. There are much more reasonable Islands to live on over here, problem is they are dirty, crowded, and not very safe. All the desirable Islands in the Virgin Islands are pricey. Living in fear is not my idea of fun.

Indeed!  I hadn't realized you live in St. John.  We lived in St. Thomas when I was a kid.  I remember St. John as being absolutely beautiful.

I don't know what St. Thomas is like now - haven't been there in decades, but in the 70s it was the Wild West.  We ended up moving back to the States because there were so many random murders there, including several people we knew.  Kelsey Grammer's dad was murdered in St. Thomas too, around the time we lived there. 

Have you visited the Bahamas since you live so close to the islands?

We are 800 miles from the Bahamas, so I'm guessing that question is for Lisa since she is much closer? I've visited the Bahamas, but only by cruise ship, with the usual "Nassau", and a couple other random cruise ship owned islands. "The Exumas" would be a nice place to visit, but you really need to be on a boat to get there. Eleuthera is another Bahamian Island I would like to see one day. No idea about the cost of living there .

Quote from: cdwheatley on January 02, 2011, 21:45

Here in St John, USVI the prices can be borderline rediculous.

but  it's a beautiful place!

Beauty has its price, we love it!! but it's not for everyone. There are much more reasonable Islands to live on over here, problem is they are dirty, crowded, and not very safe. All the desirable Islands in the Virgin Islands are pricey. Living in fear is not my idea of fun.

I would think that Islands in general would have the highest cost of living for the simple fact that it's hard to get stuff. A head of lettuce for example might start in Florida, then off to Puerto Rico, then to St Thomas, then to St John by Ferry. Sometimes you end up with something that used to look like a head of Lettuce

The average wage over here is about the same as Florida, most people work several jobs just trying to survive, and usually have to leave when the money runs out.

Numerous contributors are noticing low royalties on ELs recently. This doesn't even take into consideration the 10% bonus issue. I spoke with Contributor Relations about one of mine and the explanation was that it was a large corporation who paid $.70 per credit. That makes sense if this were the case for a few contributors, but it seems this is the norm for a vast number of ELs now. The price has dropped significantly for everyone I've talked to. The low royalties on ELs is only one issue of non-payment.

Putting aside the option of an individual audit, is there not a regulatory entity that does audits in cases like this? Numerous contributors are angry, with many suspecting fraud.

Yep, I'm not totally satisfied. I've had at least five in the last month that were in the $30.00 range, normally they would be $70.00-$100.00. I've also had some that were in the $55.00-$70.00 range which sounds like 10% drop to me. I got a reply from support to "check the forum" for answers. The huge drop doesn't sound like 10% to me, it looks more like I've been paid as a non-exclusive at 20%, rather than 40%. Impossible to know whats going on though without the actual price per credit the buyer purchased. I hope this gets sorted out.

rashguard, bugspray, sunscreen, lunch, rum.