Well went through a descent dry spell for stock photo sales. The last photo I sold in 2009 was a couple of days after thanksgiving 11/29, the first sell i had in 2010 was just 2 days ago 1/19 that made me a little nervous but since then I have sold two more images. Its just a reitteration that i need to increase the size and quality of my stock photo offerings.

Speaking of quality, I am thinking of trimming my non-selling photos on istockphoto

On line since June 06 and only 1 sell

On line since June 05 and only 1 sell

On line since June 06 with 2 sells

On line since June 06 with 1 sell

On line since Feb 06 with 2 sells

I’ll keep these images on the less productive stock agencies, but istock and if I ever get accepted shutterstock (I know this requires me to actualy submit photos for acceptance) I have this feeling that I should only keep my best images on those 2 sites. I dont know if I have a concrete reason as to why but my gut just tells me that is what I should do.

Well 2009 was personally a rough year for me. But I’m glad I have pulled out of it, but before I did 2009 let me know where i stood and I did generate a single sale for the whole month of December for any of my stock photo sites. So it is a fitting end to the year and good ridden. I wont let last year set my expectations for 2010. I’m going to have a successful year this year and I’m going to have a blast doing it.

To start my year off, I got a shrink wrapped copy of Apples Aperture from Scott Bourne over at photoFocus. I got aperture installed and now I have the goal of learning a new and more efficient workflow, if anyone has some suggestions for aperture shoot (Ahh the puns) them my way as I have a lot to learn.

So Happy New Years to everyone, and I’m really looking forward to a succesful 2010 and getting to know more people in the micro stock industry.

I was at the local Polar Bear Plunge annual event that is put on by the Bellefonte YMCA. It was a great event and I had a blast taking photos during the middle of a wonderful winter snow storm. The snow was just right when it comes to stickiness if you will. Because of the wonderful scenes that were presented in front of me, I took the time to take a few photos and one of them is actually my new favorite image. I still feel that there is too much fine art in these images to be great stock photos, but we shall see.

Here is the lot of photos
These were taken out in Howard PA where the Plunge was taking place.

I stopped on my way home from the plunge to take photos at the park by my house.

I got the above images loaded into deep meta and submitted to iStockphoto, tomorrow I will get them submitted to the other agencies.

I submitted images from the previous post, to my stock photo agencies. These obviously are not my best work and i have heard that you should only submit your best. I also heard that you should not submit several images of the same subject, I submited 12 images of drill / screw / hammer / nail set.

I submitted the images out of angst of getting something submitted and getting back in the habit of doing that. But I think in doing so I may of hurt myself by submitting too many photos of the same subject and submitting images that aren’t my best work. So we shall see what the verdict is from the agencies soon enough but I speculate that my acceptance % just went down.

I was using one of my hours to shoot some stock photos of some simple construction photos. A drill screwing in a screw, a hammer driving in a nail, and honestly they weren’t living up to my expectations.

Now granted I was trying out some new modifiers, a boom for a light stand, so I was able to put an Alien Bee AB800 in a soft box directly overhead. I was also using my slightly modified 22″ Beauty Dish. After using a couple of different props and a few different angles, I switched off the over heard AB in an attempt to get something that jumped at me and said pow.

So now I was shooting with just the Beauty Dish at the same height as the subject. And I still wasn’t overly satisfied with it, that is until I moved 180 degrees onto the dark side of the moon, and then my images started Popping.

I really liked what I was seeing on the back of my LCD the images, too me, had life and made me smile, I had Changed a simple thing as a toy hammer hitting a roofing nail into a photograph. But is it right for stock images?

I think it was Nicolsey that said you should look at photos used for advertising products and strive for your images to look like that in order to get good selling images for microstock. So does commercial advertising photography make good stock photos? Do I have too much fine art in my stock images?

I’m going to start dedicating an hour every evening to stock photography. Now an hour a day really doesn’t seem like much time. But I don’t have a lot of time either. I get home around 6:00 or 6:30 at night where I’m immediately swamped with the love and affection of my 4 kids and my wife. After accessing how the school day has gone and getting to chirp in 3 complete sentences between my wife and I Dinner is quickly served and consumed homework is double checked and baring any sports or scout activities the 8:00pm bed times are upon us quicker than the sun sets in the winter. After the last minuet drink of water and bathroom breaks are over the kids are snug and sound asleep it’s typically between 8:30 and 9:00 now normally I would catch 30 min of TV and then it was off to bed in order to get up at 6:30 the next morning to do it all over again. So now I’m making that mental allowance to try and get an hour in during the evening to work on my photography after the little ones are asleep.

I don’t expect I’ll get to it every night but I hope by putting this plan out on the blog I will get to it more than not.

It is very difficult for me to come up with what to shoot for my stock portfolios. When someone presents to me a subject for a photo I typical have very little problems coming up with some creative and unique ways of shooting that subject. But I get brain locked when it comes to photo shoot ideas when it comes to stock photography. I really don’t know what sells. I think I am very uniformed when it comes to the industry of stock photos and I’m not exactly sure how to become informed about it. I think this is why I am looking for that assignment, I think its why I like the entertaining thought of working for a news paper or magazine and getting asked for pretty specific topics for photos. I am also unfamiliar with the production of a photo shoot, the whole business side of it is completely foreign to me and just like I don’t know how to become informed about the industry, I don’t know what to do to become familiar with everything that is involved in a photo shoot. Maybe at the root of it all is that I dont fully have a grasp for the value of photography. I severely under-value it. Maybe its part of my self loathing, it cant be worth that much money since I can do it, but its something that is repeating with my non-stock work as well, continually under charging for my work.

Stock photography and more specifically micro stock photography isn’t going to make me rich, it’s not the high end top of the mountain work of Joe McNally. It’s not the cool work of Chase Jarvis, and it’s not the kind of work that will fill the empty black hole in your soul of Zack Arias inspirations. The photos I have for sale on big stock photo don’t bring me clients locally. My family and friends aren’t impressed with images that come across.

So what does it do for me? Well I want to take photos, I love taking photos, I have to take photos it’s what I do. I don’t shoot for myself and neither do you, I’ve set it before. When showing my work to others I grew tired of the childish games of internet forums, I felt the amount of effort involved in learning how to get good feedback and added expense of popular photo sharing sites was just too much. So for me it’s that rush I get when someone purchases my image, the satisfaction in knowing that they looked all that they could and my image stood out the most too them for what they wanted that is the ultimate thumbs up or +1 or digg or vote or whatever you want to call it. Even though it is not a reflection of reality I look at the size of the photos as to how much they liked the images. Someone how in my brain I rationalize that they looked at my photo, they don’t need that XXL size they only really need the small size, but since they enjoy the photo so much they buy the bigger size. Thus the greater coinage that comes to me. I know completely wrong but somehow that is how is how I hoped it happened.

So for me, I shoot stock photography because of the rush I get and satisfaction that I feel when someone buys the image unsolicited and non-pressured from me.

I was on the fence of rather I should submit images from my portfolio to the stock agencies that I am a contributor with or rather I should stick with only submitting new items. I had my doubts about submitting the older images.

I have a problem which I think and a least hope other photographers have as well. When I take a photo and I look on the back of the camera I get excited, I show it to the model right away and it kicks the confidence level up a notch for everyone. Once I get the photo into the work flow I get all giddy about it again and am quick to get some web sized photos put out for peer critiques. But after about a week maybe a little longer on some photos I start to really dislike them. I start to find every flaw in the photo, and probably create some imaginary flaws along the way. After a month they are trash amateur snap shots at best in my eyes.

But what good are they doing sitting on my backup drives? So with that I figured I would just quickly browse through the lightroom catalog I had open and pick out photos I thought would have a chance of being marketable and submitted them to each of the sites, and here they are.

How did this work out for me? Well I uploaded the files to StockXpert, they were approved this morning and I already have one sell.

Last night I was able to submit 10 photos to dreamstime, and unlike the last few days the uploading process went smoothly and without a single problem. I was also able to get 10 photos submitted to StockXpert, so now the hurry up and wait game as we see which photos are actually accepted and which are rejected.