Tuesday, July 31, 2007

July earnings

  • Made my first $ 100 on microstock

  • Bronze level achieved at FT (100 sales)

  • BME in general and BME on FT with 30 sales

  • Active portfolio of 900 photos on 9 microstocks (CT,CSP and 123RF as new)

  • First pictures sold on IS,DT,BSP,CT,123RF

    Ø What is next?
    My commission was raised to 52% at Fotolia for my exclusive portfolio but most importantly it is possible to raise quite a lot the price of the pictures and I already some increase in my exclusive earnings at FT
    Try Shutterstock again (will be the 3rd time) and SXP (second time)
    Keep shooting and uploading !


Below you will find a table with the details, earnings are in USD. Note: 100 % global performance is defined by a portfolio with an average of sales of $ 0.1 per picture.

Don't really why but you do need to click to enlarge !






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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Experiment 1 : Accepted of not ?

After selecting,editing,adding keywords and uploading the pictures you want to sell the first step will be to get them accepted which is sometime more difficult than expected ! Reviewing is very subjective of course and some agencies are tougher then others....
For this first experiment a series of 6 pictures belonging to various categories was uploaded and the outcome of the review examined. The following categories are represented:
  1. Animals
  2. Travel
  3. People
  4. Science
... and pictures uploaded to the following microstock agencies:

  1. Dreamstime
  2. Fotolia
  3. Istockphoto
  4. LuckyOliver
  5. CanStockPhoto
  6. BigStockPhoto
  7. SnapVillage
  8. Crestock
  9. 123RF
  10. Shutterstock

And here are the results !


Train departures board 1

Accepted: IS,FT,LO,DT,CSP,BSP,CT,SV

Rejected: 123RF (minimum commercial value), SS (limited commercial value due to framing,cropping and/or composition).









Train departures board 2

Accepted:IS,LO,DT,CSP,BSP, CT,SV,SS (initially rejected for limited commercial value but accepted after resubmission after telling the reviewer that this picture was selling well on IS !)

Rejected :FT ( type of photograph), 123RF (Minimal commercial value)









Birds on wire
Accepted: FT, IS,123RF,CT,CSP,SV


Rejected: DT (lack of composition + poor optical performance),LO (similar image already submitted in the same batch),BSP (Poor composition or cropped subject ),SS (Noise, film grain, over-sharpening, or artifacts at full size)






Chasing the mouse
Accepted: FT,123RF,CSP,SV

Rejected :CT (underexposed),DT(lack of composition,lack of concept,poor lighting setup poor contrast or incorrect exposure.The area occupied by the isolated subject is too small, and by cropping the resulting image is under 3 Megapixels),123RF (Minimal commercial value), IS (overall composition of this file's lighting could be improved),LO (Focus needs to be sharper on the cat),BSP (Blurriness, sorry.. a little too blurry),SS (Your image is not in focus or focus is not located where we feel it works best)




Measuring


Accepted: 123RF,FT,IS,CSP,DT,LO,SV
Rejected: CT (over/under exposure), BSP (Reason: Graininess/Noise),
SS (noise,film grain,artifacts,or pixalation at 100%).













Men at work
Accepted: 123RF,FT,CT,CSP,LO,IS,SV,SS
Rejected: DT (Poor lighting setup, poor contrast or incorrect exposure),BSP (Blurriness, sorry.. a little too blurry)








To summarize....

123RF(6/6) SV(6/6) CSP(6/6) FT(5/6) IS (5/6) CT(4/6) LO(4/6) DT(3/6) BSP(2/6) SS(2/6)


Even if this pool of images is relatively small, results of the reviews confirm some previous observations : reviews across agencies are not very consistent and some pictures are rejected for the wrong reasons (lack of composition,commercial value).
BSP is particular is not consistent at all, approving pictures with some noise and rejecting noise free pictures.It is also the agency with the lowest approval rate (2/6).
123RF, CSP, SV were the only agencies to accept all 6 pictures, IS is always very picky about noise but accepted 5/6.

It is worth noting also that review time was extremely different from few minutes to few weeks, SV and BSP being the the slowest of all 9 sites !
Also 123RF and LO are by far the easiest sites to contribute and IS is the more tedious.
This first experiment do not stop here but will continue for few months to see how these pictures are selling !
My bet is on the picture entitled "measuring", what is yours ?





My referral links

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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Microstock Jargon

As you noticed there are a lot of acronyms in microstock so here is a quick memo about them !

FT,FL: Fotolia
DT:Dreamstime
IS:Istockphoto
LO:LuckyOliver
SS: Shutterstock
SXP: Stockxpert
DT: Dreamtime
CSP: CanstockPhoto
SV: SnapVillage
CT:Crestock
IV: ImageVortex
FP:Featurepics

EL: Exclusive licence
BEM: Best Month Ever
HDR: High Dynamic Range
IPTC: Press Telecommunications Council
EXIF: Exchangeable image file format


Fotolia stock photos, royalty free stock photography, photo search Stock Photos, Royalty Free Stock Photography, Photo Search View My Portfolio Stock Photos - Instant Downloads for only $1 Royalty Free Images

What happened in June ?

As I just started this blog and to get a bit of history here what happened in June.
It was a quite interesting month actually with the dismay of FT (big bug of their V2) and the arrival on the market of Snapvillage, new baby of Corbis. The upload on FT being down for few days and a bit frustrated I decided to start contributing to other microstocks (IS,DT,LO,BSP,SV).
My applications on SS,CSP and SXP were rejected which mean that I have to wait a month to resubmit :( Anyway it was a good start and since all my pics on FT were exclusive, I had to start from scratch to build a new portfolio....
So here is on the table below the stats of June. No pictures have been sold on other microstocks except FT and the results are quite good with a average of $1.92 per picture sold boosted by the sale of two exclusive licenses.

All figures are in USD. Click on the table to enlarge



June highlights:


  • BME on FT
  • Pics uploaded on 5 new microstocks
  • 1st picture accepted on IS was a HDR architectural shot

Fotolia stock photos, royalty free stock photography, photo search Stock Photos, Royalty Free Stock Photography, Photo Search View My Portfolio Stock Photos - Instant Downloads for only $1 Royalty Free Images

How did I start microstock photography and why I keep doing it ?

I have been doing photography since 1991 on and off and started digital in 1998 with a 1MP kodak. After that as the equipment got better and better I decided to stuck to digital and never used my traditionnal SLR again.....
I am relatively new to Microstock since I started contributing in September 2006 at Fotolia by submitting few pictures. Some of them were bought which was quite motivating and encouraged me to continue. After selling few pictures, it is easy to get caught in the game of pictures review and making few pennies. Fotolia is a good place to start with a relatively high acceptance rate and the ability they have to sell pictures in Europe.

Fotolia had a lot of trouble last month with the migration of their server and uploads were down for while . As I was exclusive with them I started looking around to where I could submit pictures. I was surprised to find a quite a lot of agencies out there divided in two groups : the established ones with 1 to 2 millions pictures on line (SS,IS,FT,DT,BSP,SXP) also called the big 6 and the newbies (LO,123RF,CT,SV) with a smaller portfolio.
The interesting thing about microstock is that every company is different and the business is constantly changing. They differs by their interaction with the contributor and the buyers and also in term of how they work (acceptance procedure,uploads,forum,royalties,affiliation,etc...)

But at the end of day what is good about microstock is that it makes you think differently when you take pictures and it is a excellent way to improve his skills. Also the interaction with the microstock community through the forums is quite enjoyable and you always learn new things.
As for the money part, well I fixed myself a target of $ 100 a month by the end of the year!

If you are tempted by the experience you can click on the referral links below to register to different microstocks !



Fotolia stock photos, royalty free stock photography, photo search Stock Photos, Royalty Free Stock Photography, Photo Search View My Portfolio Stock Photos - Instant Downloads for only $1 Royalty Free Images