Posts Tagged ‘Photography’
This is news to me, its the first sale I’ve had marked like this “Credit for Photo Sale by reseller”…
Could this be how the Fotolia Free API works??
The Pics below:
http://futureworks.co.kr a Fotolia Reseller in Korea, is a Flash website, but I couldn’t spot how to purchase images.
The recent Fotolia new letter:
“COMING SOON: FOTOLIA’S FREE CONTENT API
The first website based on the Fotolia’s free content API will soon be released! The site will drive traffic to Fotolia and is a fantastic opportunity for Fotolia’s contributors to get additional visibility amongst stock photography buyers.
Fotolia’s extensive API infrastructure (partner, Business, Developer and Reseller) has already shown their capacities in driving qualified traffic on the Fotolia website. We’re confident that this new API will do the same.
As a backgrounder, Fotolia’s free content API is based on free contents and unsold files. This API will be used by Fotolia to attract more stock imagery users and to invite them to buy additional imagery on Fotolia. That means: more traffic, more buyers and more sales. As you already know, you can add your unsold files to this program and get a half credit for each file added. Your file will be still offered on Fotolia.com at the standard price, while at the same time, being offered for free through the API.”
January’s been pretty good, a couple of nice surprises in the form of a $100 referral and $25 Extended license at Dreamstime, and January as a whole feels to have been a busy sales month.
CanStockPhoto has had some Fotosearch sales, one nice ‘Fotosearch regular sale’ brought in $19.80 and a trickle of subs sales from Fotosearch… looking more promising that CSP has for ages! (ever before!)
I’ve actually managed some uploading, and I’m still at it, I’m going to have to do some overnight (un-metered) uploading or I’m going to bust out of my ISP’s 15Gig/month limit an I’ll start getting charged more (£1/Gigabyte).
Considering that I’ve got myself a new project, of Beer brewing, I’ve done quite well with the keywording and editing this month, I have a batch of 103 waiting to go up to a couple more of the sites and lots of already approved images at Stockxpert though iStock have rejected quite a few of the first 20. Also I have another batch of 28 which is edited, keyworded and ready to go, iStock is going to take a while at 20/week in the queue and I notice that Dreamstime has set a 25/day limit on adding to the inspection queue too.
I’ve stopped uploading to Mostphotos and YaY Micro for the moment as its going to be counter-productive if nothing actually sells there!
Here’s the Lookstat graph:
Lookstat’s new feature is pretty cool, its an image specific stats function that lets you drill down through an individual file and check out its sales over time. Obviously this is only across iStock, Shutterstock and Dreamstime at the moment but from what I read over at their blog we’ll soon have Fotolia too… Quite an exciting prospect being able to cross-reference the sales of a particular file on all these sites and see their true full earnings, fingers crossed for Stockxpert next 😉
All-time earnings averages pie chart:
The Leader board looks like this:
Dreamstime just edging ahead of Fotolia, which is probably due to good referrals and an Extended License sale at Dreamstime and the exact opposite at Fotolia.
All in all I have cashed-out $483.30 in January, which is above my current average of $401.65, not a bad first month to say we are in this (bogus) Recession!
We would be creeping out of recession if people would just start to spend again, so come on folks go buy the thing you were thinking of buying but just holding off to wait and see what the financial climate does. Spend wisely and save, but remember to spend, pay off those debts too!
Though I do like the USD-GPB exchange rate at present, watching the exchange rates can net you a few extra monetary units in PayPal with a bit of balance swapping or cashing out 😉
First Extended license sale at Dreamstime – Stock Photo: Poppy seed cake
Posted on: December 10, 2008
© Photographer: Pdtnc | Agency: Dreamstime.com
Making me a whopping $20.83, the files’ first sale and someone wants to print a load of them or something!
Description:
Stock Photo: A scan of some poppy seed cake, scanned at 1200dpi
Keywords:
abstract, background, baking, cake, element, organic, poppy, seed, structure, texture
Woo 🙂
I like the way this site works, its pretty sensible and works logically, the upload procedure works well and editing image details is simple.
This is how the profile page looks, Its pretty concise and usable:
The Image portfolio page is just as easy with albums for organisation that work by drag and drop, and looks like this:
I have just completed uploading my portfolio of 1324 images, all accepted due to there being no inspection procedure to go through (the closest acceptance to that was 979 images at CanStockPhoto).
Earnings and referrals
Royalty-free images: earn 50% of the total price, which is €12.50 per sale.
“We offer you 1 Euro for every sold image by a referred photographer and an additional 1 Euro
for every image bought by a referred customer. This means you can earn up to 2 Euro every time a transaction is made between your referred friends”
All there is to do now is organise a few albums and site back and wait…. we shall see!
After seeing other peoples shots of dark places such as drains and tunnels, I decided to have a go for myself.
So experimenting with long exposures, 30 seconds and longer, and a mid range aperture in a couple of disused railway tunnels.
All Rights reserved © Copyright of pdtnc
Setting the Camera
With long exposures you need to keep your camera shake free so the use of a Tripod and cable release is essential, I picked my shot and set my camera in the dark getting focus manually on long shots and shooting off a flash shot to attain focus on closer in shots (Switching to manual focus once happy so as to lock it at that distance).
I was shooting in the camera’s Manual Mode so as to set exposure time to the ‘BULB’ setting, I chose an aperture of F8 so depth of field would be mid range for my lens, I set the camera ISO to 100 so as to keep down the possibility of digital noise showing up (Other ISO setting could be used while practicing and getting the hang of how long the exposure would take).
So I’m focused, my camera is on the tripod cable release attached, my camera setting are locked, it was time to click and lock the shutter release and start using the torch to light the scene.
Lighting with the Torch
Using the torch its a case of literally painting the subject with light where you want the camera to ‘see’ and capture what you want, it takes some experimenting and can be an interesting way to be creative with lighting your photograph. Its important to keep the torch beam moving on your subject so as to avoid ‘hot spots’ where too much light could over-expose, paint evenly and try not to miss the bits that interest you.
I started with 30 second exposures and went up to 2 minutes 30 seconds on some shots where I didn’t want to use to much direct light so I could get a more creative effect, this will all depend on the brightness of your torch or torches.
A handy tip would be to leave a small dim light under your tripod so you don’t go walking into it while making a shot.
Using more than one torch can give you the option of back lighting an object and also painting the foreground with the other torch, coloured gels can be used over the torch beam if you fancy adding a little extra colour to your subject.
Light trails are fun, and can be a happy accident while lighting your subject and add a bit of excitement and movement to the scene, though if you don’t want the trails be careful that the line of sight between your torch beam and your camera is guarded and you wear dark or black clothes so you don’t show up in your own shots.
For most of my experimenting I stayed behind the camera, though I started venturing out further to see what else was possible which is well worth it.
Safety and Darkness
Standing in almost complete darkness with just a flashlight might be an eerie experience for some people so its always best to take a friend and tell someone else where you are going and how long you will be there. For me the excitement of creating some amazing photographs out weighs any fear I might have had, I found the darkness and torch light quite calming with the silence only broke by the dripping from the ceiling of the tunnel and its ventilation shafts. It always good to watch where you are putting your feet while setting up shots as uneven floors and obstacles could trip you up, so be careful, safety first!
All Rights reserved © Copyright of pdtnc
Equipment
The Camera equipment used was as follows; Canon 400D, Sigma 10-20mm lens, Tripod, Remote shutter release cable. The Torches used were; Maglite 3D-cell with Terralux LED upgrade, Fenix TK10, and some other cheaper LED torches, I also took a couple of Glow-sticks.
Links
More of my tunnel photos are at www.flickr.com/photos/pdtnc
If you liked this and found it useful please go vote for it at http://www.jpgmag.com/stories/6108
Time for a brief stock update…
I’ve been reading up on exclusive images at Fotolia and Dreamstime lately and decided that I’m going to start submitting exclusive images to DT & FT…
I’m going to try filter off a few from each batch of stock images to be exclusive at DT and FT and have another bunch of files that will just be uploaded everywhere as they usually would be.
FT especially it looks a good deal and with the ‘exclusive to fotolia’ box ticked you get to increase the base selling price from 1 to 2 which should double the earnings on an accepted and selling image *fingers crossed eh!* 😉
So as long as some images that I submit get through the inspection process it should be much better than going exclusive-only to just one stock site and limiting distribution of my images at differing price points and credit structures.
The Exclusive info on FT says the following: (I’m currently at Bronze 
level) (there is a bit of the following tables cropped off in the page, sorry about that, but the main info is still there).
| Number of Files Downloaded | Symbol | Level |
|---|---|---|
| Less than 100 |  |
White |
| Between 100 and 1000 | |
Bronze |
| Between 1000 and 5000 |  |
Silver |
| Between 5000 and 10000 |  |
Gold |
| Between 10000 and 50000 |  |
Emerald |
| Between 50000 and 100000 |  |
Sapphire |
| Between 100000 and 500000 |  |
Rubis |
| Above 500000 |  |
Diamond |
Exclusive
| Maximum Sales Price | |||||||||||
| Contributor Ranking[ ? ] | Contributor Commission % | XS Standard | S Standard | M Standard | L Standard | XL Standard | XXL Standard | XXXL Standard | Vectors | Extended | |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
| White | |
50 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 20 |
| Bronze | |
52 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 14 | 50 |
| Silver | |
54 | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 | 18 | 21 | 21 | 100 |
| Gold | |
56 | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 | 24 | 28 | 28 | 150 |
| Emerald | |
58 | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 | 30 | 35 | 35 | 200 |
| Sapphire | |
60 | 6 | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 | 36 | 42 | 42 | 200 |
| Rubis | |
62 | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 | 42 | 49 | 49 | 200 |
| Diamond | |
64 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60 | 70 | 70 | 200 |
Non exclusive
| Maximum Sales Price | |||||||||||
| Contributor Ranking[ ? ] | Contributor Commission % | XS Standard | S Standard | M Standard | L Standard | XL Standard | XXL Standard | XXXL Standard | Vector | Extended | |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||
| White | |
33 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 20 |
| Bronze | |
35 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 50 |
| Silver | |
37 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 100 |
| Gold | |
39 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 150 |
| Emerald | |
41 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 14 | 200 |
| Sapphire | |
43 | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 | 18 | 21 | 21 | 200 |
| Rubis | |
45 | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 | 24 | 28 | 28 | 200 |
| Diamond | |
47 | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 | 30 | 35 | 35 | 200 |
Dreamstime says the following, which in my opinion is a little harder to follow:
| Level | Version | Earnings from Registered Users Downloads | ||
| Non-Exclusive | Exclusive | |||
| Level 1 | Small size | $0.50 per image | $0.60 per image | |
| Medium size | $1.00 per image | $1.20 per image | ||
| Large size | $1.50 per image | $1.80 per image | ||
| Maximum size | $2.00 per image | $2.40 per image | ||
| Level 2 | Small size | $1.00 per image | $1.20 per image | |
| Medium size | $1.50 per image | $1.80 per image | ||
| Large size | $2.00 per image | $2.40 per image | ||
| Maximum size | $2.50 per image | $3.00 per image | ||
| Level 3 | Small size | $1.50 per image | $1.80 per image | |
| Medium size | $2.00 per image | $2.40 per image | ||
| Large size | $2.50 per image | $3.00 per image | ||
| Maximum size | $3.00 per image | $3.60 per image | ||
| Level 4 | Small size | $2.00 per image | $2.40 per image | |
| Medium size | $2.50 per image | $3.00 per image | ||
| Large size | $3.00 per image | $3.60 per image | ||
| Maximum size | $3.50 per image | $4.20 per image | ||
| Level 5 | Small size | $2.50 per image | $3.00 per image | |
| Medium size | $3.00 per image | $3.60 per image | ||
| Large size | $3.50 per image | $4.20 per image | ||
| Maximum size | $4.00 per image | $4.80 per image | ||
Royalties rely more on the actual image sales and the level of a particular image, so this doesn’t sound as good an option as FT… An interesting experiment all the same.
Fotolia is always going to be my best referral site with its earnings equal to that of my image sales. Dreamstime is a slow burner with referrals but can come up trumps now and again when a referral buys a credits package.
On another note, I’m pretty much decided that I will no longer upload new images to BSP or CSP as their earnings are tiny and payouts infrequent, I’ll leave my images online all the same. No point wasting the time it takes to upload and categorise my images.
JPG magazine
Posted on: March 10, 2008
- In: Links
- Leave a Comment
My first few submissions to JPG magazine, go vote for me 😉
My stock photography in action
Posted on: March 10, 2008
This is the first time I have actually found one of my images being used, purchased from istockphoto and its nice that they credited me too 🙂
The Original shot can be found here…
Also available at other stock sites:
http://www.canstockphoto.com/Tall-Ship-in-dock-0663912.php?r=16050
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/photo/view/1634463?refid=jqNKkUDsgl
http://en.fotolia.com/p/47653/partner/47653 – search for image 3275105
http://www.dreamstime.com/tall-ship-in-dock-rimage2442693-resi131585
http://www.luckyoliver.com/photo/5162567/tall-ship-in-dock?loaf=pdtnc
Keywords:
action, amsterdam, back, dutch, flag, istockphoto, netherlands, photography, rear, rigging, royalty free, scheepvaartmuseum, ship, stern, tall
Probably Due To Network Congestion 
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