I Am Now A Getty Images Contributor !!!
I received an email a few weeks ago inviting me to list some my photograph on the Getty Images stock photography website. Needless to say I could not be more excited about this. I am extremely honored to be part of the collection. So far I have six photographs active on the site and I am anxiously awaiting the time on April 20th when I am able to submit more photographs for consideration to be added to the collection.
I have gone ahead and removed all of the photographs and have closed my accounts on the microstock websites that I joined last year for two reasons. The sales have been very limited with those sites and I want the bulk of my work that could be used for stock use to be exclusively in the Getty Images collection.
Published in VivaLaModa !!
A month ago I was contacted by riskybeads on Etsy asking for my permission to use one of my photographs in an issue of VivaLaModa. Of course I granted permission.
I had totally forgotten about it until yesterday afternoon when I got the email notifying me that the latest issue was now on-line. My photograph can be seen on page 15 !! This is my first publication and I could not be happier about it !!
Prints of the photograph can be purchased as either a 5×7″ or an 8×12″ from my Etsy Store. Please take a look !
Looking For Some Feedback on My Etsy Store
Sine I fully launched my Etsy Store a few months back I have received thousands of hits on the items I have listed but I I have only yielded a single sale.
I have revamped the store several times with better descriptions, clearer photographs, and lower prices on all of my items but I feel that I must still be missing something. I know that the majority of photographers on Etsy only sell prints of their work while I am selling matted prints of my work. Is this a good thing?
Please take a look and tell me what you think. Feel free to post comments here on why you would or wouldn’t purchase items from my store. Your honesty is greatly appreciated and don’t worry, you won’t hurt my feelings. I am looking to make myself (as a photographer) and the items that I sell better.
I am anxious for your feedback !!
Selling Prints on Etsy
With all the positive feedback that I have received over the last year or so since I started shooting, I figured, why not try to sell some prints of the photographs that people seem to like the most. So, last week (as many of you may have seen through my posts on Twitter and on Facebook), I opened a store on Etsy.
I had poked around on the site for a little while and observed how well other photographers seemed to be selling and at what prices they were selling their art for. What I noticed that surprised me the most was that the far majority of photographers on there are selling their prints un-matted.
After all the fun I had getting the right materials and learning how to mat my prints, I figured that I would offer my photographs with and without the matting.
I am extremely excited because I have already sold one print to date and the other items in my store have been getting a lot of views and “favorites” on the site.
Check it out if you get a chance. I would love to hear your feedback.
Stock Photography : Lessons Learned
As many of have you seen in my last few posts, I signed up for iSyndica and I reported back on the results of my submissions. Now, I would like to share some feedback and tips I learned throughout the process. Some of the lessons that I learned seem like common sense to me now, but like Steven Wright has said, “Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it”.
- Rejections : The various sites typically responded back with the reason being either that the photograph was out of focus, too noisy, or not unique enough for use as a stock image.
- Lessons Learned : While I typically shoot with the ISO as low as I can, I will be passing future submissions through Noise Ninja to be on the safe side as far as noise is concerned. Also, I will be viewing all photographs that I edit at 100% before finishing them.
- Workflow : I found that once all of the photographs were uploaded to the stock websites, I still had to go through and add Titles, Descriptions, and anywhere from 7-10 (minimum) keywords for each photograph. These dramatically slowed down the process of submitting each photograph for approval on each website.
- Lesson Learned : By editing these attributes and including them as part of the workflow, they are embedded into each file and will auto-fill into the fields on each stock website. This saves A TON of time and in most cases, all I will have to do in the future is to click the “submit for approval” button without the hassle of entering all of the information each time.
I have to say that this has been an invaluable experience. Applying what I have learned as I move forward can only increase the likelihood that my future submissions will be accpeted and hopefully purchased on these stock websites.
As for my experience with trying out iSyndica, it has been wonderful. Being able to upload a batch of photographs once rather than fourteen times is an obvious time saver. I recommend it to anyone who shoots photographs for use in stock.
Results of My Submissions with iSyndica
After signing up (and completing the necessary applications) for the 14 stock websites listed below, I uploaded a batch ten images to each. I was only able to use the iSyndica service for distributing the images to Crestock, Fotolia, Fotomind, MostPhotos, Pixmac, and YayMicro at the time of upload because I either did not have the required credentials for proper account linkage to iSyndica, or because my application to become a contributor was still in process for the remainder of the websites.
Here are the results:
- BigStockPhoto
- CanStockPhoto
- Crestock
- Fotolia
- Fotomind
- MostPhotos
- MyStock
- Pixmac
- YayMicro
- 123RF
- Dreamstime
- FeaturePics
- StockXPert
- Zymmetrical
1/10 images accepted
9/10 images accepted after initial approval of application
-/10 (all 10 images still under review)
1/10 images accepted
10/10 images accepted
10/10 images accepted
5/10 images accepted
0/10 images accepted
10/10 images accepted
-/10 (application is still under review as well as all 10 images that were submitted)
0 – Every time I tried to upload with iSyndica or via their site directly, it never worked.
7/10 images accepted (7 accepted and 3 images still pending review)
0/5 – Rejected my application completely
0/10 images accepted (3 denied and 7 images still under review)
I am very pleased with this initial round of submissions. 58% of the images that I have received feedback on were accepted. While this number is not great, I did learn a lot from this experience. I am in the process of compiling some tips that I would like to share in my next post about what I learned from the process as well as the feedback that I have received (particularly from the websites that rejected my submissions). Stay tuned!
I would love to hear your feedback or any comments that you may have if you have tried this as well.
