Driftless Ramblings

I did okay getting some more images added to my portfolios in the beginning of June, but with preparations for and a vacation at the end of June I didn’t get much done then.  Hopefully in July I’ll be getting some of the stock worthy shots from vacation uploaded.

I have been reading that the summer months are usually a little slower in microstock.  Hopefully I’ll be able to make up for that with additional uploads and have more there for when things pick back up in the fall.

I really want to hit getting images onto ShutterStock.  With only 39 images, which is less than my average portfolio size, it accounts for almost half my overall earnings.  I still want to give some of the other sites a chance but I just can’t seem to get many images accepted Crestock and Dreamstime.

Here’s a couple other blogs I follow that report their earnings:

Microstock Diaries
Nil to Mil
Pixels Away

Allen

I haven’t really done a lot in getting my numbers of pictures increased this month. My big news this month is that I finally got accepted on ShutterStock and StockXpert. ShutterStock has been doing very well for me as you’ll see in the table below, I’ll take ShutterStock over Lucky Oliver any day. I’ve been accepted on StockXpert but haven’t gotten any pictures in my portfolio yet, not sure if I didn’t submit them correctly or if they just are really slow at getting them reviewed. Would have been nice if the initial five I submitted for approval would have gone right to portfolio, but that doesn’t appear to be the way that site works.

In the last couple days I did finally get some more shots together that I will upload, just need to do the post processing and keywording.

I should point out that these numbers are my career TOTALS not just the totals for May. When I get some more consistent downloads and earnings I’ll switch to monthly numbers.

Here’s a couple other blogs I follow, hopefully someday my earnings will rival some of theirs:

Microstock Diaries: Microstock Results for May 2008
Nil to Mil: May 2008 Microstock Earnings
Pixels Away: Microstock Photography Earnings Report for May 2008

Allen

A couple days ago (5/24/08) the boys and I started a new experiment. A while back I got a couple large 55 gallon plastic barrels from a neighbor and I’ve been trying to finalize what I want to use them for. I have quite a list, rain barrel, recycle bins, chicken feed tub, and probably a couple others that I’ve already forgotten. The idea I came up with was to mix the fresh grass clippings and fresh alpaca manure in one of them, similar to a compost tumbler but much cheaper.

The first thing I did was have the boys drill a bunch of holes, don’t know the exact sizes, but somewhere in the range of 1/4 to 3/8, on the sides and bottom. There probably should be more holes but my help got tired or lost interest. We then gathered up the fresh grass and scooped the paca poop. We then layered it into the barrel. I had been hoping to get the barrel half full, but in reality it was full to overflowing. It would probably work better if it was only half full so could get mixed around when the barrel was rolled, but I left it full. The extra grass I sealed into the second barrel that had no holes drilled in it. I did also dump several gallons of water in with the grass clippings and manure. All the water must have gotten absorbed by the grass and manure though since none or very little of it has drained out.

Today (5/26/08), we checked the barrels and the one with the holes in was cooking pretty good. It was composting quite nicely. We actually busted up a couple dozen guinea eggs that I didn’t have room for in the incubator and added them to the mixture. It was actually probably reduced down by about 10% or so already. The mixture will work better if it does get mixed more thoroughly. The boys do enjoy rolling the barrels around. The sealed barrel with only grass has done virtually nothing in the way of composting.

Now that I have some garden planted it sure would be nice to find a way to process the alpaca manure into a more useful compost. I had been just dumping the alpaca manure into the garden and just got it tilled in (no I won’t be doing any root crops this year), but since I’ve started planting in the garden I need to do something else with the poop. What I would really like to get worked out would be to process the manure through a quick composting then process it through a worm bin. I think the output from this process would be a wonderful soil addition, a mixture of vermicompost and regular compost.

I think the next barrel will get used as a big worm bin. Attempting to get it setup as a layering bin, at foot or so of material for the worms and more added on top once that portion has been processed by the worms. I’m just not quite sure how many barrels I’ll need to get going to process the poop from seven alpacas.

Allen

  Immediately after I published my previous post on April’s earnings.  I went to check my email and found that I had a sale on Fotolia.  It could be a good month!  It was a XS but a sale none the less.

Allen

April was a really busy month but I still got to do some shooting and uploading. Even got a couple more added to most of the sites. I got a good jump in my average portfolio size, but I’d really like to do something like Lee Torrens’ Shoot Daily and Contribute Nightly or Matt Antonino’s April 450 - monthly microstock goal . Both of which are very ambitious but not really an attainable goal for me right now.

Had an interesting experience with my best sale from last month. It was just a simple shot of some gravel I took while watching one of my boys baseball practice. That is what I’m working at getting better at, having the camera with me and seeing the opportunity to take a shot that is a good microstock shot.  The shot is the picture to the right.  Makes me think if you can get it past the review process, it may well sell on Microstock, within reason.

My average portfolio size is currently 52 up from 43 images. It looks like that will take a hit along with my total balance when Lucky Oliver goes away in May. I did sign up for 123RF last month but need to submit my first batch of images there too, probably use the same batch I use for ShutterStock.

I should point out that these numbers are my career TOTALS not just the totals for April. When I get some more consistent downloads and earnings I switch to monthly numbers.

Here’s a couple other blogs I follow, hopefully someday my earnings will rival some of theirs:

Microstock Diaries: Microstock Results for April 2008
Nil to Mil: April Earnings and Portfolios
Pixels Away: Microstock Photography Earnings Report for April 2008

Allen

March was a pretty dry month for downloads, only got two from Fotolia. I was successful at getting a couple more pictures approved at most of the sites. I got some images approved on Dreamstime which is a new site for me. I’m really trying to focus on getting good images that will sell as microstock images. Everything I’ve been reading says you can’t really make any predictions until you get a portfolio of 100 images, so that’s my goal, especially for IStockPhoto.

My average portfolio size is currently 43 images, and that doesn’t include the sites I don’t have any images on yet.

Allen

Well Bentley over at RedWormComposting has inspired me, that and my boys bugging me to check out their worm bins. It’s actually been quite a while since I’ve checked out the boys bins so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was afraid they would be dried out and all the worms dead. What I found was the opposite, they were actually soaking wet, and almost decomposed down enough that the worms couldn’t get out of the standing water. And I was happily surprised to find some worms in the bins.

My older boy’s bin was the first one I checked out. The contents had settled down to about half the original size, but I quickly found some worms. The final count in this bin was 2 adults found and 7 juveniles, so they did reproduce some. I did see at least one cocoon, and I’m betting there were more but I wasn’t really looking for them.

The second bin was my younger sons. I was a little disappointed to only find two adults and no juveniles. I think this one may have just been too wet.

These two bins were in the small clear snack food containers so in the process of searching the bins I moved them each over to a bucket. The larger bin should enable the worms to hopefully find an area in the bin that is to their liking.

The final bin that I checked through was my bin which has been in a bucket the entire three months. I only found one adult, but did find 7 juveniles.

I may have set the bins back a little by my digging through them but hopefully they’ll all make a come back and continue to grow. My biggest concern is the bin with only two adults, hopefully there were some cocoons or small worms that I missed.

While doing my digging I did check on my main bin and found it quite active with LOTS of worms and much of the contents in the bin converted to worm castings.

Allen

Well I finally got my email Welcome Back to Shutterstock, meaning it was time for attempt number four to get approved to what is widely considered the most profitable microstock web site. The selection of the first five photos was relatively easy, I was just going to use ones that had been approved previously. Counting my most recent fourth attempt the images have been approved 3/3, 3/4, 3/3, 3/4 and 4/4 time. Three of them have been approved every time and the other two have done well.

Three of the last five have been accepted at other microstock sites, here’s my favorite, it even has a favorable review on IStockPhoto. Unfortunately none of them were approved by Shutterstock.com so it will be another month before I can attempt again. Hopefully that will give me a chance to get some more photos that may get accepted.

My biggest problem appears to be ‘Poor Lighting’, which on some I can understand and control, but some of the outdoors one I think might be a little difficult to control. Over the next month I’d like to concentrate on getting some more marketable microstock photos which should hopefully assist in me getting approved at ShutterStock, to say nothing of getting more downloads at other sites.

Here’s a nice FAQ about ShutterStock which gives quite a bit of useful information.

Allen

It doesn’t look like I’m going to get much use out of this window unit much anymore this year. With today being the first day of spring there probably aren’t too many more cold days left to see how well this will work. And unfortunately I don’t even have it done yet. It looks like it will have to be used next year.

I’m also not sure that the unit isn’t too wide by about a quarter of an inch for the window.  I haven’t actually tried putting it out the window yet, but by my measurements I may wind up shaving down the one side to get it to fit.

Allen

I got a chance to shot some still life photos with my new lens over the weekend. I don’t have them all keyworded yet for submission to the microstock sites, but I thought I would at least put a couple of them up here. When I first started the photo session I was pretty impressed with the new lens. It was really FAST even at maximum aperture I was getting shutter speeds less then 1/100th of a second. I thought it was a combination of the new lens and extra lights I was using. Needless to say I was quite bummed with I downloaded the figures to the computer and realized I’d just spent a couple hours taking pictures at ISO 800! UUUGGGHHHHH! I had forgotten that I had set it up to 800 to take pictures at a cub scout presentation. I kept a couple of the pictures that I had because I liked them compositionally but most I just deleted. So I set the ISO to 100 and started all over.

My main subject for this session was eggs from our flock of chickens. The picture to the left gives a give representation of the various egg colors. And yes the second one from the left is a light green and the fourth one is khaki. We don’t have any white eggs in the house usually so didn’t have one of them for comparison purposes. We might pick up some white eggs to paint for Easter as our colorful ones don’t paint up quite as vibrant, although they do get a nice rick color.

Another subject was some of our dogs treats. He wasn’t too thrilled about not being allowed to have them until I was done photographing them but he made out okay in the end. The one thing I like about the dog treat picture is I was able to do a good isolation and left plenty of copy space at the top of the image. As I’m comparing them the isolation on the dog treats is much nicer than the eggs. I actually used the Magic Extract tool in Photoshop Elements to remove the background which is why it blends in with the white background of the page perfectly. The egg shot doesn’t do that.

Really just need to keep practice and maybe get some more lights.

Allen

Note:  Of course if the page background isn’t pure white it won’t blend in.