Ok this one is for the bloggers who are reporting some income come May 1st.  If you are a blogger, reporting your sales & income, I’d like to see it come May 1st (or 2nd). 

What’s your link?  Comment away!  Get yourself some SEO - get those links in there! haha

“You can get everything in life you want if you will
just help enough other people get what they want.”
  ~Zig Ziglar, Secrets of Closing the Sale

The wedding industry has one extraordinary quirk. We (mostly) all like each other, get along, try to help everyone else move forward. It’s our intent to build up the industry and we rarely consider each other competition in the traditional sense of the word. Local wedding pros routinely go to each other’s weddings, shoot, have fun, make more friends and provide the brides & grooms with MORE bang for the same buck. It’s a good way to pass a Saturday you aren’t shooting. Online, we support each other, create helpful tutorials and blogs to push our industry forward.

So far my experience with microstock is quite the opposite. Photographers are more contentious, SEEKING conflict and even reveling in it. It’s easy for stock photographers to lay blame for their own sales (”this site’s down, that site’s down this month, this site isn’t spending enough on marketing”).

To be a stock photographer, you never need to talk to another human being in your life. Buy some food, props, etc. do your design, light it, shoot the photo, keyword, upload and repeat. You can spend all of your time doing what you love.

So why are you here? Why are you on the Microstock Group forums? Why do you participate in conversations with your fellow photographers or as the title of this post suggests: what are your intentions?

Mine are simple - my goal in interacting with other photographers is education.  I want to learn the who/what/where/why and how of microstock photography.  I’m about sharing knowledge - if I know it, I’ll tell you.  If it helps you more than me, so be it.  If you double my sales next month, good!  I am not as worried about you as “competition” for my images - if I do my job right, you won’t be.  If I do it poorly, I expect to not be rewarded. 

Back to Zig’s quote - has someone helped you?  How does it make you feel toward that person? Imagine you popped a tire and someone helps you fix it.  You talk as you change the tire and feel like you get to know someone.  Five miles down the road you see the same guy pulled over with a flat tire.  You are much MUCH more likely to pull over & help him as you would have been 30 mins before.  How can you apply that to microstock?  Can you help people enough to get everything you want?

First, I need to thank the Magnificent 10.  I started a 10-player challenge on Shutterstock to increase my uploading.  The other competitors have pushed me and fought through two months of uploading.

Second, and the reason for this post, all things must change.  After 2 months of our challenge, we will all be at completely different starting points next month.  So, we evolve.

The new challenge, started by Ulrich, is called “Think Big” has the following rules:

* Get 3564 files accepted between May 1 and August 31
* At least 1000 must come from two file types (we chose photos & videos)
* No teams (studios - he’s accepted myself & Sarah as “one”)
* No double submissions (one image/video is 1, even if hue shifted, sepia, HD/SD, etc)

The winner, if Ulrich should not make it and someone else does, gets Ulrich’s Shutterstock earnings for April 2008, around $250.  Why am we taking on such an insane challenge?  Not for $250.  We want those 3564 images/videos online asap.  ASAP means now, yesterday, tomorrow, or by August 31st.

If you would like to follow the Think Big challenge, this is the link.

Here are the challenges for us:

* We have 19 submitted videos.  Ever.  We need 1000 more.
* We are on vacation from July 28th through August 7th.
* We are shooting 10-12 weddings during May 1-August 31.

Removing the 11 days of vacation and 12 wedding days leaves us with exactly 100 days to complete the challenge.  We must get 36 files accepted per work day.

Note: I will be renaming the Magnificent 10 link “Think Big” so if you want to follow the posts I make into this category, that’s where you will find them.

Think Big

This is a fantastic trick that helps your model understand the session you have planned (and helps you execute it and not get sidetracked).  Simply come up with a title for your shoot and pass it along to the model.  Maybe something that’s the title of a song, a book, a movie, something made up - whatever.  As long as you & the model are on the same page, you’ll go far.

For example - our last shoot we wanted to do a painter, artist, writer & pianist set - all with one model.  So I called the set “Portrait of An Artist” and she got it.  She understood our vision was an inside peek AT an artist at work.  We did our set and it was a great shoot. 

Another example is an upcoming soon.  The model wrote “I do martial arts - tae kwon do, capeoira etc.
I also do weapons training - swords, sai’s, staves, etc.”   Now, I know my martial arts well so I immediately thought of a title for this - Only the Strong.  There is a movie with the same title and so I immediately went to that as my inspiration.  Now, our model will know the source of our inspiration and react accordingly. 

One more great reason to use titles - it’s fun!  Seriously, what’s more fun “we’re going out to shoot some martial arts” or “We have our ‘Only the Strong’ shoot today”?  C’mon!

Ok, ok, one more good reason - finding images & naming folders.  When we have no title, I name my folders by date.  20080410 for April 10th, 2008’s shoots.  Boring.  Hard to find too.  20080410 Portrait of an Artist with Tammy   Now THAT is a folder.

So do it - title your shoots.

So, you’re using Image Manager to upload to IStock?

1) Shoot yourself in the head because it’s less painful.

2) Go to http://www.deepmeta.com and download the program.

There’s a reason I hated uploading to Istock - it was plain & simple a pain in the butt.  With a 20 per…whatever…limit, you never had a good way to know when to submit more, how many slots you had free, etc.

Deep Meta changes a LOT about the way IStock will work for me.  I can simple add images (not simple in IM - you had to add them one by one!)  Then categorize, add to queue and upload.  Deep Meta will submit as many as you can submit (my limit is 20 right now).  Then, when you get your emails from Istock about those images, simply enter the program, press F5 to refresh data, it’ll update your statuses of those images, and press “upload” again - all the other images you queued are ready to go!  You could have 500 in queue ready to push, all categorized, etc.  VERY simple!

Deep Meta tracks a lot of IStock stats but I’m really mainly concerned with getting my images online and Deep Meta makes that SO much easier.  So thank you to the creator(s)!  I love it!!

So I read about this program, Cushy Stock, on Microstock Diaries.  I had heard the name in the past but thought it was just another agency (Shutterstock, Canstock, Bigstock, CushyStock) so I never investigated.

Well Cushy Stock is an application that will drastically speed up my workflow.  The gist of it is this:

1) You can navigate to your edited photos, keyword, describe & title them, set the status as ready to upload and then upload them to as many agencies as supports FTP at once.  Yep!  No more watching your FTPs for 10 or 15 sites.  One ap, push the button, done.  Cushy Stock also supports EPS for illustrations and most RAW formats. 

2) You can track your micro finances for many big agencies (more coming soon I’d guess too!)  Right now it’s setup for IStock, Shutterstock, DT, 123RF, Bigstock, Fotolia, StockXpert, Canstock, and Crestock - again, most of what you could ever want.  No more logging in to each site 100 times a day to check balances - one application monitors them all.

3) Cushy Stock also can add keywords with a keyword generator/suggestor.  I don’t have a lot of practice with this yet but it seems to be based on DT and SS lists so it should have some validity and use. 

I will post more about Cushy Stock after I own it and have given it a month or two of full testing.  I really like the program so far and hope it can speed up my workflow a lot.  I’ve uploaded almost 400 images this month and don’t want to go through it like this next month - I’m always looking for that time savings.

To get the DEMO VERSION of Cushy Stock, use this link.
To simply purchase it, use this one instead.

I know a lot of microstockers, having been involved in some way in this business for a long time.  Where you start will vary depending on how you found microstock and the reasons you chose to get involved in the industry. 

If you are a hobbyist photographer deciding to make money from your photos, you are going to find the learning curve steep.  Things you probably considered: lighting, noise, composition.  Things you NEVER considered: model releases, taxes, commercial value, series images, design. 

If you’re a professional photographer already and jumping ship to microstock, you probably considered: business, taxes, branding, image quality.  You never considered: rejections, noise, and the value of being really good at isolations & extractions.

If you are at all serious about microstock as a way to earn your income or even make a few dollars, you will get rejected at some point.  Sometimes a reviewer on one site may get a full batch rejected on another site.  In one case, at least, a reviewer got their own images rejected on the site they reviewed for!  So yes, it’s going to happen to you. 

People deal with rejection in their own ways - this isn’t going to be a diatribe on “how to get over it” or how to deal with rejections.  You, individually, either will take it as “do better, try again” or “screw it, I’m taking my ball & going home.”  You will *never* understand all of the reasons for rejections.  We just yesterday had an image rejected on Dreamstime because it was a silhouette and I added a Model Release.  You don’t apparently need a MR on Dreamstime for silhouettes (like you do other sites) so my image was rejected for: “Image does not contain a recognizable person, no model release needed.  Please correct the issue and resubmit.”  If I had not put a MR on Shutterstock’s upload, it would have been rejected for having no MR.  If that doesn’t convince you that you will *never* understand 100% of your rejections…

Here are your action options when you get a rejection:
1) Quit microstock completely.  Happens all the time.
2) Be angry, flail about a bit, post about it on some microstock forum or other.  Fail to understand. Fail to improve.
3) Completely understand, actually praise the reviewer, and try again.
4) Put the image in a resubmit to folder and resubmit it.
5) Ignore the rejection and submit more photos, trying to get better.

Those are really the bulk of your options.  Two are non-productive.  Three have the possibility of being more productive.  Rejections suck.  Sometimes you have to decide to cut losses - and “quit microstock” but on a site by site basis.  There will be some changes to my list next month, especially related to that particular topic.  It does nobody any good to submit 1000 images to a site that isn’t looking for your work.  At the same time, the only way to make money in microstock is to add more images, improve your quality.

We have currently setup EIGHT model shoots in the next seven days.  Tues, Wed, 2 Thurs, 2 Sat, Sun, Mon - at least.  We may end up with 9 or 10 this week.

We get our models from a couple of sources - you have to diversify how you get your models in case one place dries up/flakes/no use. 

1) ModelMayhem - this site is the new OneModelPlace.  OMP is good but not free - thus a lot of models & photographers skip it, especially NEW models, the type you want.  Go to the link & add me as a friend!  To find models in your area, click Browse, then choose your criteria.  I always keep it as open as possible, sorting by “recent activity” so you know they’re still on MM actively.

2) Craigslist - You can view our new ad by clicking here.  We got the basic structure for this off of the LuckyOliver forums, adapted it to our needs, added some of our photos from stock shoots and we try to tell everyone straight up front what the shoot is going to be like so we don’t get a lot of rejected models.  We keep everything as up front as possible about our goals.  On MM you can use model-speak.  On Craigslist use simpler, common language like “Compensation will be FREE professional digital photos on CD” rather than TFCD.

3) Friends - this can be your friends, your kid’s friends, your family, your family’s friends - you get the point. ANYONE can be a stock model.  How good they are may vary but you can get started almost anywhere.  The best tip I got was from (I think?) Andres Rodriguez who said he asks models at the end of a shoot if they know anyone who’d like to have some fun & do a similar shoot.  By doing that, you may get a whole lot of answers from “no” to “here are 8 email addys & ph numbers! Call them now!”  Do it - it’s a trick, like a real live, honest TIP.  Do it.

4) Anywhere - get a business card that says you’re a commercial & stock photographer, hand them out when you see possibile models.  Talking to people isn’t “easy” at first but it gets easier - try it with a person who seems friendly & like the type of person you want to model.  Try this - “Hi…uhm, I’m a professional photographer and I think you’d make an awesome model.  I’m going to give you my card & let you check out my stuff online.  Call me if you want to get together for a free shoot.”  Then walk away.  Make your site good enough that people actually call, too!  Learn that little blurb - then use it!  It’s easy, you don’t seem creepy, and it’s a very professional way to approach someone if you see someone you have to shoot with.  Keep your eyes open!

(8 model shoots in 7 days means I’m going to be a bit quiet this week on the blog - I’ll try to post some interesting stuff if I get a chance, maybe some snips from our shoots, but no promises!  This is your chance to get out, get some shooting in, watch your RSS feeds and kick mid-month butt!)

Here are my favorite images approved in April, one from each site (easy to find my folio that way too!)  Canstock has not approved one image in April so they can’t play.

The most difficult thing I think most beginning microstock photographers face is the ultimate “but what do I shoot?!”  They hear about Yuri, Andres & Lise and think “I can do that!”  When you break down the numbers, it’s not *that* hard, right?  15 new shots a day for a year with 1 month off - who can’t do that?

Day 1 is easy - you shoot the most obvious stuff in your room.  Keyboard, closeup of everything on your desk, USB cords, scissors, pens, paperclips, piles of tacks.  Submit your 15 and you’re done - no problemo!

Day 2 is pretty easy - you have kids so you round one up, shoot 150 photos of them, sort it out and you’re done.  Whew, man this is cake.

Day 3 you have to venture out so you wander out to the park.  Take the pictures of your car cd player & dash though. 

Day 4 you totally forget about stock - your mind wandered and oops, where’d the day go?  Oh well, catch up tomorrow.  You still have to edit Day 3 stuff too since you got back from the park late.

Day 5 you have NO idea what to shoot.  You read the forums, browse people’s portfolios, do some liquid splash shots and try to edit day 3.  You nearly get it all uploaded and have 20….should’ve been 30, but oh well.

Day 6 you’re done, you quit, Micro isn’t for you - half your Day 1 and Day 2 shots got rejected by some stupid reviewer that doesn’t know what sells, clearly.  Angrily, you vow to take your money that you’re getting & never submit again.

Day 7 you got 2/3 of Day 3 accepted and the good times roll.  You think of a new shoot and get 15 new images.  The game’s back on…

Here’s what I know about microstock so far - there are good days when you get 30+ DL for the first time, when you break the $100 in a month or a week barrier.  There are bad days when EVERY site seems to be rejecting your favorite, best-ever images.  There are days you can’t think of one image to shoot and days when you are so full of ideas you need notebooks to track them all.  It happens - the best thing I’ve found is to roll with the bad days and push as hard as possible on the good ones.  Let bad days happen - get them out of your system so you don’t feel like quitting on this.

Microstock, especially to the level of Lise, Yuri, Andres, IOFoto, Kirsty - it’s hard work!  If you’re ready for it, jump in!