As some of you know, over the next 2-3 years, Sarah and I are going to become traveling photographers, doing 3-5 major trips per year.

We’re going to try and meet up with as many friends & new friends as we can along the way. To help us out, if you’re interested in our journey and meeting up, add yourself to our map so that when we plan our routes, we can incorporate you into it!

Here’s our map

To create a marker, push “Edit” then the markers come up.

If you haven’t yet seen our plans, our travel blog is in my sig. It’s going to be a LOT of fun and a LOT of work! We’re shooting for 100+ hours per 3 week trip. CRAZY! :w00t:

Sorry if any of these photos are yours - I didn’t write the site, I just find it amusing!

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=stock_photos

I read a lot of microstock blogs - every one that I know about. I hear a LOT about RPI, return per image.

This stat has no value, month to month. I’m sorry, but it’s true. It’s an interesting stat, but has no value. Sort of like innings pitched for baseball or blocks per 48 minutes for basketball. (Kenny George averaged a triple double per 48 minutes last year for UNC-Whatever…he still didn’t get chosen in the NBA draft).

RPI has no value for two reasons:
1) As your collection grows, older stuff gets pushed aside and newer stuff makes the majority of your income. RPI would have more value if you only counted your top 200 images every month. Then you’d at least have a measurable stat. By measuring your lowest images as well, you’re saying “well, I made 10 cents per image this month and 11 cents last month so my RPI is down” - so? Last month you had 650 images and made $71.50 This month you had 900 images and made $90. Your RPI is down but income is up and those new images helped increase you $28.50 or 11.4 cents per image. Basically, the older images can hold you down.

2) As the stock agency’s collection grows, your RPI is absolutely positively *always* going to drop. The only thing you can do about that is increase your gallery faster than the market increases. If market share increases 3%, increase by 6%. Your RPI may go up - it may drop. In the end, your earnings *will* increase.

RPI is not a terrible stat. Statistics should help us - they should show us a path and lead us to a new plan or future. What RPI shows is a snapshot but it’s not comparable month to month. I made $82 with 161 images online. RPI of $.50 Last month I made $400 on 1000 images. RPI of $.25 OH NOES - my RPI is tanking! I only increased income 5x but my RPI dropped.

So RPI - dead to rights. Forget it. If you’re not increasing your portfolio, your earnings will drop. Older images sell less. No news there. If you’re increasing your portfolio, RPI will rise slightly then drop. Every.single.time. No news there either guys - sorry.

If you truly care about your RPI, dump your worst 10% of your portfolio every month - your RPI will triple.

If you want to make a million dollars in microstock photography, you need to have a plan.  You need to know what it will take to get you there and then you need to do the work that you planned.

The “issue” we have most frequently is lack of images to edit & submit.  I can edit & submit quickly.  My issue is always with having enough to edit.  So the one issue we’ve struggled to address lately is how to create *many* more images - enough that I would never again worry about our lack.   We created a plan - one I’ll be drawing out over the next few months - that will give us enough images to change where we are in stock photography.

Currently we have just over 1k images up at most stock sites.  By January 31st, 2009, we expect to have 7500 images online with our plan.  According to most major lists we’ve seen (StockXpert, Dreamstime, Istock) that would put us in the top 20 of all microstock portfolios, behind only megastars in our industry.  That would be a start.

Our plan is repeatable.  If it works the way we envision in the fall, we’ll repeat it in the spring, then again after next wedding season.  By the end of 09, we believe it feasible to have 15-17k images online.  At that point, we’d be top 5 largest microstock galleries behind IOFoto, Andres and perhaps a few others by then.

Again, I’ll be sharing more details as we go along - be sure to check the comments too as I’ll drop hints along the way there too.  It’s going to be the autumn of a lifetime.

Well, there may be something good to come of all this for June anyways.  Even though I’ve been too busy to upload, the good is that I can examine what happens if I stop working for a month - and so far there are some surprising results.  Shutterstock, for example, is a site where you must “feed the beast” and always upload.  Yesterday was my best Saturday in 6 weeks even though I haven’t uploaded a new shot in awhile. 

Another benefit - all of my Qs are caught up except Fotolia.  DT, BSP, SXP - all at 0 pending.  So as of June 30, I should have a very accurate count of my “going into summer” portfolios! 

Are there more benefits to not having uploaded in a couple weeks?  I’m not sure.  I haven’t had enough time to contemplate it.  I hope to actually get some images edited this coming week and then uploaded asap.

Wedding season here last from May through October.  For those 6 months, my life changes from full time stock mode, part time photo business to full time wedding photographer, part time stock guy. 

- Are we still setting up model shoots: yes. 
- Am I uploading everyday: no.
- How many weddings by month:
* May 2
* June 4
* July 4
* August 6
* September 5
* October 3
- How many images in the edit queue: 216 to edit, 881 new to sort through
- How many model shoots in June: 4 so far.  Hopefully 10.

The big question you wonder is - is it worth checking N2M over the summer then?  I think the answer is yes.  This is my first season trying to balance our wedding business with stock so if you enjoy the challenges I give myself, the goals I’m trying to reach, and my attempts to get there, you’ll enjoy N2M this summer.

If you have other questions about N2M or my summer, let me know in the comments - I’ll answer there within a day or so.

Every industry has what I like to call a v.2 player. Who are some v.2s?

Google, MySpace, Apple’s Ipod, Ebay, IPhone.

A v.2 player is a business (or product) that didn’t exist until later in the relevant cycle than other players. Google came much later than Yahoo, Altavista and Go.com Myspace followed Friendster and the IPod followed many failed MP3 players. IPhone success blows away even the Blackberry, not to mention other cell competitors.

The main feature of a v.2 is their education came free. They are able to learn from the predecessors and do something unique, something different, something essential - right from the start. They gather the type of momentum that simply devours the competition and blow them off the board (How’s auction.com doing?)

If we were to have anything resembling that right now in microstock, it would be YayMicro. Yay has come out of the gate strong. They have the most essential pieces of the puzzle already in place - a fantastic site that everyone raves about; a clean, simple brand; a memorable name; and most importantly - a strong starting collection of images. Images of McCain, Obama. Images from top contributors such as Lev Dolgachov and IOFoto.

I recently joined the YayMicro site and love everything about it so far. They seem to have a plan (editorial=big market, creative=another big market, ease of use all around=more people using it). We’ll see if it plays out that YayMicro is the v.2 of the microstock industry. Someone must be. It’s about the time we see someone emerge to absolutely destroy the competition - maybe it’s YayMicro.

Check out YayMicro here and let me know what you think of them!

We are starting a new website with the goal of having another portral for people to find our images and hopefully buy pictures from us.  One feature of the site is going to be links to our images for buyers to click the image & buy the photo.

My question - or dilemma - is which site to link them to.  IOFoto has a similar site and has decided to link to Dreamstime, perhaps because they are able to set higher prices per image than we currently are.  So here’s the first bit of my research and we’ll see where this goes.  One thought - FeaturePics lets us set our own pricing so we can sell that way. 

If you had to promote your own images on just one site, which site would you choose & why?

I’m so glad it’s the end of May!  I can’t wait until tonight to do earnings for tomorrow’s post!  It’s been a great month and I’m excited for the final total.  I know it’s going to be a BME on several sites - in fact, some of them were BME by the 10th or 12th so they are REALLY good BMEs!! 

Today marked the first “full” wedding of my season - which means I have to focus a bit more on my “real” business and a bit less on this “hobby” of mine for a few months.  We hadn’t actually shot a wedding in FIVE MONTHS!  We try not to shoot Dec/Jan/Feb in Syracuse - it’s too cold!  haha  This season is going to be great - even though it could potentially be one of our last 2 years or 3 years.

Subscriptions for the month:
Shutterstock - meh.
IStock - had one, got $2.39 or something around that.  Could live with that.
Fotolia - .23?!  WTF?!  I hope they are kidding.  I fear they are not. 

I’m not organized in my stock world to be full time yet so I’m glad that I am not there yet.  One major goal for June is getting my head on straight about files & folder structure.  Right now it’s a mess of doing so many images in 3 months and never really grasping from the beginning what I needed.  One example of a workflow change that June will bring is that right now, all our model releases are saved in one folder.  When you have 5 models total, who cares?  That’s a perfectly fine way to arrange it.  When you have 50, you no longer know which releases have been uploaded until you attempt to submit photos and there is no release.  Starting in June we will scan all releases to one folder (unsubmitted) and then whenever we do an upload, Sarah will upload the MRs and move them to (submitted) so that we know they are taken care of.  It’s a simple, subtle change but moving the responsibility from me to Sarah and then moving the files between status’ is going to make all the difference for MR uploading.

We finally got our new model recruitment site up at http://www.SyracuseModeling.com  Very simple, very straight - and we have a gallery online to show agencies, etc. in hopes of scoring some new models.  A lot of the wording we are still working on.  It was “borrowed” from Andres Rodriguez’s site (thanks AND sorry Andres).  I’m going to keep changing what it says until I’m 100% happy with it but for now it’s very simple, very easy and matches our model business card perfectly.

My good friend Todd at Arena Creative is now freelancing some graphic design.  If you need something done up, he’s the man. He’s also a stock photographer so I think that helps him “get” us. Also, Todd may be dragging me back into Alamy (kicking & screaming) - no CD? We’ll see about that! I could handle that - except the upsizing.

I’ve been having some fun with fractal images lately - and the sales are “ok” on them.  As I get better, I hope sales improve as well!  I’ve only sent them to Shutterstock so far - they approved most of these.  I hope the other agencies like fracs!  (These were all made in APO 3d Hack which ROCKS! Download here)

 In all, I’ve probably made 30 of these in the last 2 days.  I figured out the difference between a 5 hour render (yuck!) and a 5 minute render (woohooty!) and I’m spending most of my time doing the 5 minute variety so I can get better at these much quicker.