So what happened? Did I fail? Why am I back already?
Well the answers are long & complex - I learned a lot the last 4 days though. I have submitted just over 400 images in 4 days. If I kept going, I would have made a serious run at 1k in 7 days so why stop?
The answer lies in my beliefs going into the challenge. I believed that it was easier to shoot 1000 images than to take them from the camera to the stock agency. I was wrong. The single most difficult and time consuming part of the microstock process is to shoot stock worthy images. Period.
The second reason we ‘quit’ our challenge early is that my computer bit it. I spent 11 hours on the FIRST DAY changing over to a brand new 4 gig RAM Vista machine. I’m not familiar with Vista so there was a learning curve. Add in the 11 hours out and I was already behind. When I realized I had to start shooting, it was over.
I gave up the challenge because Sarah & I simply could not *together* shoot fast enough to keep images coming. As of right now, I have under 50 images left to process. I thought that we could add shoots this week, we’d have plenty of images. It simply wasn’t true. If you are going to “add 1000 images” in 7 days, you need to have a backlog. You can’t add 1000 AND shoot 1000 in one week. I don’t believe it’s possible.
Here’s more of what I learned:
* I can edit, keyword, upload and submit about 10 pictures per hour. This meant during my 12 hour days, I would put between 110 and 150 images online. If I did longer days, I could easily hit 200 images in one day.
* No matter how tireless a worker you are, you will get tired at the end of 16 hours of editing, keywording and uploading. If you do it for 4 days in a row, you will be exhausted.
* If you shoot 40-70 useable images per model session, over 1-2 hours, you can upload 500 images per week (10 hrs of shooting, 50 hrs of editing, kw, upload & submitting). You could * with difficulty* do about 600. At my speeds, you’d average a 12 hour day everyday 7 days a week though. The most you can reasonably add is 400-600 per week. Anything more is blitzing and it’s less likely you can keep that up for a long time. Of course at 600 per week for 6 months, you’d be retired or very close!
In June, I’m doing this again but with a much different plan. I will evaluate more and figure out what needs to be done - needless to say, however, records are made to be broken. If I disappointed anyone by not making the goal, sorry. Once the lessons from this first time had been learned and learned, there was no real reason to keep myself offline.
