Ideas can come from anywhere.  As a stock photographer, your job is to make them come from everywhere.  There are 2 steps to coming up with great stock ideas:

1) Create or visualize the concept.

2) Record the idea in a medium other than your brain.

Create or visualize the concept

The area most stock photographers struggle with is the creation of new stock ideas.  If you are sitting at your desk everyday, you won’t come up with many ideas.  Ideas for stock are based on activities and the world.  Activities are based in magazines and on websites as well but mainly, ideas are what life is - go where there’s life and your ideas will flow.  Visit a beach.  Imagine your model walking on the beach, swimming, maybe there’s a volleyball game going on.  Anywhere you see people doing anything - that’s an idea.  Maybe a family is having a bbq and another a picnic.  Two ideas?  What about twenty?  Photos of the bbq grill, photos of the meat cooking, photos of veggies cooking, photos of people eating, photos of a family around the food, photos of the picnic table setup, photos of the charcoal while it’s hot & red.

Record the idea in a medium other than your brain

If you don’t carry a notebook, start.  Write down EVERY idea you have - you may not have it again, at least for a long time.  You don’t want to let your ideas slip - either abstract & conceptual or specific like “woman wiping sweat off her forehead, woman drinking from a clear bottle” whatever.  Just write it down, type it out, record it somehow that doesn’t rely on your brain.

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.

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.

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.

Ok, I’ve had exactly zero sales on FeaturePics in 3 months so I finally decided to have a “sale” and lower prices.  The problem is, some of my images were $20, some were $12, some were $10 and some were $8 and I wanted them all to be one price (lower).  FeaturePics only lets you arrange pricing by % changes - so a 50% change still left me with 10, 6, 5, 4.

Here’s the trick:

Go in & set your pricing to 10%.  This should reduce everything pretty well.  Do that same thing one more time - recalculate with 10% AGAIN. 

The minimum on FP is $1 so ALL of your images will now be $1  (20-2-.20=1)

Now that they’re all $1, adjust UP however high you want (400% = $4).

Done!  Sweet, fast trick!

When I announced my earnings last month, I heard a lot of feedback about my IStock performance and how it should be MUCH MUCH better.  I agree, but I still can’t get them to accept any of my images!  I have 700+ images on multiple sites.  I have 89 on IStock and have submitted 40 this month.  They took 8.  I’ve done my part for the last 3 weeks - 60 submissions (MAXED OUT) and 21 new images online.  That basically stinks.  It de-motivates me. 

So I’m asking for help.  I know they like less processed, I know they like less saturated.  But short of editing everything twice, what’s the trick?  I would love to get my IStock gallery going - but at this rate, it never will.

There are only a few steps to microstock photography - that’s what makes it so simple, so blessedly wonderful.  It’s not this complex maze of vendors and production.  It’s a simple process that goes like this:

1) Conceptualize & schedule model for shoot.
2) Shoot
3) Edit the images from the shoot.
4) Keyword & IPTC for the images you edited.
5) Upload images to various sites.
6) Submit images once FTP’d.

That’s it.  Realistically there are more steps (backing up, prep for the shoot, follow up) but we’ll do a full workflow post at some other time.  Today’s thoughts revolve around getting hung up on any one step.   Let’s be serious - while you could get hung up on 1, 2. 5 and 6, you aren’t likely to.  The only time I ever get hung up on #6 is when I submit to Fotolia or Dreamstime, which takes much much longer to #6 than all the others.  Aside from those, 1, 2, 5 and 6 are fairly reasonable steps.  (Note: #5 would be much worse if I used any sites that didn’t take FTP, such as SnapVillage.)

So our focus is on the meat of the process - edit and IPTC.  I was speaking with Bobby Deal (Vegas Visions Studios) on Shutterstock forums about this and he said “Simply finding the time to develop the RAW images, retouch keyword upload and finish is a full time job … when you are producing 100+ gigs of raw image data per month.”

Sean Nel is also trying to do this same project - 900 images in a month.  He says the same thing “I struggle to do more than 30 or so nice clean edits on a day… but that is if I spend the day on it, selecting converting, editing and keywording.”

So the main question is - how can you speed up the editing process and the IPTC step?  I’ll save IPTC for a “Part 2″ of this discussion.  Let’s think about editing today.

The most basic solution to all editing problems is self explanatory - take better photos in the camera.  So one area to focus your energy on is improving the image you capture and give yourself less editing time later.  I could do far more isolations in far less time if I had a proper isolation studio setup & it was properly lit.  One of my goals is to get a setup perfected that knocks the background out *without* any help from me at all.  If you can do that, you save a lot of detailed editing.

Another area to focus on is learning Photoshop and hotkeys.  If you’re editing as an amateur or hobbyist, 100 photos a month, you can afford to press the menu for everything you need.  If you’re trying to edit 200, 300, 500, 900, 1500 a month - you can’t!  You simply need to learn hotkeys and shortcuts, actions and scripts.  If there’s an easy way to “fix” your images, do it.

Third - figure out which step of editing is killing your speed.  Is it levels/exposure?  Saturation & contrast?  Sharpening?  Are you fixing your model’s hair everytime?  Hand tilts?  Background dirt, sensor dust?  What exactly are you spending your precious moments on?  If it is something you can fix in the camera, do it.  If it’s something you’re consistently *not* doing with the model, remember that & change.

You probably won’t save 15 minutes per image ever. Because you simply aren’t spending 15 minutes per image (if you are, you really need an editor).  You need to shave time wherever possible.  Over the course of 5000 images submitted, 10 seconds per image = 833 minutes of time or roughly 14 HOURS of saved time.  If you can save one minute per image, that’s 64 hours per 5k photos.  If you take 8 minutes to edit an image now but save 4 minutes in the future, you’ll spend half as much time editing.  So the moral of the story is - save time wherever & whenever possible.  It adds up!

So today we traveled 90 miles to Rochester in order to shoot models with some fellow photographers.  We had 6 models and 10 photographers in one location basically changing models every 30-90 minutes.  It was a blast!  Thanks to John Larkin for setting that up for us!

But - I got sunburnt.  It’s so early in the season I didn’t think about it but I have a bit of a sunburn, some heatstroke type symptoms - not good!  You don’t expect a slightly cool day in early May in Syracuse to burn you but it did!  Sarah is feeling it too and one of the models got really woozy & almost passed out.

So take care of yourselves.  Plenty of fluids, sunblock, get some exercise in for carrying stuff on your longer shoots - basically take good care of you.  This week’s lesson learned - wear sunblock in the sun.  Even if it’s not June/July/August.

Thanks to all who commented on the post below.  Your info is helpful in me determining what to do with the blog, where to take it, etc.  I am glad to see so many great people here, especially all the microstock bloggers!  We’re all interconnected it seems.  Thank you again!