Image Sales Report for March 2012

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March 2012

Red progress line shows a little stagnancy in my sales. I did not upload any images again, although I work on it in my ‘back office’. This time I won’t divagate on any possible reasons. Because the  most significant one is the portfolio size.

So, March was a relatively good month (for that small portfolio) and the result was only -5.6% down from the previous BME ( Best Month Ever ).

Shutterstock was again a leader in all terms, downloads and income. And the second star was 123RF agency.

I joined ALAMY and first 3 images got accepted. Now I have to review my portfolio on Canstockphoto, it seems I forgot to submit some images. Also I stopped uploading to Stockfresh at the moment. Nothing happens there for me.

Thanks for dropping by! See You soon.

Selling images – 02/2012

February was a slow month in terms of sales. Fortunately we may call microstock a passive income, which means I didn’t have to do anything to make sales. Pictures are already on internet and I submitted only few recently. Except of iStockPhoto where I have been submitting all my editorial photos since they finally accept this kind of photography.

It seems like I’m back to August 2011 and even February 2011 was +9% better. So I think it was a good decision at the beginning of the year to put more horsrepower into my workflow. February was -23% to January and -30 to the Best Month Ever.

No surprises, Shutterstock took the first place again.
I’m recently  practicing more some different techniques and learning new things than submitting images to stock.

Photography is not enough, in January I’ve been back to digital graphics using Blender 3D, see my ongoing project : Spitfire – Work In Progress  also 2D graphics using Photoshop and a tablet.
That forced me to critically look at my hand and technique (it never ends), so in February I started to draw with real pencil and got some oil pastels, paint, a set of brushes and canvas.

I already have many books about drawing and painting, I draw since I was a kid and need just bring it back to my head, hand and workflow. Although I have  never really painted anything using a paint and always hated the big format works.
I thought I couldn’t stand to draw an A4 sheet, not to mention something larger. So I’ve put a great pressure on those facts and already got 3 brand new paintings (wow) and large shaded drawings on paper.
Still didn’t used a real paint and canvas, only the oil pastels. But soon…

I’ll keep going in that direction by taking some paid classes  in a Royal Academy of Arts in Warsaw. I hope I won’t break my head and brushes there. The digital tools are amazing, but they made me lazy.

A wanting to create too much and too fast really reduced my invention.
Now it’s time to face it and wash my brain.

*Earnings from Zazzle, Canstockphoto and Stockfresh are not included in monthly charts nor added to the progress line. Earnings from StockXpert/Thinkstock aren’t included.

*Still I need to find some time to start with Alamy and Photodune.

Selling photos – Dec. 2010 + Jan, Feb 2011

Rreport for Month 23, 24, 25 ( see November earnings )

To speed up a bit, this report has only charts and overall summary for the last 3 months.

So what’s new… At this time I got a wonderful Wacom Tablet Intuos 4 M, which helps me incredibly when processing photos and free-hand drawing. A digital pen tablet is every illustrators dream…

Lightroom is the new application I use..  and hate it’s messy interface, but it has an amazing power to remove noise and add sharpness to  photos taken in really bad conditions.

Got it  tested already by submitting several  great but difficult to correct photos and surprisingly.. they got approved. Wouldn’t even try to submit them  after processing with  Photoshop and Camera Raw, because they would not pass. Even that I got created a nice collection of layered sharpen/denoise actions…  Adobe Lightroom is now a real time saver.

In the mean time  the photo “Project 365″ was born, also I added a lot of new designs to Zazzle store and managed to divide the time for microstock and creating products.
Now only need to find some  time to fix the Shutterstock add-on :-/

Another news is I expanded pure blogging with Squidoo to get more powerful tools for building more interactive and informational sites than I could using only WordPress, Blogger or Posterous.

First two publications are: “What graphics pen tablet to choose” and “Medieval Battle of Grunwald 1410 – Live Event”

It’s an useful and easy to use platform. I often like to update posts/articles and doing it here or on any other blogging platform gives no effect, as the typical “blog article” is seen  more related  to specific date/time than to the subject. Also the community and social features there are just amazing.

Overall monthly results

December -17% to best month
January +2% to best month
February +16% to best month and that way February 2011 becomes a new BME

Added Zazzle overall performance to comparison chart.

Earn money oline

Selling images in November 2010 – report

November report – Month 22 - slow recovery ( previous: October  results)

When working on this summary I found an error in October report for Fotolia sales so  it is updated now.

In November I have added a Total Stats feature to SS SiteBoost – next day Shuttterstock changed the page layout they didn’t touched for years :>.

I submitted several photos from Warsaw , my trips to Podlasie and  other places in north Poland. I like to jump through all images taken to avoid monotony when editing and in portfolio.