Go hard or go home...

If you want to earn more then a few dollars a month from your microstock photos, you need to treat this hobby as a business, and as most people know, starting a new business takes a lot of time and effort in the beginning for little or no return until you get established.  Once your business is established, there is a certain amount of work that needs to be done to retain your market position, and even more work to keep growing your market.

For most people (except for professional photographers), microstock photography is something they do in there spare time outside of their normal day-to-day job and spare time is valuable.  The time you spend on microstock, whether it is for photo shoots, processing and submitting to agencies or marketing your work is time that you don't get to spend with your family and friends (unless they join you in the hobby).  So you need to get the best ROI - Return On Investment (your time) as you can achieve.

To be successful, a business needs to provide a better product or a service then their competitors.  Your products are you photos and you need to produce the best products that you can.  In simplicity terms, the Microstock Contributors are the Manufactures, the Microstock agencies are the Wholesalers and the Microstock Agency Customers are the Retailers. 

In a normal business model, the number of Manufacturers would be small, and they would have the power to dictate the price of their product.  The Wholesalers would be greater in number and select the best Manufacturer for they products and add some additional value to the product before offering it for sale to the Retailers.

In the Microstock model, the number of Manufacturers (Contributors) is large while the number Wholesalers (Microstock Agencies) is small.  This model gives the power to the Wholesaler (Microstock Agencies) to dictate the product prices and selection of products to sell.

How does this affect you as a Microstock Contributor??  It means that you need to produce a large portfolio of work and submit it to a large number of agencies to reach to largest number of customers.

It might make it easier to think of your efforts in the form an formula which I'm going tweak slightly to apply to Microstock- the Drake Equation.  You might not know the name of this formula, but most people will be aware of it.  The Drake equation is an equation used to estimate the number of detectable  extraterrestrial civilisations in the Milky Way galaxy.  It goes something like this:

Take the number of stars that form in our galaxy in a year and divide it by the average number of stars that have planets.  Divide the result by the average number of planets that might support life.  Then take that result and divide it by the faction of planets that might develop life forms.  Divide the result again by the fraction of planets that might develop intelligent life.......etc, etc, etc.

I think you get the idea.  We can apply a cut down and simpliefied formula to our Microstock efforts to calculate the odds of selling a photo.  Some thing like this...

Take the average number of photos that you take during a photo shoot.  Divide this number by the average number of photos that are of an acceptable quality for Microstock.  Take the result and divide it by the average number of photos that are accepted by a Microstock agency and finally divide this last number by the number of photos sold.

((( No. Photos Taken / No. Acceptable Quality) / No. Photos Accepted) / No. Photos Sold)

Example:  If I average 300 photos in a session, but only 10% of these are of an acceptable quality, I would only be able to submit 30 photos to the Microstock Agency.  Of the 30 submitted, the Agency only excepts 10% of these photos for their library, that means that I have 3 photos for sale on their site.  Of the 3 photos, I average 1 sale a month.  It means for every 300 photos I take, I average 1 photo sale a month.

That is a lot of work for a very small return.

There are things that you can do to increase your odds of selling a photo...such as:

• Increase the number of photo shoots - this should be a no brainer
• Increase your skill level - the more photos that you have that are of acceptable quality the better
• Submit to multiple agencies - the more agencies that you are signed up with the greater number of potential customers to buy your photos
• Market you work - advertise your work on social media and get more potential buyers looking at your work on the Microstock sites.

Here is another example but with increased numbers based on the above suggestions:

If I still average 300 photos in a session but do 5 sessions in the month, I would have 1,500 to start with.  I've now increased by photography skill level and 30% of these are of an acceptable quality, I would be able to submit 450 photos to the Microstock Agency. I'm now signed up with 10 agencies and each agency accepts about 20% of the photos submitted.  This means that each agency has accepted 90 photos for the month, which takes my accepted photos for the month across the agencies to 900.  If I still only average a 33% chance of a selling a photo, this works out to 30 photo sales per month per agency - or a total of 300 sales for the month.

What it all boils down to is that you need to be doing a lot of work and continually increasing your photography skills to make money in this field.  There is no easy or fast way to make a quick million in Microstock.

Cheers
Fiona

Shooting Locations for May 2012

The first location that we decided to visit was O'Reilly's at Lamington National Park, unfortunately we decided to visit on the day of a public holiday, and there where literally thousands of people and families visiting at the same time for picnics and bar-b-ques.  Needless to say most of the wildlife disappeared into the bush for the day, and aside from the native parrots that where getting fed by all the tourists, there was very little in the way of wildlife to photograph.

This was also our first hands on use of our cameras, so most of photos didn't meet the quality standards required for stock photos.

The best photo of the day was taken just as we where leaving the car park, we spotted a small Red-necked Pademelon feeding on edge of the road. 

(From our Mostphotos Album) 

The second outing was to Roma Street Parklands.  I went to this location by myself as my sister was working.  I spent 3 hours walking around the gardens and managed to take over 400 photos.  This site is popular for photography courses, and I saw a couple of the groups there while I was wandering around.  The best photos for the day where a taken of an Australian Water Dragon (lizard) and the flowering stems of a native grass plant.

(From our Mostphotos Album)

The third location that we visited for May was the Mt Coot-tha Botanic Gardens.  We arrived early in the morning and managed to get most of our photos taken before the weekend rush of people.  This seems to be a popular site for photography courses and groups.  The best photos of the day where a purple lotus flower in the lake, a green succulent plant in the cactus display and a bird feeding from the flowers of a cactus plant.

(From our Mostphotos Album)

The last location for our May shoots was at Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary.  Again we spent a couple of hours wandering around the animal enclosures.  The best photos of the day where 2 taken of Kangaroos in the open enclosure, where people can wander around with kangaroos and emus.

(From our Mostphotos Album)

We managed to fit a lot of location shoots into the month of May, and managed to assemble a small set of photos as our first submission to the Microstock agencies.  I'll document how our successes and failures with these submissions in a future post.

Cheers

Fiona

What to shoot and where?

Now that we have our new cameras, it's time to take the new toys out for a spin. 

The first questions that we asked ourselves was what type of photographs did we want to take that would be suitable for Microstock agencies and what locations could we use to get them.

We've decided to start with flora & fauna photos initially.  This decision was made for the following practical reasons:

• Our skill level (nil) - we require longer to set up a shot then a more experienced photographer, and plants & flowers don't tend to move (much), so we can take several photos of the same subject with the hopes that at least one of them will be of acceptable quality
• Popular searches - the word Flower is the most searched for keyword on all the Microstock agencies.  This means that photos of flowers have a better chance of being sold.  The down side is that everyone is submitting photos of flowers, so there is some stiff competition in this category.  Also, many of the Microstock agencies limit the number of photos of flowers that they accept.  We're lucky that in the area where we live that are many unusual plants and flowers, many of which are still flowering in winter.
• Unusual Animals - Australia is well known for its unique animals, and as such, photos of these animals are popular with the Microstock agencies. There are several wildlife parks and national parks within 1 hours drive of where we live, so getting access to these types of animals is easy. (At least I don't have to go camping in the bush or the outback to get photos of kangaroos and koalas. I'm afraid my idea of camping is a nice motel / hotel room with a hot shower and flush toilet).
• Releases - The Microstock agencies have strict rules around the use of people or properties in stock images.  If you submit photos with either a recognisable person or property, you must get a signed release form from the person or owner of the property giving permission to the photo for stock purposes.  At the current time, this seems to be too much work for us as beginner photographers, especially when we're submitting photos to multiple agencies.  So we have decided not to shoot any of these types of photographs.

Now that we have decided on what type of photographs we want to take, it only becomes a matter of selecting locations for shoots.

As I mentioned above, we're lucky to live in an area that is surrounded by wildlife and national parks within easy driving distance.  These parks give us the opportunity to shoot a wide varity of subjects within a relatively small amount of time, and most of the wildlife parks offer yearly passes, so we can return as many times as we want to within the year for more shooting sessions.

The only restriction on us is time, both my sister and I work long hours during the week at our day jobs and our schedules don't always line up.  So at the moment we're only able to do 1 or 2 shooting sessions a month.  This means that we need to go to locations that offer the most variety of subjects for our photos.

In my next post, I'll detail the shooting locations we selected during May.

Cheers
Fiona

Our first photography course

On the same day that we picked up our cameras from our local camera store, we had the opportunity to attend a 4 hour Masterclass session with one of Australia's leading portrait photographers - Anthony Cottrell.

Anthony Cottrell is a charismatic and engaging presenter, and his passion for photography comes through in his presentation. 

The Masterclass session was all theory, which could have easily turned into a clock watching session, but Anthony's presentation style had the audience engaged for the entire 4 hours, with many people staying back after the presentation to ask specific questions.

Anthony regularly presents Masterclasses and other courses around Australia.  If you ever get the opportunity to attend one of his courses, I highly recommend that you go.  You'll enjoy yourself, and no matter what skill level you are, you should be able to pick up some good tips and tricks.

For more details about Anthony and the courses that he presents, visit his website: Anthony Conttrell

Cheers Fiona

Buying the Cameras

The one piece of equipment that you absolutely need with starting out in this hobby is a camera, preferably a DSLR.

All of the Microstock sites that we've signed up as contributors for require images to be submitted that are at least 4 - 8 megapixels and are to be in JPEG format. 

If you're buying a new DSLR, these requirements shouldn't be a problem.  Most entry level DSLR cameras on the market are rated at least 10 - 12 megapixel with a file format of JPEG.  If you're planning using an older DSLR, check out its capabilities before spending time taking photos that are not going to meet the minimum requirements for the Microstock agencies.

As we mentioned in our first post, neither my sister or myself have any previous experience in photography or with DLSR cameras, so the first thing I did was research on internet and talking to the staff in our local photography shops about the different DSLRs on the market that were within our budget.

We finally decided to get cameras that not only take photos in JPEG format, but also have the capability to capture files in RAW format.  RAW format is the uncompressed file format and is used by more experienced photographers for post-processing images on a computer.  Although we're not using this capability now on the cameras that we purchased, we will be as our skill level increases.  I'd much prefer to buy a camera with the capability now, then have to purchase another camera in the near future.

After a lot of research on various blogs and camera review sites, and talking to the helpful staff in our local camera shops, we decided to purchase the following:

For Fiona
Canon EOS 7D body with a Tamron 18-270mm Lens

 For ShelleyNikon D5100 with 2 Lens18-55mm & 55-300mm    

So far we're both very happy with our camera purchases and we've already produced photos of a higher quality than we've ever managed to achieve with our old point and shoot cameras.

Cheers
Fiona

Welcome To Microstock Cash Blog

This blog was started to document the journey of two sisters into the world Microstock photography and their efforts into earning money from a hobby.

Before starting out in this hobby last month, both of us had never picked up a DSLR camera or attended any photography courses.  The full extent of our experience was taking holiday happy snaps with simple point and shoot cameras.

If you're reading this blog, you're probably trying to find out information about earning money with your photographic hobby.  You've probably already read the 'stories' about people that were originally rejected by a stock photography agency and are now earning thousands of dollars a month from these sites. 

Is it believable???  Can it be done??

Reading between the lines of these stories, it seems these may be urban legends or that the people involved have always had prior photography experience.

Can a pair of absolute photography newbs do it??  We'll see.

Cheers
Fiona & Shelley