Milestones

I've been shooting a fair amount lately, but not for stock and not for pay. Call it a personal project I guess. I'm definitely learning a lot and keeping myself in practice, though. I didn't make a conscious decision to take a break, but I just haven't seemed to find the time this summer to set up a decent stock shoot. I'm starting to get the itch, though, so we'll see what I manage to come up with this week... One great thing about stock photography, though,  is that when I take a break from adding new images, the existing ones keep on working. One shoot in particular generates a sale almost every day. Now, I just need to figure out how to shoot more like that! I do understand why these images are selling, but I don't think that what we did was deliberate at the time. The model and I were simply playing around.

Meanwhile, there have been milestones.

1) I've reached the 250 sale mark at iStockphoto, and with my 69% acceptance rate there, I was qualified to go exclusive. So I did, after deactivating my portfolios at Shutterstock and Fotolia. I'm looking forward to only having to upload at one place, and hoping that better search placement gives me enough of a boost at iStockphoto to compensate for the cessation of sales elsewhere. I will certainly keep you posted.

2) My brother noticed one of my images of Model #1 in Sports Illustrated! It's a tiny 1 cm x 1 cm picture, and it probably only made us a dollar or two, but I must confess that this one made me pretty happy.

iStockphoto 200th Download

I hit 200 downloads at iStockphoto this morning, moving a bit closer to eligibility for their exclusive contributor program. I'm thinking of opting in, for the following reasons:

1. Relatively easy uploading and release management with DeepMeta.
2. The appeal of only having to manage one image collection.
3. More than half of my earnings come from iStockphoto already.
4. More allowed uploads per week.
5. Increased royalties as cannister level increases.
6. Faster inspections.

I still have 50 more downloads before I'd be eligible, but I'm currently leaning towards exclusivity.

Exclusivity

Trying to look to the future, without getting too far ahead of myself, I've been considering the exclusivity option at iStockPhoto. I haven't decided whether it's really the choice for me, especially since iStock only accounts for about 15% of my sales to date. But let's say I did want to go exclusive.

First thing I'd have to do would be cancel my accounts at all other agencies. At most of them, this is no big deal- just ask and they kill your account and remove your images. In fact, I did just this at Canstockphoto and Crestock. I'd had no sales to date at either, and decided that continuing to upload wasn't worth the effort. But at two sites it's not so simple:

At BigStockPhoto, you cannot remove a photo until it has been up for 90 days. This is supposedly to protect some sort of "investment" they made in their inspection of submitted images. (I don't think they inspected any of mine, they just clicked "approve all" - accepting something like 100 images all at once.) Whether I approve of this policy or not, I did agree to it when I signed up, so if I do ever want to go exclusive, I'll have to wait 90 days after my last submission to BSP.

At Dreamstime, it's worse. They lock their contributors in for 6 months! Again, I agreed so I'm stuck.

So, my advice:

1) Read those contributor agreements carefully. You never know what they might try to sneak in there. As someone new to microstock, you might be tempted to agree to more than you should, just to get things rolling. Don't. There's plenty of places that are more reasonable in their treatment of their contributors, so be selective.

2) Plan ahead. If you are locked in somewhere, and think you might want out some day soon, stop contributing! The lock-ins are rolling. If I upload a photo today to Dreamstime, for example, then I won't be able to leave until the end of Feb. 2010.

So, just in case I might want to go exclusive in half a year's time. Dreamstime and BSP have seen my last upload. Unfortunately, they lose and I lose, because of their overly restrictive agreement. Who knows, I might not even want to leave in Feb. I might LOVE being a contributor there. But I won't be, not under their current terms.