Blue Battle Fairy

It was hot as heck, but we shot a quick series in the garage yesterday anyway. Since I had to mess around with the lighting a bit, I thought I'd describe where I ended up.

The background is a wide (104"?) roll of white paper, hung high on the garage wall on L-brackets. It is lit by 2 AB-400's each aimed across the paper, for overlapping "field of fire". I have a light meter, but just winged it this time to play around. I adjusted strobe power and placement,the model's distance from the paper, and my camera settings until I liked what I was seeing.

She is standing on the flip-side of some speckled fiberglass bathroom paneling I got at Home Depot. It's not perfectly smooth, but it still blows out really well when I blast it with this much light, and it's not too hard to clean. I've been walking on it for 2 weeks, every time I go in and out of the garage, and all I had to do was hit it with a wet sponge for 2 minutes.

The Blue Battle Fairy has her own light, too. A 22" beauty dish with a third AB-400 in it, and a diffusion sock on it. It' is close to straight on, a little above her head, and aimed down to light her from head to toe. It also adds some light to the floor, whitening it up. I tried some shots with the dish to her side, with a white posterboard to fill her other side, but it was tough to get all that close enough while still leaving her some room to play. So I backed up, centered, raised the dish, and then angled it down some.

I really had to push my main light a lot harder to do these full body shots. (Mostly I've been in a lot closer until now.) In close, it is easy to get the beauty dish really close on one side, and a reflector in really close on the other side. For these wider shots I think it'd be really nice to have 2 lights on the model...

I edited four of the images last night. In Lightroom I cleaned up the background, darkened the wings a bit, and did some basic global adjustments. Then, I made a path selection with the pen tool in Photoshop to remove the shadows under her feet, as I just didn't like the way they looked.

The first four are up at Shutterstock and 3DS already, and as usual I'll wait a while to hear from iStock, Fotolia, and Stockxpert.

Education

Sometimes it seems like the more you learn, the more you can appreciate how much you don't know or understand. I got this feeling in a bog way when I first entered graduate school. After college graduation, I felt and acted like an expert on Math, Engineering, Science, and therefore the world in general. In the first week of graduate school, I quickly learned a few painful truths: Nobody knows very much at all about everything, and nobody knows everything about anything at all, everybody knows more than I do about something, and the killer: I didn't really know very much at all about anything.

I'm getting that feeling again in my photography. This means I'm transitioning from the blissful ignorance of "not knowing what I don't know" to "becoming painfully aware of what I don't know". This discomfort and uncertainty means the opportunity to grow is at hand. How will I learn?

Reading: Books, Forums, Blogs, Manuals - I read a lot every day.

Multimedia: Podcasts, Videos, Websites, Flickr, Microstock Sites, Lynda.com, Kelby Online Training - I follow a bunch of great podcasts and blogs, I'll make a list one day. I also have subscriptions at both Kelby Online and Lynda, and always have at least one course in progress. I can't recommend these two sites strongly enough, they offer a HUGE value for a small monthly cost.

Other People: This is a gap. I'd love to take a class, and join a photography club, but I don't feel like it will fit my schedule at present. Someday, definitely.

I do have a tendency to let the above get in the way of actually taking pictures, which is invaluable. So, I've started taking my camera with me wherever I go. I probably look like a bit of a dork, dropping my daughter off at Kindergarten with my D90+17-55 2.8 on my across-the-chest Black Rapid BR-4 strap. Probably more so this morning when I was lying chest-down on the sidewalk taking pictures of snails and flowers. But I can live with being a dork, especially if I learn a little in the process.

A Shifting Monetary Perspective

I've noticed a slow shift in the way I'm spending my money. Watching my daily microstock sales tick by, I get excited at $0.25 here, $1.88 there. The plan is, a lot of these small sales will add up into a meaningful revenue stream at some point. But here in the beginning, they add up to very small daily and monthly totals. So, where's the shift? When I hear, "That will be $14.42 at the window." at the drive-through fast food joint, I think to myself, "That's more than my stock earnings last week." At a finer level of detail, I get to decide whether I want to erase the day's sales by ordering dessert.

The point is not that I want to become some sort of miserly old fart. But, as I moved from an hourly to a salaried worker, I changed. Moving from cashing a paycheck to watching for a direct deposit to not even worrying about it anymore, I'd lost my perspective. Once I decided it'd be fine to budget $500 a month, and later $1000 a month, on whatever whim I felt at the time, I started to literally spend without thought. Any book on personal finance will tell you that the first step to better finances is to track every cent you spend. I've just never felt the need, until now, and now I can't help but pay attention.

An unexpected benefit of the microstock experience may be a new awareness of money. I have earned a little over $100 to date. I have spent $10,000. *gulp* If earning the occasional $0.25 or $0.30 can add up to a significant pile of cash, then so can saving the occasional $0.25 or $0.30, right? What's the old Ben Franklin quote? "Take care of the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves." Was he talking about budgeting, or microstock?

August Sales Report

Here's the totals as of 8/31:



Bringing my total accumulated earnings to $108.96.

What do I need to make to break even?
Since the first phase of my microstock experience will be an attempt to repay the cost of my gear, I had to figure out what that cost was. Over the past year or so, I got more and more interested in improving my photography, and also in improving my photography gear. Savings and monthly "spending money" gave way to better glass and lighting equipment. In the end, here's the approximate damage:



I admit I was a bit surprised by the total, but it's good to know where I'm at. Here it is graphically:



Looks like I'd better get shooting!

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.

Update

We've finished our move from old home to apartment to new home, and we're finally all unpacked. Just a little more work to do in the garage:


Only problem was, this week has been super hot, so shooting in there was not an option. That plus model #1 started Kindergarten... Gotta work on model #2 as soon as it cools off a little!

I did some shooting in the living room over the past few weeks, and submitted some images here and there...

My results: Today I hit $100. Small change for some, I know, but a happy milestone for me. Reaching another milestone also gives me more incentive to keep going. I'll post a full sales update at month's end.

Status update...

We've moved, and are halfway through our stay in temporary housing while we wait to close on our new house. I did bring a good portion of my "studio" gear with me, and had a pretty good week of shooting/uploading.

I also watched the lynda.com course on Access 07. And just spent a few hours playing with pivot tables, which totally rule. Here's what I ended up with, my history of microstock to date:
Time, numbered 23 to 29, is by week. As in, the 23rd to 29th week of 2009. Sorry for my crappy labeling of the axis.

Crestock and Canstockphoto are not included, as I didn't see the point entering in the image acceptance data for sites that haven't sold any images yet. If they show me some earnings, I'll add them to my spiffy new relational database.

Some observations: Two sites I added late, Shutterstock and StockXpert, are kicking butt for me, relatively speaking. Fotolia took a long time to kick in, but is looking good of late. IStockphoto and Dreamstime sold a couple of images early on, then nothing since, although I am still building my portfolios everywhere.

Basically, there's a table of agencies, a table of images, a table of accepted images (date, agency, which image), and a table of image sales. Getting it all set up was a lot of typing, but now when an image is first accepted, I add a line to the images and the acceptance tables. (Subsequent acceptances reference the already-added image.) And each time an image sells, I enter where and for how much. Then I can track sales in all sorts of interesting ways. Like, for any image I pick: Which sites accepted it? At which sites did it see sales? What is it earning per week/month/agency/whatever? Very interesting, but overall I think it's better to focus on just taking better pictures, and more of them...

We'll see how it goes.