Zazzle

It is always worth exploring other markets for photographs.

Zazzle is a shopfront for Photographers and designers to sell products direct to customers. You can upload images and design T shirts, cards and loads of other products.

You could easily spend all of your time making products here particularly if you like manipulating images for more creative effects. Microstock agencies prefer photos that are not worked on excessively but with Zazzle you can let your creative juices flow. 

Still Number One

Shutterstock is still my best performing site. It is head and shoulders above the rest. Although the fees are quite low per picture the volume of downloads from here is higher than any other sites. Strangely older photos seem to get regular downloads and it is noticeable that the downloads of these increase when new material is uploaded.

Click this link to go to Submissions at Shutterstock



Times are changing

Over the past year or so some of the smaller stocksites have fallen by the wayside such as Geckostock, Albumo and Lucky Oliver. There is no doubt that the current financial crisis is having an effect on number of downloads. There was a lot of work put in to these sites and it is unfortunate that they make it.

Other sites are have survived by combining or being bought out. What was once Snapvillage is now VeerMarketplace. Part of a bigger image resource bank. It will be interesting to see how it works in the microstock market in the present climate. Stockxpert another good site for me has been absorbed into Thinkstock a joint venture with Istockphoto. Bigstockphoto has been bought by Shutterstock. There are rumours of other buy outs all the time.

New sites are still cropping up though, the latest of which is Depositphotos. They had a promotion of paying for uploads for a short period and have rapidly accumulated over a Million Images for sale. One to keep an eye to see if the market is recovering.

Taking Stock from A to Z

It's been a busy year. I have been taking stock photographs from Aberfoyle to Zurich with a few places in between. Now is the time to sit down and prepare them for submission.

I try to keep the amount of processing to a minimum otherwise noise and artefact rejections increase.

Keywording and captioning take up most of the post production time but storing it with the EXIF information in the photograph means that it only has to be done once.

My resolutions for this year are to significantly increase my upload rate and to shoot more sellable photos.

Turn of the Card

My latest venture is designing templates for Business cards. It is a good way of using and promoting my stock photographs.

The important part of the card is the customers details so the design should have an area to contain these. There is a bit of flexibility in their placing and the image should always enhance and not detract from them. The illustration above places the text to the left although it is also possible to move the leaf and make another template with the text on the right. The range of subjects used should reflect the customers requirements so a bit of research is worthwhile.

Once I have completed the design I upload it to Printbusinesscards.com where they will be used by their customers for personal and business cards. You can checkout their Blog here -www.theartofbusinesscards.blogspot.com.

The design above and my other designs can be seen at http://www.printbusinesscards.com/ordering/Iain-Frazer-Business-Cards.php