Interviewed by the Breakfast Stock Club

Grunge heart on turquoise blue background. Available from Dreamstime through link below. Happy Valentine's Day!

See this on Dreamstime

I've been submitting stock photos for a while now but didn't really start adding to my portfolio until late last year. As I grow my stock portfolio, I've found it helpful to join a few forums, including those on the various sites I submit to such as Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and Alamy Images.  Most forums have a great community and it's been a big help to get advice from others, both those starting out and those who have been selling stock photos for many years.

Last week, I was interviewed about my stock photo sales by the Breakfast Stock Club. I've been getting their emails for a while and just joined their group on Facebook. The idea behind the article was to encourage new stock photographers. Since I'm a freelance writer as well as a photographer, I found it especially fun to be the interviewee instead of the interviewer. 

Conventional wisdom these days is that you need to license both RM and higher end RF on the macros as well as more generic RF on the micros. My images are split between microstock and macrostock, so I can experiment with backgrounds such as the one above that I made with my lensbaby and my wacom tablet, licensing a few 100 photos on the micros quickly, or licensing photos on Alamy for $100 or more a pop.

My portfolio is still very small, but  I'm encouraged to keep uploading. Here's the article - I hope you find it helpful. And here's to everyone's continued success!

 (The image above was made with my lensbaby composer and the macro filter attachment. I then drew the  heart using my wacom tablet. When I have more images to share, I plan to blog about the lensbaby. Here's one of my  favorites from my website. It's so much fun and the images I've made with it have nearly recouped my cost already).

More Time Travel - History Pin

As you know from my Time Travel post, I love old photos and I love historical fiction, so when I came across a rather old tweet from Ellen Boughn @ellenboughn "Imagine being an author of historical novels with this very cool tool," I had to check it out. People all across the globe sharing their old photos - a really cool concept.

Check it out   

and don't miss the video that explains the concept.

It looks to be mostly European photos right now but if you pan to the left you'll see there's plenty of empty real estate for we Americans to start adding those pix from Grandma's attic as well (I know the attic is the worst place to keep those old photos, but many of us do).

I also like the fact that their terms of use protect the contributor's copyrights and restrict re-publication of the photos on other sites and downloading unless you expressly give them permission, unlike so many sites that want you to upload your materials and co-opt all your rights once you do.

If you add any photos to history pin, add a comment and a link below.

This photo of Rome is from 2007, but it could easily be from 1907.  I don't have any old scans on my laptop so I opted for a photo with an old feel. You can see this and more photos from Rome here. Search Amazon.com for ellen boughn

Holidays are big sellers. I've licensed this photo and other similar ones from this shoot more than two dozen times this week on various microstock websites. Also licensed a lot of the 2011 backgrounds. This one popped up as recent download on Dreamstime.com (you can find it here) and I've got several different ones on Shutterstock.com (my biggest sellers) and Fotalia.com too. Next year I'll try a different setup on macrostock sites to do a comparison. Decent download numbers for a traditionally slow week with a small portfolio ranging from 37 to 99 images per site. 

Click here to see a few of the other shots on Shutterstock

Pitching Travel Articles & Photos to Magazines in the UK and the US (Print is not dead)

A Swedish pal from one of the photo forums that I subscribe to was asking about how to find English-language magazines for an article that she wrote about surfing in Ireland.  A fellow photographer wrote back with links to a book with markets in the UK. It's funny, I never think of pitching articles to other English-speaking countries and this got me to realize that such an effort makes sense, especially for travel articles and travel photographs.

For markets in the US, I have always counted on Writer's Market  (and Photographer's Market too). Both give you a year's subscription to an online database that keeps everything quite current. I usually buy them every few years for the guidelines and for setting out the different types of magazines. A quick online search will help insure the info is not outdated once the book is more than a year old. Call me old-fashioned, but  I like having a book that I can mark up and annotate. For me, print will never be dead.

It's interesting, the book that the UK Photographer/writer suggested, The Freelance Photographer's Market, is available for purchase at Amazon in the US (click on photo below) and in the UK. It has greeting card and calendar markets too. Here's the link to the same book on the Amazon UK site:
Freelance-Photographers-Market-on amazon UK
Or you can click on the photo below to link to the US site. 

The one bad review complained that it was all UK markets, but with the Internet today I'd think that's a real plus. In fact, it opens up a whole new world of markets for you.

So, if you want to search US markets, the books above are a safe bet. In the UK, I'd trust my Photo forum buddy. I'm going to give it a try soon and will report back on this site.  

The US books mentioned are also available on the UK site.

If you decide to purchase any of these books or even just want to take a look, please use one of these links.
Thanks.

New Photos from Maine

Maine Gallery on www.campyphotos.com

I just uploaded some new photos from Maine to my website www.campyphotos.com. They are available to license as stock and will soon be available for purchase as fine art matted and framed prints. Contact me if you'd like more info.

Time Travel

Mississippi Bayou, 1939.  Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Makes me think of Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn. All photos in this post were taken by photographers commissioned by the Farm Services Administration or the Office of War Information.

     Since this blog is about travel photography, I thought that traveling back in time to look at photos taken by photographers traveling across the US back in the 1930's and 40's to document rural America and the World War II effort throughout the US, certainly fit in with the blog's theme--and these are far superior to any I have to offer. 

     I love the old Black & White Photos by the FSA photographers--Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Gordon Parks, who, among others, have inspired me since I first learned about the Farm Services Administration's photography project back in high school. I didn't realize that there was also a small treasure trove of color images such as those shown here.

Cincinnati, Ohio circa 1942. Photo by John Vachon.

A member of the Stock Imaging Forum--from Sweden (gotta love how the web makes the world so much smaller-thanks, Kathleen!)--just posted the link to an article on the Denver Post's Photo Blog and I felt that I just had to share it. All of the photos posted here are from the FSA or the Office of War Information and were commissioned by the Government, between 1939 and 1943. They are the property of the Library of Congress.

      The color in these images is wonderful, as is how well they capture America at that time. The quality of the transparencies is really great after all these years. I didn't realize that color film was that sophisticated back in the 1930's and 40's. 

 So Carolina. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer

Our government was really enlightened when it hired so many wonderful photographers to go out and document America during the Depression and World War II

Be sure to check out the rest (there are 69 shown full frame size-just a small sampling of the 1,600 color photos taken by the FSA/OWI during that era ) on The Denver Post's Plog Photo Blog
 
 Plog Photo Blog 
and even more from the Library of Congress (see link below)

Tennessee, 1943. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer.

I can't help wondering if this photo was the inspiration for that famous poster of "Rosie the Riveter" 


The detail in the photos is truly incredible. 


You can download full-resolution copies of these and the other FSA/OWI photos from the Library of Congress website: The Library of Congress  They have 1,600 color photos alone from this era. It's an amazing resource.

A Lawyer Who Makes His Living Selling Travel Stock Photos

Just read an article in microstock diaries about an Australian lawyer who gave up his law practice a few years ago to travel around the world shooting travel photographs - a dream for many. It was of particular interest as I left the practice of law here in the states some time ago to spend more time with my daughter, first working as a freelance writer and eventually as a freelance writer and photographer.

I'm not in a position to leave my family behind,  hit the road with my D700 and travel like Holger Mette but I found his story encouraging. The article says that in the last 6-12 months he's been able to fund travel costs of roughly $18,000/year with a portfolio of 2000 photos in microstock. (He also has an editorial portfolio at macrostock agency Alamy- I searched the site and as of today he has around 750 photos there).  It seems that 2000 photos online is the magic number at which returns per photo start to inch toward $1/month.

Alamy has traditionally been a good outlet for travel photographers--both for emerging photographers as well as seasoned pros. I found it interesting to note that the micros were working for travel too as they are often seen as an outlet for slick commercial images and lifestyle photos. Mette says that he plans his travel "around what I want to shoot and when... I try to avoid shooting what I think will sell rather than what I would like to creatively or editorially." Like many photographers, especially those who have left other jobs to follow their muse, he values the freedom that shooting stock photography gives him and does not expect his income from photography to replace what he made as an attorney.

What I found particularly encouraging is that he shoots what he wants and shoots travel rather than lifestyle and still gets a respectable return per image. In fact, it appears that his people photos (unreleased) end up on Alamy as RM editorial images, so his photos on the micros are mostly of places--again not exactly the type of photos that are supposed to do well on the micros, and yet apparently they do.

The stock photography market has been in a state of flux since well before I entered it in late 2008 and the general wisdom seems to be that you should have some photos in both camps--macro and micro--especially if you are new to the business. Mette's experience seems to bear that out. Something to think about. Here's a link to the article:

Lee Torrens' Article about Holger Mette

Photo Copyright © Marianne A. Campolongo.