So by now most of you know that Bigstock is no longer BigstockPhoto and 123RF has also redesigned.  I’m surprised for a few reasons:

* Shutterstock (who owns Bigstock now) said the redesign proves they want to move forward with BSP.  What’s the idea of that?  Just keep stock photo buyers happy?  I like it but I wish they’d let us submit to one place and distribute on both networks.  I have many images on BSP that aren’t on SS – I’d like them combined.

* Both 123RF and Bigstock went for the black/white/grey look.  Very simple, clean, easy designs. I’ll be honest – I like both.  But they look VERY similar now!

I’m glad stuff is where I’m used to finding it, somewhat.  Bigstock’s bulk tool seems to be gone, replaced with a much better one at a time engine.  Still wish it worked more like Canstock or even SS.  Submissions are so much easier at those places without the “delay” of javascript.  I don’t want smooth transitions – I want SPEED.

Bigstock listed a lot of new changes here.  I want to look at a few more closely.

• A new and enhanced search engine (interesting – will have to search my stuff later)
• Additional search engine optimizations for Google and others
• Improvements to the collection: checking metadata and enhancing the search algorithm

I’m interested to see how their changes play out.  I would love for BSP to kick it up a notch and remain a player, even growing.  We just saw IStock kill StockXpert and the contributor side of that pretty much sucked (told you I’d be honest!)  I would be grateful and glad to see Shutterstock market and push Bigstock for one-off downloads.

As far as 123RF, their official twitter (does Alex run this ship?) says “The redesign of 123RF is NOT the END, it’s only the beginning!”  I sure hope so!  I’d like to see the beginning of shorter wait times for reviews, less of the truly bad “poor lighting” rejects and of course more dollars and cents.  PS: Note to 123RF, fix the “Check FTP uploads” screen – it doesn’t scroll right.  It looks a right mess.

What do you think of the changes?  Good, bad, indifferent?

I’ve started to push images and get reviews.  I was pending this morning but a lot of batches were reviewed and now I’m starting to go live everywhere.  I can’t wait to see how the food images sell!

Our shooting has started off very well too – I want to get ahead a little. We have now completed 6 food shoots in the last 9 days – about 200 new photos to submit now.

We need to plan our dishes for this week – we’ve done a lot of desserts so I think it’ll be great to get a few lunches and maybe an entree out this week.

What are your favorite foods?  What foods do you really LOVE to cook?  And eat?  I’m really interested in the types of things you enjoy.

Let me quote myself.

I am not going to stick around and pretend to be something I’m not.  Too many people set goals and fail to reach them, yet still continue the journey unfazed.  I often share my experiences and ideas in hopes of helping you.  If I can’t help myself first, I can’t help you.

If I fail to reach both goals (10k images, $25k for the year) by 12/31/09, NiltoMil.com will close for good whether I continue to shoot microstock or not.

At this point in the year it is obvious that I will not reach 10k approved images OR $25,000 this year.

I am modifying what I wrote above.  I am not going to destroy or delete Nil. I am going to stop posting earnings, stop posting ideas until they are working better.  I AM going to keep Nil up for the archives and the posts that often get referenced.  I AM going to continue to put up posts of interest to me – whether that’s of interest to anyone else or not.  My journey will continue.

I need to help myself first.  I need to figure out the steps I should be taking to reach my goal  and when I do, I’ll be back full force with the full effort I can give Nil.  Until then, expect sporadic updates on what I’m doing, how stock is going and what I am trying to do to improve.

Today is going to be fun I hope – I’m going to show you how I edit.  I don’t claim it’s the ONLY way.  I’m not even sure it’s the BEST way.  But it’s fast.  REALLY fast.

This image was shot over grey instead of white because I like the flexibility of being able to isolate on white OR having some texture to a background if I want to colorize the available texture with some sort of blend mode.  For stock, I’d always turn this white though and let the buyer decide what to do with it later.

The entire edit ends up taking less than 2 minutes.  You can add another 15 seconds because after I finished recording I realized his shirt had a few small mistakes on the edge so I cleaned it up.  At any rate, editing at this speed would give you 30 images per hour or slightly under.  At even 20 images an hour, you could edit 100 images in 5 hours.  That would be quick and gives you 3 hours of “work day” to keyword, upload, push and submit those 100 images.  People have asked me before how I plan to sub 100 a day – this is the general idea.  Of course some days you have to shoot.  Some days you don’t get 100 edited and subbed.  Heck, MOST days I don’t.

Every trick you can learn will help you.  The difference in 10 images per hour and 15 is also the same as 1000 online vs 1500 or 10,000 vs. 15,000.  The difference in 5 images per hour and 30 is 6x your income each month.  Speed IS necessary.

Click the photo above for the video on what I did.  There’s no audio – it’s a visual process.  Tools used:

• Wand – grab the grey background.
• Lasso – select and unselect with shift and alt after the initial selection has been made.
• Feather 1, backspace – clear the grey background.
• F5 – custom action for curves.  Just brightens it up 2 steps.  I undid one to find a happy balance.
• [ and ] to resize the brush.
• Dodge/highlights around the hair.
• Eraser to trim unclean edges.
• Contrast for skin tone.
• Clone for the logo.
• Brush – for the screwdriver (alt-clicked the color nearby to grab it)
• Smart sharpen – 60/1.3 I think.
• After the vid ends, I also used clone on the edge of the shirt a bit.

To show you what my 2 minutes did, I’ve uploaded a watermarked version of this finished image to here.  One of my next goals is to upload some actual Photoshop tutorials – one using only the keyboard, NO mouse.  One as a speed drill and whatever else you guys want.

First of all, I know this is my second post on exclusivity in the last week and so it may appear that I’m considering it.  At this point, we are not.  I do want to consider what exclusivity agencies offer and why it may be beneficial in our future or for others.

123RF

Type of Exclusivity: Per image.
Method: “May be arranged” – asked support and they had no idea.
Terms: An exclusive agreement may be arranged for a better commission.

Dreamstime

Type of Exclusivity: Per image or per photographer.
Method: Per image – upon image submission, check the box.  Per photographer – submit an application.
Terms: Exclusive images earn 10% ($0.10 to $1.40) more per download.  Exclusive photographers earn $.20 per accepted image + 10% more per download.

Fotolia

Type of Exclusivity: Per image.
Method: When submitting a file, choose “Yes” to “Is this file exclusive to Fotolia?”
Terms: Commission is 17% higher for exclusive images.  Maximum sales price on all sizes may also be set higher after contributor reaches the Bronze level instead of Emerald for non-exclusives.  Exclusive images may be opted out of subscriptions.

IStockPhoto

Type of Exclusivity: Per photographer.
Method: Apply when you have 250 downloads, a minimum 50% approval rating, and have no royalty-free stock images, vector illustrations, video footage or Flash files available at other agencies.
Terms: Higher royalties (+5 to +20% so 25-100% higher), extended license bonus, larger upload queue, Exclusive-only events, higher search rankings, business cards.   Full artist Exclusivity means no images, video or audio files may be sold on other royalty-free sites or businesses with the exception of Getty Images.

Bigstock

Type of Exclusivity: None.

MostPhotos

Type of Exclusivity: None.

Shutterstock

Type of Exclusivity: None.

StockXpert

Type of Exclusivity: None.

So what did we learn?  I think it’s safe to say I won’t be going exclusive for a long time, if ever.  The “best” royalty increase is with IStock on the high end (20%) but as you know, my sales always suck at Istock.  So second best royalty increase is Fotolia.  Again, I make *some* money on FT but not my best results.  17% more wouldn’t help me enough.

The most likely candidate would be either a) Shutterstock figuring out that exclusive is the way to go or b) Dreamstime.  Dreamstime gives one of the “worst” exclusive bonuses (10%) but 10% of my monthly earnings would almost eliminate one of my smaller agency’s income (say 123RF).  Until that extra 10% would eliminate as well as give me a bonus, I can’t consider it.

Exclusivity has benefits for those photographers in one of three situations:

1) The Time Swamp – if you have a full time job that isn’t microstock and you simply don’t have time to upload *everywhere* you may be better off spending time building your gallery on *one* site.   At this time, I’d suggest Shutterstock though, and  since they don’t have an exclusive program…

2) The EasySimple – it’s “easier” to upload to one site.  You don’t absolutely have to  use IPTC data for keywords and descriptions, you can manage reading the news on that site, keep up with what’s  new,  and even focus your attention on what downloads when and how you can better yourself.

3) The Student – if you’ve had trouble getting accepted to Shutterstock and IStock and you want to maximize  earning potential it may be worthwhile to try submitting to only Fotolia or Dreamstime for awhile as you grow your talents, not just your gallery.  This is by far the best reason to go Exclusive right now.  Dreamstime and Fotolia are both “difficult” agencies so if you can master them there’s nothing stopping you from Shutterstock and IStock.  Dreamstime and Fotolia both also offer per-image exclusivity so you can “test” exclusivity and see what you like and don’t like about it.

Are you exclusive?  Why or why not?

The top image comes from Philadelphia – we shot with these three models and one other on our trip.  They are all fantastic models and we hope to shoot with them all again!  We’re actually shooting Ronice’s wedding in April  so we know we’ll see her soon at least.

The next image is Laura – one of the best “character” models we had on the trip for sure!  She did a number of different looks including this nautical theme.  I like the red, white & blue theme as well as the crazy weather around her.  It was a very windy, dark day but we made some great images, I think.

Joseph was our lone Virginia Beach model.  We scheduled 14 models and he was the only one who showed at all.  It was a very difficult day and we considered turning around right then and coming home.  Joseph saved the day with hundreds of awesome photos.

One more trip photo for now – the Assateague ponies.  We now have a 20×24″ of this on our wall in the studio.  This print looks FANTASTIC at that size.  I love the subtle colors in it and the sense of depth with the second pony.  It reminds me how incredible our trip was.

Finally, we’re back to the studio for a little mother/daughter action where Michelle and Kelsey took over in the studio and produced some fun images on white.  This is just one of the series but we had so much fun!  We need to get those two back in here soon.

Once in awhile it’s great to remember that we enjoy our job and that we’re pretty good at it.  Sometimes that gets lost in SEO, business, goal setting, day-to-day business operations, etc. but it’s still important to remember what we do and why we do it.  I love being a stock photographer and despite having many other roles in my life (father, business owner, wedding photographer, book publisher, author) I still enjoy stock more than almost anything else in my life.  It’s the perfect job for me and I want to remember that.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work. – Thomas Edison

It’s always great when a project starts to gather momentum. I wanted to take a moment to AGAIN thank my blog readers for coming to see what I’m up to. I know the last month has been off but it’s going to get really exciting around here VERY soon. October 8th and counting!

There have been a few bits mentioned about NiltoMil.com that I think warrant posting about:

1) Image of the Day at Snapvillage for 100 Yard Dash – my #1 most popular image ever.

2) We’re doing an interview with Moodboard, a stock photo site that seems to have some cool options for selling your images.

3) More SnapVillage blog love – Inclusion in their “Top 20 Microstock Resource Sites”

4) Google loves us more. We’re up to #4 on “microstock blog”, #3 on “microstock blogs”, #7 on “microstock earnings” and #1 for “microstock goals” (no quotes on any search). We’re no Microstock Diaries yet. Lee is a fantastic blogger and anyone not reading him is missing a TON of great info. All we can do is try to be another voice in a growing sea.

Adding all this love to our TWO new sponsorships (ProPhotoRental.com and ThinkTankPhoto.com – see WeWillExplore.com for more details) and we’re feeling really excited to get back to work and ready to rock this winter in microstock. We have 5 more weddings before the end of the season. I will finish our last edits hopefully on November 9th, the day after our last wedding. Once that happens, I’m full time microstock for 6 months. Excitement!!!