Calendar

I've been thinking (for several years) about putting a calendar of my images. Finally, the other day, I pulled together a dozen shots from my microstock submissions, and sent them off to my favorite processing lab: Mpix. They did a (predictably) wonderful job, it looks great. Much better than the samples I've seen at places like OfficeMax, Kinkos and Wal*Mart.

Here's what I used:

Jan- Feb-

Mar- Apr-

May- Jun-

Jul- Aug-

Sep- Oct-

Nov- Dec-

Locations: January - Charleston Falls, near Dayton, OH. February - Land Between The Lakes, Western KY. March - Pontiac, IL. April - West Alton, Missouri. May - Niles, OH. June - New River Gorge, WV. July - Funk's Grove, IL. August - Bellflower, IL. September - Edwardsville, IL. October - Highland, IL. November - Seattle, WA. December - Land Between The Lakes, Western KY.

Merry Christmas 2007

Ah, the joys of microstock... This is one of my images (not available through microstock) combined with a tree from 123RF, and some text in Photoshop Elements....

Jackpot!!

Shutterstock always displays your 3 most recent sales. When you get three in a row, people call it a "jackpot". You know, like a slot machine??

Variations

It is interesting to see how different versions of the same image perform at microstock. For example, here's two shots, taken (and uploaded) at the same time, different orientation:

Silly little photos, but what the heck, huh?? But back to the question: How have they performed?? The horizontal version has 6 sales (at SS), the vertical has 5. Looking at a more popular photo shows similar results:

In this case, the horizontal version has 13 sales (at SS), the vertical has 15... So it would seem to pay to do both versions. I've not done so well at that, it'll be something I need to remember.

UPDATED: I checked my numbers more closely. I only have 5 sets of images at Shutterstock where I included both Horizontal and Vertical layouts. The sales breakdown remains pretty close. How close????

Horizontal = 51% Vertical - 49%

So, the logical conclusion is that we can double our sales potential by shooting both formats. While I'm sure life doesn't work quite that simply, it is clear that providing more options to our customers is smart!