Competition is fierce in the stock market and if you want to stand out you have to invest. Long gone are the days where your holiday pictures or nice shots from your cousin’s newborn were enough to earn a comfortable pocket money. For the past two years I have watched the quality of pictures on iStockphoto increase constantly and after discussion with many other successful stock photographers quickly decided that the only way forward is to invest: invest  in reasearch, invest in quality.

This has worked well for me. A good photoshooting will cost anywhere between 700EUR and 2000EUR (mainly model, make up, wardrobe and location). Recently I spoke to a stock photographer friend of mine and enjoyed hearing he had spent careful time researching a topic and then investing on producing the idea in the best possible way. Numbers are working for him.

All this time however, I had had no proper means of measuring how successful my investments were. I knew my shooting costs but I could not measure precisely the point where my investment broke even. And this was always a problem.

The goal is that a photoshooting breaks even within 6 months. That means that the series should generate 16% of your costs each month. How do you measure that?

It was only just recently, about 3 weeks ago, that I had a deeper look into LookStat.com, and was surprised to finally discover a tool to help me improve measuring return on investment (ROI). In LookStat you can set up a collection of pictures (suitably the results of one photo session) and LookStat will tell you how much money those pictures have generated. You have different viewing options and charts, making it easy to understand.

I am still missing some important features which make measuring ROI easier, and so I wrote Rahul Pathak, the founder of LookStat, with some suggestions and was pleased to hear that they are already working in that direction! I’ll keep you up to date on any evolution and how you can use it for your pictures.

Thanks to LookStat here are some examples of my measurements, good and bad (click on the picture for the complete series):

	Earned 61% of investment in 4 months
	Earned 8% of investment in 4 months
	Earned 1200% of investment in 13 months
	Earned 221% of investment in 9 months
	Earned 67% of investment in 8 months
	Earned 585% of investment in 20 months
	Earned 13% of investment in 9 months

How do you measure return on investment? How important is it for you? I would be interested in learning about your workflow and number keeping

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Tickets for the Glamour Workshop are officially on sale! The workshop is currently only open for iStockphoto members.

If you are interested in buying tickets but have not yet applied on the iStockphoto forums, then please send me an email with your iStockphoto member name and I will send you a message with all the necessary information.

Numbers are out for iStockphoto and Getty Images. iStockphoto has produced very strong results in February 2010. I doubled my February 2008 earnings and achieved one of my best ever months. 2010 is being very profitable on iStockphoto.com!  Here the chart.

Downloads on the other hand remain constant. My portfolio has not grown which explains the low fluctuation in downloads.

At Getty Images no surprises. January 2010 was good but stays within the normal revenue range.

Comparison

When we look at the complete evolution of my iStockphoto and Getty Images portfolios, the trend remains: iStockphoto revenue increases while Getty Images remains constant.

And most interestingly, the revenue per image on both agencies continue their convergeance.

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On Sunday we will be shooting Lingerie in an incredible Berlin hotel: Pension Funk. The hotel offers the perfect style and setting for high quality and tasteful lingerie pictures. I’m certain you will produce very special pictures in such a great location!

We have 3 big rooms rented. In each room a small group of photographers will work with the models to produce stylish lingerie pictures. Here some pictures of the hotel. All their rooms are in this style.

Mandy

Mandy is one of our highlights at this workshop! She was Pet of the Month in the February 2010 issue of German Penthouse! She will be working with us on Saturday in our studio setting! Here you have a selection of her pictures (remember, there will be no nude or partial nude at our workshop)

Katya

Sandy

Aljona

Now that I have the complete team and the studio I can start planning dates. I am targeting the weekend on the 10th and 11th of April, 2010 in Berlin.

I now only have to get all models confirmed and the location for the Sunday.

I’ll keep you updated

We got a studio! The first day of the Glamour Workshop will be in one of Berlin’s best equipped photo studios. I teamed up with Studio 67 providing you access to their large collection of strobes and light formers, and they will be sharing it all with us!!

I want you to use the opportunity so that you can learn to use all type of light formers and produce high quality glamour photos. So start thinking about ring flashes, strip lights, honeycombs and more, more, more!

Here are some pics of the big studio:

I was recently contacted by www.fotos-verkaufen.de for an interview. Enjoy it here

Oh, and don’t take my comment about the PC too seriously, hehe  I just love how controversial the PC vs Mac topic is.

Let me show you how one same light source can produce two very different pictures just by tweaking things a little. When photographing Laura in late October we produced two series, each with only one beauty dish and a similar setup.

The first lighting produced clean bright pictures. You can see the pictures and setup here. The second setup was similar but produced darker and more intense pictures.

The difference was to simply move the  key light to the left and reduce the power of the light. I also added a black panel in front of my key light to create some shadow. The lens I used in both cases was a rented 100mm 2.8 Canon Macro (an excellent lens for close up portraits!)

Here you have a quick picture of my studio just after we produced the photo.

And here you have the exact lighting setup

One of my main goals in 2010 was to organize two workshops. Well, here we go, I started planning the first one and I have quite some stuff ready!

I want to offer you two days to learn how to produce glamorous photos which you can sell successfully, good taste and politically correct photos which can be used by anybody who needs sexy imagery.

12 Photographers will be welcomed to Berlin over a weekend, 8 hours per day, to work together with

• - 3 make up artists
• - 1 wardrobe stylist
• - and a total of 8 beautiful female and 4 male models (including model releases )

Photographers will be divided into 3 groups and will spend the first day working in a studio and the second in a glamorous location in Berlin. That’s 4 photographers per group, each with their own small group of models.

We will have access to different types of light formers to experiment with so use the opportunity to try new stuff!

Dates and prices will be defined as soon as the organization is complete.

For this workshop I have some nice surprises I will keep you updated on organization and on the goodies directly on this blog.

Stay up-to-date by clicking the workshop picture on the top right of the blog!

Hope to meet you soon