It really offers a lot of creative possibilities.

Enjoy!

Laetitia Casta

Lara Stone

Emily DiDonato

Alessandra Ambrosio

Karolina Kurkova

Adriana Lima

Jessica Stam

I set up a small “Guess Who’s who” on facebook. Are you good? Can you recognize any of them!?

welcome http://www.purplelash.com

I can’t say much more at this point. Go have a look and soon there will be more to come!

Enjoy,
Luis

However, rest assured. I will continue posting once in a while when I have good quality material to post, videos, lighting schemes, and such. And of course, as soon as the project is launched, you will be the first to know!

I admit, the title of this blog post is a bit oversized. There has been a lot written about how to produce images that sell. The list is of websites and books offering information on this topic is long. However, I think there is one point of advice which I want to emphasize and share with you.

You can reduce this advice to asking yourself these two simple questions:

Who are your customers?

What do your customers want?

It is really important that you think about these questions. Producing stock photography is not about producing nice, beautiful images. It is about producing images people want. In order to answer the two questions above, here is a three step process which I follow myself every few months:

How are your images being used?
Have you seen your images in action? Collect all your images in action and try to observe how designers used your images. Spend time analysing the designs and ask yourself what attributes of your images are important in those designs. Is it the copy space you added? Or perhaps the interesting tight crop? Is it the expression of your models? Is it the concept which works well? iStockphoto offers you the option to see some of the designs with your pictures. Use that option!

This will teach you what designers do with your images and let you identify your strengths and weaknesses.

Analyse designs in your segment
What segment of photography are you specialised in? Is it Fashion? Glamour? Landscape photography? Go out there and buy magazines regularly, surf the web, look at adverts, and try to understand how images in your photography segment are being used within designs. What is it that you see often? What trends can you spot?

This will teach you what designers are looking for and allow you to focus on that.

How is your competition doing?
Every stock agency has its heavy weight photographers. Find those photographers in your area of specialisation and look at their pictures. Learn from them. What pictures sell most? Do you see a relationship with your findings regarding design’s? It is not about copying ideas, it is about identifying trends. Design trends change every few years (ever heard of Web 2.0?) and you have to adapt.

What strategy do you follow to improve your sales?

Follow me on twitter, it’s fresh

I am often asked if it is worth to upload photos there and sell them; is it possible to make money there?

I joined Seen.by fairly early, and was invited to offer pictures for sale. Back then, only three of my pictures were available for purchase, but since, almost all my pictures have been made available.

I don’t want to dissapoint you but my income at the page has been very low. Below 100EUR in the time I have been there. I can only speculate why this is so, but I believe the main reason is that my pictures are not well suited for printing and using as decoration. I have not spoken to other photographers on Seen.by and cannot offer you any comparisons.

Nevertheless, Seen.by enjoys one of the best collections around with top photographers contributing. The selection process is rigurous but once you are in it is a great place to show off your pictures. So I think everyone should give it a try.

Are you already on Seen.by? How have sales been for you?

Due to my holidays I was not able to post my April statistics on time, so here you have them with some delay. The month of April was weaker and did not continue the upwards trend of the previous months. When compared to 2008 the dip in April appears to be normal. In 2009 April stayed flat with regards to March. So no need to worry with the April 2010 numbers.

The months before summer are usually weak and it is a great time to shoot and get ready for the post-summer large volume sales!

Getty royalties are exactly the same as they were a year ago. These are the numbers for March 2010 (the April numbers are coming out next week). I am happy with that considering the more expensive Getty collections are struggling to keep up with the changes in the stock market.

Royalty per Image slightly down on iStockphoto. At Getty Images slightly up for March.

How has your business been going? Did your April see a peak too? Are you preparing your portfolio for post-summer sales?

Follow me on twitter, it’s modern.

I’m away for two weeks travelling to Japan and Thailand. Do not expect any posts during that time. As soon as I’m back I’ll be fresh with new ideas!

Take care and keep shooting

Luis