Some info about stock photography

Just for fun, today I got together some of my sales reports from UpperCut Images and checked out which photos have been selling in my collection. I downloaded the photos and opened them all in Photoshop, then used Apple's incredible (life saving) feature called "Exposé" to see all them at once. It looks pretty cool. So here is a screenshot.



I get a lot of emails from photographers asking if my photos sell in stock, which ones sell, which agencies to sign up with, etc etc etc... Hopefully this will help answer some of those questions. Feel free to ask more questions anytime though, I love helping people out with stock stuff.

Check out the screenshot above, it's a good sampling of some of my photos that have sold in the past few months. If an image is on there more than once, that means it sold more than once. I have sales each month and get a royalty check every month, sometimes it's $200, sometimes it's $2,000, it's all over the place. It's definitely not enough to live on, but thats the goal someday. I just need to keep shooting like crazy and building up the collection with high quality images. It's a numbers game. More the better, but the quality needs to be there too.

Without a doubt my biggest inspiration in this whole stock game has been an awesome guy named Ralph Clevenger. I was lucky enough to have him for a few different classes at Brooks and I've never learned more from anyone, ever. When people ask me what I want to do with my career, I usually just say, I want to be Ralph. :)
Definitely check out his beautiful images on his brand new site, and his huge collection on Corbis (search: "Ralph Clevenger")