June Sales Updates:

Church of St. Nicholas on Tilos island, Greece

June was an unexciting month in terms of photo sales but personally exciting with a two week stay on the little Greek island of Tilos and the installation of new super fast broadband making my work flow way easier (more on those later).

As usual Shutterstock came well out in front. On Demand sales were considerably down this month -pulling down the total revenue earnings.

Alamy made a pleasing second place with 3 downloads. None of them especially large in money terms but still well above typical microstock rates. All three were from my old archive images confirming that the time spent uploading these was worthwhile. My Alamy portfolio has now passed the 2.5k mark.

Istock continues to pull in the revenue with 36 downloads giving them third place.

In fourth place was Dreamstime with 12 downloads including a worthwhile Extended License.

Solar energy powering Tilos island, Greece

Redbubble made fifth place with a single sale of childrens clothing. Yet again some lucky baby is going to have an outfit adorned with a Margaret Thatcher image! For anyone wondering how to get childrens clothing as a product line here is the answer. Click edit on the first template (T Shirts) then click on the I for information symbol (over on the right of screen). Then tick the childrens clothing box before hitting save. Basically you have to opt in to this for each upload to avoid inappropriate images appearing on kids clothes.

Bigstock did well with 14 downloads and made sixth place. A mixed bunch of images this month.

Breaking their four downloads a month rule 123rf continued their slow goodbye (from me) with 6 downloads pushing me to barely $2 to payout level and giving them seventh place this month. Now at six months since I ceased uploading to them.

In eighth place were Mostphotos with a single subscription sale. I'm never quite sure why I continue to bother with them (other than the free back up service) but I have now opted out of their subscription packages so any future sales should be for a reasonable rate. If there are any, of course. Either way I'm not really losing anything there given how few sales I get.

Framing Livadia harbour on Tilos island, Greece

Two weeks of June were taken up by a trip to the small Greek island of Tilos. I hadn't stayed there since 2006 (when I wasn't doing photography) so my images were limited to those from a couple of day trips from the nearby island of Halki. There was plenty to shoot on Tilos including two main villages, two deserted villages, a monastery and a couple of Crusader Knights castles. Of especial interest was the solar/wind power project Tilos have whereby they hope to become self sufficient in power just from renewable sources. This has attracted a lot of attention so getting images of the wind turbine and the solar panel array were high on my shoot list for the trip.

Back home my uploading was advanced greatly by upgrading to 4g broadband. The difference was astounding. Single images now upload almost instantly and larger batches take a few seconds - not the many minutes they used to take. Ironically, this is costing me less per month than my old slower 3g broadband did. In terms of uploading this is certainly a gamechanger and I look forward to getting many more images uploaded going forward.

July looks set to be firmly in the Summer Slowdown mode judging by my sales so far. More next month. Regards, David.