April Sales Updates:

 

Chancellor Lamont - archive sale on Alamy

A steady if undramatic month in April with with the usual suspects keeping their place at the top end of the rankings.

In first place for the second month running were Redbubble with 5 product sales. Three T shirts, a greeting card and an artboard print were purchased here. 

Second place went to Alamy with 2 downloads. Both of these were from my B/W archives - Norman Lamont (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) and a good $$ sale of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Shutterstock took third place. I hit 5 On Demand sales this month and 3 Single sales. As expected, I also moved up to Level 3 which gives a 25% commission on credit sales. I have already noticed higher amounts earned for On Demand and some bigger subscription sales in the $0.50 to $0.70 range (i.e higher than the old fixed $0.36 I used to get under the previous schedule). Obviously, still plenty of the $0.10 sales in the mix as well.

Fourth place went to Istock with 31 downloads and a reasonable RPD. Travel and music festival shots

Bexhill Hospital - welcome to my portfolio

featured heavily here as ever. Barcelona University seems to be an ongoing seller.

Fifth place was taken by Dreamstime with a bigger than usual 9 downloads (including the rare beast of an actual credit sale).

Adobe came in sixth place with 5 downloads.

Bringing up the bottom of the list in seventh place were Bigstock with just 1 download. There's a problem here as the Bridge to Bigstock link seems to have stopped working. No images approved at Shutterstock from the last week of April have moved over. Its been mentioned on the Microstockgroup forum so it's not just me. It's not the first time this has happened and previously got sorted out in the end.

New shooting included some images of the welcome sign at Bexhill Hospital in Sussex. I had an appointment there so made the most of the opportunity!

Thames Television studios in London, 1989

I have also been revisiting my old archive material and scanning some images that I never got round to before. The Gibraltar Chronicle newspaper building, Capital Radio in London and the Thames Television studios featured in these. Because these were all shot between 1987-1989 I didn't bother uploading to Shutterstock because of their strange rule that any images taken before 1990 have to have a signed property release for each one. Like they cannot believe that any contributor could possibly have taken photographs before that date and must have stolen them from somewhere. Nobody else has an issue with this. 

For anyone that's interested in the technical details of scanning I am using an Epson Perfection V300 Photo scanner. This comes with a special holder for both 35mm negative strips and 35mm colour transparencies. I have scanned some medium format (120) negatives where the point of interest fell within the 35mm size area (if that makes sense). The V300 is an old model but they may well have an updated version available. 

It is always strange initially to be working with these old images because they look so different to todays grain free crisp digital images but, of course, that is exactly the appeal to photo buyers looking for an authentic older look. Regards, David.