 Today, we're talking stock photography and a few other odds and ends. My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. I wanted to be a landscape photographer. But with a family to feed and bills to pay, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. It was time to follow my passion. Come along on my journey to become the best black in my photographer I can be. Whether it be film or digital, I will be sharing what I learned through my successes and my failures and hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Riding the Edge. Welcome to another Riding the Edge vlog. Today I'm going to do a little update on where I am with stock photography. I've been asked to cover this topic by a subscriber to the channel. And to be honest, I've been kind of putting it off. I've been kind of dreading actually making this video. So let's start with where I'm at right now with stock photography. Currently I have about 247 assets uploaded to Shutterstock with about 140 of those as still images and 107 as video clips. And to date I've not sold yet a video clip. All my sales have been from my image uploads. I've sold 22 in the last nine months, which really is not very impressive, which amounts to almost no money, honestly. So let's take a second here and I'll show you basically everything that has sold so far. We'll start with the most downloaded and then we'll go to the least. Nature, it seems that my cover bridge photos tend to be downloaded more frequently. Now the reason that I've been dreading doing this video is because for the last few months my excitement for doing stock photography has kind of waned. And I've been kind of having these mental gymnastics on whether stock photography is something that I really want to be doing in the future and if it's something right for me. I don't think I'm going to need a year to figure out where I stand on stock photography. Recently I watched a video from a lady named Rachel Lurch and I'll put a link either up here somewhere or in the description. If you're really interested in stock photography, you want to hear the honest scoop, I would advise that you watch her video. She's someone who has done it for about three years and she's laid a case for why she's doing it and why she's not doing it and that kind of thing and I actually found it pretty interesting. And the things that I've been kind of wrestling with are the time versus the reward and for me time is money, time is cost. And when I first started I started thinking well I can make a little money with stock photos, a little money over here and put it all together and make something. When I start thinking about how much time and money is spent finding these images and then uploading them, doing all the tagging and all that stuff, key wording. I'm having a hard time convincing myself that it's something that I should be investing in for the future. I have, for an example, one of my most downloaded images, I almost kind of regret actually uploading it now. But one of my most uploaded images, which has only been downloaded like three times, I have made more money from print sales on that image than I have on stock photography. And it got me thinking that all the money and time that I spend putting these photos up for pennies, I could be spending on promoting and marketing my own photography, my images, my prints, my products, my zine, that kind of thing, books, whatever I'm going to be working on in the future, clients. I could spend more time on that with probably a better chance of actually making money for the life of that print or the life of that image. A good percentage of the images I load to stock will not sell. Say I sell 20% of the images I upload, maybe 20% of them get downloaded or used. That's not a real good return on my time and effort to produce those images. Now, I'm not trying to discourage anybody else from doing this. These are the conclusions that I have come to after kind of weighing the effort and cost and time versus reward. And it really seems to me that the only people that are really benefiting big on stock photography are the stock photography agencies and the people actually buying the images for very little money. It's hard to get your head around the idea that I can get 25 cents for an image that someone can launch a whole ad campaign for and pay very little money for. Or go out and sell big prints or calendars or whatever, and my payment is 25 cents. So that's the kind of the mental back and forth that I've been kind of wrestling with. So this video really isn't to try and talk to other people out of doing stock photography. I'm just saying that I don't think it's a good fit for me. The problem is you'll get a sell and then you think, oh, maybe I should be doing more of those. But the reality is that's just enough to keep you going. It's stringy along. For me, now if I lived in a different area, I might be more into the stock photography. But I'm kind of a live kind of rural. And I've got to drive anywhere I want to take pictures basically. I need to drive there that just cost and time and gas and all that stuff. The amount of times I would have to have a photo downloaded for it to make enough money to cover just the cost of producing it is crazy. I mean, at least one image would have to be downloaded at least 100 times to make it even to where I might break even on that image. 100 times is like 25 bucks. What are the odds of an image being used more than 100 times? I don't know what that is. At this point, the most downloaded image I have has been downloaded three times and I've got a few of those. But when you practically think about continuing on down the future, how many thousands of hours and how much money have you put into something that's got such a small reward? It seems like there are tons and tons of people on YouTube telling you should go out and shoot stock photography for pocket change. It's a very hot topic and I think a lot of these people are just seeing that they're talking about it because it drives people to their channel. So how about you? How is your stock photography experience going? If you can convince me to rethink this decision, at this point in time, I don't see how it makes a lot of economical sense to put so much effort into something that has such little payout. I mean, a couple hundred bucks a month would be nice, but at what cost? How many hours and how many thousands of dollars are you going to put into something in hopes that it will pay off sometime in the future? To change the subject a little bit, I've been kind of playing with the idea of changing my format just a little bit on the videos. Typically I would go out on a shoot and I would try to vlog with some kind of topic while making images. And that really does seem to kind of get in the way of actually making the images, trying to focus on two media for things at one time. So I think I might try to separate the topic and the shoots. When I go out on a shoot, I'd like to take you along, show you what I'm photographing, how I'm making the images, just keep it real basic. Then maybe I'll do these separate topic videos, whether I make a studio, which this is not, but I may have to make a little bit of a studio or just do a mountain yard or something. Just kind of do a topic oriented type video. Something that you can leave comments, we can kind of get a dialogue going back and forth. Something I can learn from you, maybe I can spark some thoughts in your head from how I look at them. This is a photography YouTube channel. We're going to still talk photography, but we're going to actually try to do the photography shooting videos and keep those kind of more focused on the actual project of making those images out on the field. I don't want to be done talking head, but there are a lot of things I'd like to talk about, things that I've observed in photography over the years, how things might be a little different now. I still think I have something to offer in photography as far as some knowledge, just because I've been doing it for so long. I've been trying to figure out a way to see your photography. I show mine all the time in these videos, but I would love to see what you're working on. I'm thinking that Instagram might be a good platform for that if you're on Instagram. Why don't we start a hashtag, hashtag show RTE and I'll follow that and I get a chance to see what you're working on. I'd love to see your photos. I'd like to see more of a community around this channel. I learned a lot from other photographers. I'd love to. I'm sure I could learn a lot from what you're doing and maybe we can figure out a way to highlight some of the work that you're sharing with the viewers in the future. Well, I've talked long enough. I'm babbling along here. So until next time, thanks for coming along. The Rag.