Photo page gets better!

Yes, the page that showcases your beautiful photos, that’s the one.

First, we’ve completely taken the page apart, analyzed each section under the microscope. Then, using advanced user experience optimization techniques and voodoo dolls, we pieced the page back together. Over the years (8.5 years to be exact) the photo page has evolved into a complete state of cohesion, where each piece of functionality is strongly related to one another. Euphoria.

Now the actual breakdown:

1. Image Zoom – no flash player needed (read: works on iPads!), works within the page (no more popups!), faster load times, easy on/off switch.
2. Purchasing options – stands out more, redesigned and cleaned-up “Help Me Choose” behavior (no popup, loads directly on page).
   
3. Share tools – they show up in a non-intrusive expandable panel, Google+ added. Share away!
4. Previous and Next links added to the top of the image to navigate within current album.
5. My Photo dashboard – new layout for the contributor info related to the image. Why is it yellow? So that you can tell it apart from the content that other people will see about your photo.
6. Similar images recommendations added, which is like a reality check to make sure no one else is shooting and posting rare coin collection photos.
7. Faster page loading speed with primary content available ahead of the rest of the page being fully ready. There’s really no visual way to explain this, except voooosh!

Enjoy!
ShutterPoint Team

What it takes to sell photos online

It’s no secret that some photographic subjects are highly marketable, while others are harder and harder to sell. Enormous growth of the stock photo industry in the recent years coupled with internet expansion has opened doors to the world of stock photography for many photographers.

Stock photo agencies around the world have accumulated quite a large number of “non-dated” images that will not need to be replaced any time soon. These images include animals, sunsets, clouds, and natural landmarks – the very subjects many photographers love to take pictures of.  ShutterPoint’s own statistics confirm that these subjects are in high supply but demand is scarce.

While these images do sell, getting “a piece of the pie” in these categories is hard. (Please see the Selling Photos on ShutterPoint for more examples of low marketability subjects).

The key to success in the stock photography field is to figure out what the buyers of photography want, and then provide it. Many photographers shoot what they want instead of what buyers want, and then are disappointed with their stock sales. If you are seriously trying to sell your photography, you need to choose your subject wisely. Before taking a picture intended for stock use, ask yourself how such an image may be used. If you are not sure what it can be used for, the photo buyer won’t be either. On the other hand, if you can create an image the buyers need, they will buy it from you regardless of your level of experience or who you are, often paying a higher price. This makes producing WHAT BUYERS WANT a simple, but often overlooked concept in stock photography.

The above has been taken from the ShutterPoint Marketable Photography Guide. If you have not yet taken a look at it, we strongly recommend all photographers serious about selling photos to read it and try to follow the tips in the guide.

ShutterPoint photographers can get the guide free with any active storage space subscription.

Image Collections: Thematic Concepts

Sometimes we just don’t know what to search for.

Lets say you are a graphic artist tasked to build a brochure for the US Army recruitment office. You may have an idea for a photo to use in the graphic, but it’s not very specific because you were asked to portray patriotism.

How would you portray patriotism? Is it a proud soldier, an American flag, maybe uniform, or some kind of combination? Naturally, you’d turn to stock photos and look for an image that catches your eye. For designers, looking for that perfect graphic translates into flipping through many pages of online stock image search results.

It’s frustrating and difficult to find a conceptual graphic when all the stock photos are tagged with flat keywords like “man, flag, weapon.”

But wait, what’s this? Collection? This is just what you, the designer, were looking for! Modern War – Men, Weapons, and Pain. A hand-picked collection of relevant stock photos on your topic of interest. War, army, soldiers, jet, tank, pain, military, patriotism, it’s all here.

This new thematic collection feature is in beta. More collections will become available in the coming months.

P.S. Patriotism may look something like this:

Patriotism Photo - War Photo

More Eyes on Your Photos

We want your wonderful photos to get noticed and that is why we bring you…:

ShutterPoint-Facebook integration!

So, a couple of things.

1. Each photo on ShutterPoint now features a “Like” button. You can “Like” any of the photos, yes including your own, and it will appear on your Facebook wall.
2. ShutterPoint is now wired to share your photo activity on Facebook without you lifting a finger!There is a number of benefits gained from this new functionality:
   
   ○ Get additional exposure for your photos through Facebook.
   ○ Update your friends of your ShutterPoint activity.
   ○ Help spread the word about your images and images of other members.
   

   Here’s how this actually works:

   For example, when you upload a new photo to SP, an update will be posted on your FB wall and your friends will automatically find out.

   

   When you add a favorite album, favorite photo, or favorite member to your ShuttePoint profile, this too can be posted on your wall and your FB friends will automatically find out.

   

   Finally, when you comment on a photo on ShutterPoint, your Facebook friends will find out.

   
   Wait, there’s more! If you decide to change your own profile pic or e-mail address or even gender status on Facebook, those updates will automatically be reflected on your ShutterPoint profile page. Anyone planning a gender change?

   You can enable all this wonderful functionality through the Account Sharing Page.

   Through this page, you can pick and choose which type of ShutterPoint activity will be shared with your friends on Facebook.

Now that you are empowered with the new Facebook features, be aware that sharing your photos with friends is addictive, so remain sensible!

PS: Don’t worry about posting to many updates at once, Facebook has a nice feature of condensing wall posts into a nice little pragraph with a link to see the rest.

Activity Tape: Stay In The Loop

Seems like everything is going “social” these days and we at ShutterPoint are following suit!

Why? Because everyone wants to know everything at the very moment it happens and we gladly support this concept.

The new Activity Tape feature alerts users of updates from their fan base.

Lets say you are a member photographer and you happen to like Murdock’s SP photo gallery, and so some time ago, you clicked to ‘become a fan of’ Murdock. Now that the activity tape feature is in place, ShutterPoint.com will display updates when Murdock –

– becomes a fan of someone else
– uploads a new photo
– posts something in ShuttePoint Forums
– comments on someone else’s photo

We think it’s pretty cool! Keep in mind that if you are using a previously customized version of the home page, you will need to click ‘Customize this page’ from your home page and make sure ‘Activity Tape’ section is enabled for viewing.

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

ShutterPoint on Facebook!

ShutterPoint now has a Facebook page! Become a fan and stay in touch with the news and updates from ShutterPoint.com.

ShutterPoint’s Facebook Page

Don’t forget to click on “Like” button and you will start getting SP updates on your Facebook wall.

Sorry Sheryl..

So last night I was confronted with the fact that a mysterious mishap happened during the final compilation of the Marketable Photography Guide 2009.

Apparently, a page containing an interview with photographer Sheryl Kasper has “fallen through the cracks” and did not make it into the final SP Guide.

At this point, we have updated the SP Guide with Sheryl’s interview and posted the new version on the site.

Sheryl, we at ShutterPoint would like to sincerely apologize for this mistake.

Marketable Photography Guide 2009!

It’s finally ready!

Yes, this year it comes a bit later than usual… but this is in part due to all the hard work put into the new SP Guide!

If you’ve never seen the SP Guide before, in short, it is an e-book in PDF format that consists of three parts.

1. A comprehensive how-to guide that explains everything you need to know about selling photos. Starting from choosing subject and taking the photo, to image post-production, and to uploading the image to ShutterPoint.com.
2. A collection of 800+ popular images that sold on ShutterPoint.com at least once within the previous year.
3. Insightful interviews with some of the top-selling photographers, who offer practical tips on selling photos online.

The 2009 Edition of the SP Guide is longer and better. This year look for:

• 116 pages of quality content that gives you an inside scoop of how to sell your photos.
• Updated walk-through every step on the way to offering your images for sale.
• Improved categorization of images in the Showcase section. This year the images were broken up into four main categories: People, Animals, Objects, and Places.
• Added “Tip Boxes” within the Showcase of images.
• Photographer interviews followed by a sample of images from the featured photographer.

The Marketable Photography Guide 2009 is completely free to ShutterPoint members! Ready to read? Remember, the table of contents is interactive, which makes it extremely easy to navigate.

If you are not yet a member, take a look at the 5-page Preview of the SP Guide.

Enjoy!

Colorful Charts Woo-Hoo!

I am so excited to present to you these cool-looking colorful charts!

These charts certainly bring out the kid in me with all their primary colors. OK now I will have to calm down and explain what all of this means. Here’s the breakdown.

ShutterPoint allows image contributors to submit either commercial or editorial types of images. The above chart shows that 90% of submitted images are classified as commercial – this is because these images either do not contain any recognizable people OR contain people but a valid model release has been submitted for each person in the image. The remaining 10% is classified as editorial.

As you should be aware, ShutterPoint’s pricing model consists of Standard License and Full License pricing. The Standard License prices are pre-determined based on the image size being purchased. Although the Standard License is very affordable, it has image usage limitations. The Full License price is determined by the image contributor and allows virtually unlimited usage of the image. Now lets look at this next chart.

ShutterPoint’s contributors have the option to either offer Full Licensing only for their images or offer both Standard and Full Licensing. The chart above shows that 60%, the majority of our photographers choose to offer both Standard and Full Image Licensing. These contributors understand that image usage limitations are dictated by the Standard License and they agree to offer it to designers on a budjet.

Here comes the fun part! Now lets look at charts representing actual image sales on ShutterPoint.

The chart represents image sales where the Full License was purchased.

This pie is split almost equally! Out of all images sold with Full License, 53% of images are offered with Full Licensing only. The other 47% of images sold with Full License could also be purchased with a Standard License for much less, but the buyers chose to pay the premium price for unlimited usage and got the Full License. This means that for many serious image buyers the Full License price – the price photographers set – is still affordable.

The next chart will further prove this point. Lets look at how much ShutterPoint image buyers pay for Full License images.

The chart above reflects price ranges of Full Licenses sold on ShutterPoint.com. As you can see, most of the images are sold in the range of $20-30.

Now lets see how much image buyers are paying across all License types available.

The chart above represents image sales on ShutterPoint.com by price.

Notice that one out of three images sold on ShutterPoint is purchased with a Full License – at the price photographers set. This means that image buyers do not mind paying the premium price because – a) it is still affordable and, b) they want to feel confident that they have full rights to the image and can use in whatever way they need.

Another third of images gets sold with a Standard Web License. This license costs $0.99 and the image file being sold is pretty small – about 1000 px on the long side at 72dpi. Such size dictates web-only use because print quality would be poor at this size.

So there you have it – now you know how photographers price their images and how much designers are paying for them. Now is a good time to go over your own pricing strategy and make appropriate adjustments if needed.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everyone! May 2009 bring you happiness and prosperity!

This is the first year when I continuosly wish prosperity to everyone. My standard wishes usually include non-material things as health and love, but this year is different. I think we all need a little hope in the financial department this year.

I hate to sound pessimistic, but heck the whole world is struggling in the economy slump and there’s no point to deny it.

Still, I’d like to point out several photographic opportunities that arise from current hardship. I am referring to various “hot” concepts that can be portrayed in a photo.

Economic Hardship

Lost jobs, bankruptcy, foreclosures, etc – all of these happenings got many people struggling right now.  It’s a good idea to think of creative ways to portray these concepts.

Future/Looking Forward

Although economic hardship and related images make the most sense right now, keep in mind that advertisers need positive imagery for the majority of campaigns. Naturally, the next step would be to come up with solutions to all of our current problems. I’m referring to imagery that brings out hope of better times ahead of us.

Simple Pleasures

The final point that I would like to make is that people tend to turn to life’s simple pleasures when going through hardships. For instance when a person can no longer afford to go out, he/she spends more time at home with their family, playing board games, talking, maybe strolling at a local park, or playing sports with friends. Material things are less of importance and happiness comes from human relations. As long as basic needs of food and shelter are met, people feel healthy and happy.

I always say that a little planning before the photo shoot goes a long way! Of course don’t forget to have fun!