5 Ways to Improve your Photography with Stats
I am a stat whore. To a certain extent, I think most of us are. People who follow sports often obsess over the performance stats of their favorite leagues, teams and individual players. They call it trivia. As a microstock photographer however, it can be so much more than that.

For us it’s a tool. Here is a list of some of the ways statistics can help us microstockers perform better.

Watch for trends, seasonal and otherwise

By keeping up with your stats, you will notice when the clients are busy working on upcoming holidays for instance. Christmas advertisements are typically not created in December, but in advance. If you shoot anything seasonal, use your stats to figure out when to upload, so your images will be fresh and timed just right.

You can also watch for declining trends, like when certain lighting styles become popular or when hairstyles change.

Find models that work
Comparing top selling images across models is a very good way to check their individual performance. If one of your models sell significantly more than the rest, or vice versa, you can book your next sessions accordingly.

Next, if you compare all your top performing models, you can start to look for patterns, similarities and other indicators of the usefulness of these particular shots.

Find props, lighting and locations that work
Sometimes the models are not as important as everything else in the shot. I’m sure still life and landscape photographers would agree. Again by comparing individual shots in a series, and top selling shots across multiple photo sesssions, you can look for similarities. Maybe a certain lighting setup works better than another one you’ve tried, or a certain location you’ve shot at.

Based on this knowledge, you can re-use successful elements in new ways, combine them differently and avoid those that seem to lessen the commercial value of your imagery.

Hone your concepts
Good stock photography is often concept based. You start with a basic idea, and you build on it and add to it using different poses, props, post-processing techniques etc. Some results will be strong and sell well, but the ones that don’t are actually more interesting. When an entire photo series fails to perform, compare it to similar ones that did well and look for differences. Maybe you overdid the make-up or left out vital elements. Maybe your problem lies in how you keyword your images, and not in the concepts at all!

Take note of these things, as you analyze your sales, and eventually your overall hit rate is bound to go up.

Calculate the ROI of your shoots
Return on Investment or ROI is a fancy way of saying: Is it worth it? If you are a serious microstocker, you will want strong shots that make it worth your time. Getting a professional looking image often requires direct financial investments covering anything from equipment and studio renting to hiring stylists, models or assistants. Not to mention all the time you put into organizing, executing and post processing the shoot. Using sales stats, you can easily add up how much you’ve earned per shoot.

If after one year, you have made more from your sales, than you invested into the photo session in question, I would call it a successful shoot. And if not, take the opportunity to figure out what went wrong.

About theprint
Rasmus shoots primarily urban lifestyle portraits and has been active in microstock since 2000, the last few years as an image inspector for iStockphoto. He is the author of “The Microstock Photographer’s Guide” and also does one-on-one coaching for photographers looking to get established in microstock. When he’s not involved with photography, he writes novels, music and lives the Bohemian lifestyle. His own microstock portfolio lives on iStockphoto, he blogs at rasmusrasmussen.com and is an avid Twitter user.

Shutterstock’s reasons for blocking access center around account security and the fact that 3rd party applications can create a negative performance impact on their site. (You can read more at their forum) These are reasonable and valid concerns and we have worked hard to address them in a responsible manner.

We take security very seriously at LookStat and appreciate the trust you put in us when you allow us to access your stats on your behalf. We are committed to maintaining your account security and go to great lengths to protect this information. We encrypt all private data as well as every single page on our site and we test the site daily for vulnerabilities using a 3rd party vendor. We would much rather not have to ask you for this information but until more APIs appear we have no other alternative. Your data is secure at LookStat and will remain that way. Our success hinges on our ability to maintain your trust.

In terms of performance impact, we take great care with our systems to ensure that we are not causing undue load and we are very open to feedback and guidance in terms of managing our impact on the sites we support. Our goal is to help our users track and analyze their stats without creating a negative impact in any way. We want to help you sell more microstock and to support the growth of the sites at which you list your portfolios. Our view is that if we can help you sell more images and spend less time on repetitive work, everyone will benefit.

If APIs or other feeds existed which allowed us to access your stats on your behalf without requiring us to know your credentials, we would jump at the chance to use them. Our hope is that in time, APIs of this sort will become available. We’re committed to investing in contributors and will be working with Shutterstock and other agencies to see if we can help move things in this direction. As the industry grows, and third party systems develop, everyone stands to benefit; including the sites themselves.

We remain committed to microstock and our vision of providing tools and systems for contributors and will be working on submitting an application to SS and on continuing to expand the sites that we cover. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly. We appreciate your patience and support. Thank you for using LookStat.

Congratulations on being featured, Roberto!

Thank you and sorry.

If you look at the Image Search results for the same category, the results are identical.

The takeaway is clear. Get your ‘weight loss’ related images online before that January spike. Although it’s not microstock specific, Google Insights is incredibly valuable for learning about what people are searching for and that can only be beneficial to deciding what to shoot and when to shoot it.

While I haven’t yet looked at microstock sales to see when those images spike (to find out what the typical lead time is) delivering that sort of information to contributors was one of the core ideas behind LookStat.

I highly recommend reading the article itself but also thought I’d share two sections that jumped out at me. First, they have a list of color associations that are common in ‘mainstream North American culture’ (their words.)

Red –excitement, strength, sex, passion, speed, danger.
Blue –(listed as the most popular color) trust, reliability, belonging, coolness.
Yellow –warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness
Orange — playfulness, warmth, vibrant
Green — nature, fresh, cool, growth, abundance
Purple –royal, spirituality, dignity
Pink — soft, sweet, nurture, security
White –pure, virginal, clean, youthful, mild.
Black –sophistication, elegant, seductive, mystery
Gold — prestige, expensive
Silver — prestige, cold, scientific

One caveat to the above list was to be aware that the impact of color varied considerably by region and to be mindful of local variations. With that in warning in mind, the article laid out a simple hypothetical example about how insight about color could influence a marketing campaign.

Let’s say that you are selling books for young children, but you are marketing to grandparents. You’d probably design the books in bright, primary colors (reds, blues, yellows) to appeal to the children who will use them. However, the marketing materials (web site, brochures, etc.) would be designed with grandparents in mind. You might decide to go with blues (trust, reliability), pinks (nurture, sweet, security) and yellow (happy, playful).

While the article is targeted at designers, I think it is very relevant for stock photographers. If designers are thinking about the impact of color on their audience, it is bound to affect their purchase decisions. As a result, while this information shouldn’t dictate the look and feel of your shoots, it should be a useful input in your pre-production process.

I’d love to hear your perspectives on the ideas above and whether you think about color in this way when planning an executing shoots.

(I was pointed to the article by a great list of Design Oriented resources on PSDTUTS)