This is a guest post by Rasmus Rasmussen who among other things (listed in his more official bio below) is the author of The Microstock Guide, the creator of the Stock Photo Concept generator and is an all around great guy. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! (Also, all the photography in this post is his.)
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.
