Another Milestone…

I’ve been patient and have not been trying to rush things. The rules of probability were in my favor this time. If you read my blog, then you already know that I submit most of my photos to Adobe Stock for sale. I believe I have over 60 images that have been approved for sale. The first photo accepted was in October sometime. The most recent photos I submitted were from my trip during the first week of December, 2018.

The only editing that was done to these 60+ images was cropping. I was shooting photos and then going home to basically cut out the best part of my images. Very seldom was I able to use the whole frame, reducing the quality of the image. Adobe still accepted them as they at least met the minimum requirements.

I woke up around noon today and as I’m shaking the cob webs out of my ears, my phone give me the alert that I have new e-mail. I usually don’t check them out right away as we are close to the weekend. That is when I get the redbox, pizza hut and other weekend spam. I wasn’t in the middle of something so I grabbed my phone and checked it.

I got an e-mail from Adobe and at first glance it said something like being accepted Mt. Rainier or something. I know I didn’t have any photos in my queue waiting to be accepted so I obviously read it wrong and had to take a second look after I rubbed a morning eye booger out of one of my eyes.

Nope. An image for Mt. Rainier was not accepted for sale it was sold. I went from groggy wake up mode to I just won the lottery faster than my wife can change her mind. I was like sweet, I just made my first $0.25 on Adobe Stock. When you are so poor that you can barely afford to pay attention, $0.25 is a big deal. I scrolled down to look at the image that was sold but viewing it on my phone wasn’t working.

I get dressed and walked over to my studio so I could get on my laptop. I go to Adobe Stock’s website to checkout the image better. It was an image where I cropped out almost 60% of the image making it like a banner. If you want to see the image that sold, here you go. I then headed over to my dashboard and saw the graph that is the featured image.

It didn’t sell for $0.25, it sold for $0.99. That is a penny short of 4x what I thought an image sold for. I guess when I did my planning and estimating I used the low end price for all of my figures. That way if I did get the higher royalty the numbers would be in my favor instead of over budget. So I am no longer the FNG (F’n New Guy), and have made money from my photography.