So this is by no means an extensive study or telling insight into the health of the UK retail consumer economy. It’s literally five minutes strolling through the Princesshay city centre retail / mixed use development in Exeter which is relatively new and occupied by good quality stores. I was struck by how many had continuing sales. Many of the signs were tucked away discretely at pavement level; I’m not quite sure of the marketing rational there? Still they were easy enough to photograph without getting under any shoppers’ feet because, well, there weren’t any shoppers about.

Do scroll down to the end though, it’s not all doom and gloom!

The Apple store was still active.

A ray of optomistic light!

A passive income is a beautiful thing. Money that flows to you without any or minimal effort on your part. It is something of a holy grail amongst many Internet entrepreneurs. I suspect there is often too little appreciation of the work that goes into creating such a happy situation; a passive income is usually the result of an asset in some form that took a lot of effort to build. In other words, while it may be passive when received it isn’t often achieved without a significant initial investment of effort, talent and/or money. Photographers producing stock images are effectively working to build a passive income, a photographer’s pension in a sense.

Stock photography earnings rarely come in the form of a payday; the return on your investment of time, money and creativity is usually some way off in the future and over a period of, hopefully, years. Putting your resources into producing stock images is really more akin to making an investment for future returns than working for next months bills. Microstock may be a slight exception to this where good images will often enjoy an instant honeymoon period of downloads due to the sectors general bias towards fresh material. However with micro numbers the payday will be small for anyone other than the seriously committed contributor.

Given the time lag usually involved between doing stock work and earning a return from your efforts it is important for photographers producing stock to consider what they realistically may assume the return on any investment in creating and marketing new images will be. Are you wasting your time or building an asset that will return a healthy passive income for years to come?

For a variety of reasons including migration, hoboing and general laziness, I haven’t added any significant new material to my stock photo portfolios for the last six months. It isn’t the productivity I had hoped or planned for, but it is what I’ve done! That isn’t to say I haven’t been work a day shooting and carrying a camera around, so there will of course be images I can add in due course. However for that period I haven’t really worked on my stock and yet my income from stock photography didn’t stop. Inadvertently I’ve conducted a short experiment to test the financial sturdiness of my current stock photography collection. So how well did it hold up?

Well, I’m pleased to say I have been able to enjoy a reliable and, so far, sustained level of income from my various portfolios. Obviously six months is a relatively short period of time to judge any collection’s longevity in terms of providing a sustained passive income. It is quite possible that if I continued in this dormant mode my income would gradually fall as my images dated and their relative presence in the market declined. While I’m interested in how stock photography may contribute to a photographer’s pension pot I can’t continue this little experiment for much longer without damaging my own pot’s potential!

Obviously every photographer’s collection is different. Currently my own stock collection is around 2500 images; so relatively modest. The fact it has stood up to this period of inactivity I take as a positive sign that it is worth me continuing to build it for the future. I’m spread across RM, RF, traditional and microstock which, arguments re the pros and cons aside, I think probably helps in terms of sustainability of income by evening out peaks and troughs across different sectors.

As I’ve mentioned previously I’m not a big stats man; this post is as close as I’ve previously come to number crunching and a minutiae of stock photography income analysis. However I am going to do some basic analysis of my microstock portfolios over the last six months to a year to see how these have held up. I’m particularly interested to look at my micro portfolios in this regard given the common perception that it is necessary to continually “feed the beast” in order to maintain returns from microstock. To date my micro images have provided a reliable and reasonable return without too much effort in recent years. For me the attractiveness of continuing to contribute to microstock depends on the sustainability of the returns. Stay tuned if you’re also interested to know if microstock has passive income potential.

I’ve written about DepositPhotos previously so here’s a quick update to report that I have started to see sales from the modest  one hundred and thirty odd images I currently have on sale.

DepositPhotos made an impressive late entry into the microstock market with their contributor incentives so I’d hope their pursuit of buyers will be equally proactive and this early result would seem to be a positive indication.