20 Pumpkins on iStockphoto

Yesterday afternoon this photograph of a load of pumpkins was my 5,000th image download to sell on iStockphoto.com. My portfolio on the popular microstock photography website has grown to over 850 images today from a mere 77 in March and my sales have shown a comparable increase. I am pleased to say that my October revenue will be over triple the amount I earned in June.

My goal for the future is to continue to grow my iStock portfolio by a minimum of 10 percent each month. In doing so, I anticipate my sales to grow at an equal or higher percentage. I am finding that my approval percentage (each image submitted to iStockphoto has to be personally inspected and approved) is getting better the more I upload to the site. I now have fine tuned my recipe for post-processing images and I average over a 90% approval percentage on my photos (up from around 50% early on).

As I said in an earlier post, I look forward to continuing to add images to my portfolio and monitor the growth. Is this a sustainable business long-term? We'll continue to wait and see.

Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens - 1/125 second, f/7.1, ISO 100