jrtb

What a spooky month!

BMEs at Dreamstime and Fotolia. In particular, I made more at Dreamstime this month than iStock! First time that’s ever happened. But with the slump at iStock continuing, it isn’t surprising that sales are higher elsewhere. 

Total revenue this month was $92 on the back of an average of 9 new photos accepted (5% increase in portfolio). The new batch did particularly well at Shutterstock. Not a great month, I blame the economy!

Also, I can’t say enough about how great BigStockPhoto has been for me the last couple of months! I had a conversation this month by email with BSP’s founder, Tim Donahue. He had personally contacted me to clear an EL sale and mentioned how great my portfolio looked I had to thank him for the time to personally contact me and the complement by returning the favor! Thanks Tim!!

November 3rd, 2008 | Category: General | Comments (4)

No Jamies were hurt during filming

October 23rd, 2008 | Tags: family | Category: General | Leave a comment

So I was curious after yesterday’s post about exactly what Obama’s administration’s stance on Space Exploration is. Here’s the answer. Awesome! In particular:

“Human spaceflight is important to America’s political, economic, technological, and scientific leadership. Barack Obama will support renewed human exploration beyond low earth orbit. He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars.”

October 23rd, 2008 | Tags: politics | Category: General | Leave a comment

Sure, most people know who they’re going to vote for when it comes to the President. But what about your Governor, U.S. Senate and U.S. House representatives? What about Judges, Treasurers, Controllers and Auditors? What about the bill to pay for more sidewalks?

I’d love to hear from folks about if they vote for these other officials and how they decide who they’re going to vote for!

Personally, I’ve done research for the middle tier of folks I listed above (Governor, U.S. Senate and U.S. House representatives) and made a decision based on their positions on the issues. I’ll be voting for: Kay Hagan (Dem), Bev Perdue (Dem), Dan Mansell (Rep) and B.J. Lawson (Rep).

If I have time to research the other officials and amendments, I will. Otherwise, I won’t vote for them either way.

One issue that I don’t see many folks take a stance on is Space exploration. I can understand that other issues are more important, but I’d still like to see all the canditates say something about that. I mean, if no one is talking about it, it’ll never happen, right? Props to Dan Mansell for stating he would like to slightly increase spending for Space exploration (I also like his fair-tax position).

October 22nd, 2008 | Tags: politics | Category: General | Leave a comment

From Connie:

Jamie will be 6 months old in just 4 days!

• The first big news is that Jamie has her first tooth. I felt a rough spot on the bottom a few days ago, and today we looked with a flashlight and saw it poking through.
• And the second big news is that Jamie is sitting up really well now… she can balance herself in a sitting position for 10 minutes or more, and uses her arms to help balance herself. She loves to sit on the floor with toys all around to grab and play with.
• She’s fascinated with her big sister… she watches Anna with adoration as Anna plays and runs around the room. Now there are games they can play together… imitating, bouncing Jamie while Anna jumps, tickle games, sharing toys.
• Jamie gets lots of hugs, kisses, smiles, and funny noises from her big sister.
• She’s in the “grabby hands” phase… grabs at everything within reach - hair, clothing, glasses, jewelry, table utensils. Poor Anna has had her hair pulled a lot these past few weeks.
• She’s growing so fast! Even at 6 months old, she is wearing size 9mo clothing. She went from newborn to infant in a flash, and I think one day we’ll blink our eyes and she’ll be a toddler!

October 20th, 2008 | Tags: family | Category: General | Leave a comment

Here’s a great site for watching the polls. Note that while the numbers are supposed to be unbiased, the commentary from the guy that runs the site is obama biased. For an unbiased look at the actual numbers quoted so often in last night’s debate, as usual, head over to factcheck.

If you haven’t registered to vote yet, want to vote early and live in North Carolina, you can go downtown and register and vote today through November 4th!

If you haven’t made up your mind yet, cast a vote for Obama!

October 16th, 2008 | Tags: politics | Category: General | Leave a comment

Awesome month! 

Overall sales were $112 at an average of 10 cents per image (RPI) this month having now sold 30% of my images to date (STR) with an average of 192 images in my portfolio at 6 sites. 

BMEs at bigstockphoto and 123rf.  3rd best month at iStock. I got a licensed sale for $13.50 of the following image from bigstockphoto, my first there:

I’m really glad the summer slump is over! I haven’t had a chance to do almost any new shooting, processing or uploading, but expect to have a chance to do some this month. 

Congrats to Constance on her recent acceptance by Shutterstock. Check out her great portfolio there!

October 2nd, 2008 | Tags: photo | Category: General | Comments (5)

I’ve changed the theme for this blog for the first time since it’s inception way back in 2005 Let me know what you think! I’m not ambitious enough to make my own from scratch and so I settled on one of the nicer pre-made themes. I’ve also updated my homepage with new images (http://jrtb.com) in addition to changing the link for the gallery to our smugmug gallery (http://jrtb.smugmug.com). Let me know if you forgot the password!

September 10th, 2008 | Tags: family, photo | Category: General | Comments (4)

Google is my BFF

I’ve been using Chrome (Google’s new browser based on Safari) since it’s release yesterday at 3:02pm I love it! The only site I haven’t been able to use with it is Yahoo (I can’t login there..). What is everyone’s experience with Chrome? I wish they had a Mac version already!

Picassa 3 was released today! Google has been busy! For the most part, I think I like all the new features. Red eye correction looks great, and the names feature in web-albums looks really awesome! I still don’t think you can allow family access to private albums with a common password though - show stopper! I’ll probably end up using both Picassa web albums and Smugmug.

Lot’s of new toys, is this Christmas!?!??

September 3rd, 2008 | Tags: photo | Category: General | Comments (2)