State of My Union

Posted on February 2nd, 2010

January has been a long month for me…  I managed to create 81 new animations and I added several new stock sites to my rotation.  You can read more of the details on my MicroStock Blog.

It was too cold outside to shoot any footage, so I spent all my free time learning more about Cinema 4D and playing with the new Mograph 2 dynamics engine.  I am extremely grateful to all of those fine folks who have made free tutorials available.  I’ve learned a lot and plan on returning the favor real soon.

As for February, I am hoping things warm up a bit and I can get out with my camera to shoot a ton of footage.  Animation takes too long and creating 81 clips last month took working 60 hours a week.  I have more animations plan, but I’d really like to focus on getting some new camera footage.

I also plan to celebrate 1 full year doing MicroStock full time by giving away a couple of prizes to my twitter followers.  I’ll have more details soon, however the basic plan is to give away a $50 Pond5 gift certificate and a $50 Visa Gift Card around the end of February or first part of March.  I’ll select random followers of my two twitter accounts.  The Pond5 gift certificate will go to a follower of my personal account (dnavarrojr) and the $50 gift card will go to a follower of my MicroStock Blog account (microstockblogr).

Tags: , , , , | Category: Cinema 4D, MicroStock, Personal, Twitter | Leave a comment

Stock Photography

Posted on January 25th, 2010

Now that I’ve fallen in love with my iSyndica account, I have decided to start doing more with stock photography.  I had pretty much abandoned doing stills when I got into stock footage, but as I have preached often lately… diversification is the key.  Get your portfolio everywhere you can and create as many income streams as you can.

What actually prompted it was that I was doing a 3D video render in Cinema 4D and while looking at one of the frames, it occurred to me that it would make a nice photo…  So I rendered it at 12mp and uploaded it to a few of the sites where I have stock photo accounts.  And it sold…  So, now when I’m doing 3D renders for video, I review the footage to see if there is anything I can do to make a still from it as well and I am uploading stills again.

And I decided to give ShutterStock a try again.  The last 3 times I submitted my 10 images it was a frustrating experience.  The first time I got 7 photos rejected.  The second time I got 5 which included the original 3 they liked.  The last time they rejected 4, all of which they accepted when I did the second time.  The inconsistency of reviewers there is extremely frustrating.  But I’m starting to do better at DreamsTime, so I’ve decided I have better things to do that get frustrated over ShutterStock.  If they reject me again, I’ll just keep trying each month (yes, they make you wait a MONTH) until I get in.

Tags: , , , , | Category: MicroStock, Stock Images | Leave a comment

A New Plan!

Posted on January 18th, 2010

This blog site is my personal blog.  In addition to actual useful information, I also occasionally blog personal stuff.  Seeing it all mixed up here has confused even me…  So I’m making some changes.

This site will be about me.  What I’m up to, things I’m learning, examples of my work, and my personal opinion on a lot of stuff.  I’ve created a new blog site about Stock Footage which is where I’ll discuss my doings on that subject, including reviews of microstock sites, tips, etc…  Although most of my tips will first appear on the iSyndica blog before being copied to my new blog site later.

My Cinema 4D and After Effects tutorials will continue on this site for now, but I might create a third-site for them at a later date.  Lots to do!  Lots to do!

https://www.pond5.com/oembed/?url=http://www.pond5.com/artist/357837

Tags: , , , , , , , | Category: MicroStock, Personal | Leave a comment

Catching up and cleaning up

Posted on January 12th, 2010

Keep your data safe

A new decade has begun and I was long overdue for backing up my data.  I bought a few new hard drives in December, but never got around to setting them up in my external RAID backup.  So, I finally took care of that. I now have four 2 TB hard drives in my external RAID set up with two of them mirrored.  I did it this way only because with striped RAID you have to rebuild the raid when a drive fails.  With mirrored backup, you just pull the bad drive and replace it with no real downtime.

It took about 3 hours to fully back up my system (I have 2.5 TB of storage in my computer), so I took the opportunity to clean up around my desk as well.  All trash was placed into an actual trash can and that can was emptied (twice).  And I organized a lot of stuff.  My desk  area still looks like a pit of despair, but trust me… it’s improved.

Once my backup was complete, I deleted a bunch of stuff from my main computer and did the basic maintenance (defrag, make sure I had all  updates for all my software, etc..).  And then I did a quick incremental backup.

So, now that I’m done with that… It’s more work.  If you’ve been visiting my blog often, you’ll see that I’ve been working a lot on the site itself.  I finally settled on an e-commerce package for WordPress and I’ll soon be setting up my online store.  I’m also uploading like crazy to RevoStock, ShutterStock and ClipCanvas… trying to grow my portfolios there for some diversification since Pond5 is doing so poorly in sales these last few weeks.

I am also working on some video tutorials for Cinema 4D.  I’ve been doing a TON of animations lately and I’ve learned a lot.  So I figure I’ll share what I’ve learned with everyone.

Tags: , , , , | Category: Cinema 4D, MicroStock, Personal | Leave a comment
 
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