DANANG, VIETNAM – Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated.
Melanie and I have lately had a few queries along the lines of…
“Are you guys OK? You haven’t written anything new on your blog for more than a month!”
Or…
“Are you two still living in Vietnam? We haven’t heard from you in a while.”
The answer to both of those questions is a resounding “Yes!”
We’re fine. We still live in Vietnam. Our daily life goes on as usual, with interesting experiences almost every time we step out of our apartment.
It’s just that…
We haven’t done much writing lately. At least nothing that could be considered blog post material.
Melanie has been reluctant to put fingers to keyboard for the blog because she doesn’t want to take up my time (as her editor, I insist on working over everything before it goes online).
At times I manage to muster the inspiration for an occasional Facebook share, or some even more occasional personal journaling.
But most of my own recent efforts (if you can call it ‘effort’) have been devoted to increasing my online portfolios of stock photos.
John’s been working on his stock photo portfolios
Our travels over the last several years have yielded tens of thousands of photos, most of them languishing in our one-terabyte cloud storage account.
I periodically sift through the folders to select possible stock photo candidates and download them into my photo editing software.
Then I spend time tweaking each one, adjusting exposure, color saturation, contrast and all the other little nudges that make them pop when a prospective buyer sees one on a stock photo site.
I’ve dabbled in selling stock photos for a while but never really devoted much time to it until I retired. Since then I’ve put in more effort (there’s that word again), but nothing near what might be called ‘serious’ or ‘work’ (after all, I’m retired!).
Still, with all those dibs and dabs of ‘effort’ I’ve managed to build a portfolio of more than 4,000 photos across seven stock photo sites. Here are a few links where you can see some of my images: Adobe/Fotolia – Shutterstock – iStock/Getty Images
John’s photos are downloaded almost every day
And lately my photos are downloaded (and I earn royalties) almost every day.
The payout per download is usually not very much, but the same photo can be downloaded again and again, and I get paid for it every time.
One of my first stock photos has been downloaded almost 200 times!
I love the idea of doing the work once and making money from it forever. Just this week I earned another royalty on a photo I shot in Cambodia in 2012.
It’s fun to search the Internet to see where and how my photos are being used. I’ve found them on travel blogs (besides our own), tour company sites, commercial websites (including Amazon.com), even in editorial content on the Huffington Post.
So, long story short… don’t worry about us. We’re both just fine!
Mel’s studying Vietnamese
I’m still taking lots of photos, and Melanie is just starting another series of Vietnamese lessons.
And we’re still traveling… We were in Malaysia for a few weeks in February, and we have a couple more trips in the works for later this year.
Stay tuned. We’ll try to be better about keeping in touch.
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