Time for my annual lookback and planning for my photography.  This annual post gives me a chance to reflect on what was accomplished in the last year and state some goals for the next year.  For previous years posts, see the Year in Review category.

It is now 2026, and my previous year will be 2025.  In 2025 I actually used my camera.  Not as much as I’d like, but it never is.  2025 is the first year in a while that I can say ‘yeah it got some use’.  While I’m still not back to the pre-2020 numbers, 2025 was getting back to old times.  It felt good to use my camera again, it had been too long.  2025 is now my 10th most productive year.  The new 11th is 2024, last year.

The Technical Stuff

While in 2025 I created 11,954 photos, I’ve really been trying to decide if number of photos taken is still a good metric for success, more on this below.  2025 is now my 10th most prolific year, above the 9,988 of 2024 and below the 13,000 of 2020.  2024 is now pushed to #11 and 2023 is lowered to #15.

I’ve managed to use this same screenshot 7 years in a row! Saving time, Saving time….

Time to add in 2020 to now.  This is a Lightroom screenshot and the year window only opens so far.

In 2025, I really favored one lens.  Oddly enough, my newest lens, the Nikon 200-500 f/5.6.

This is all very unusual results for me.

For the seventh year in a row, the D850 was my most used camera.  While the D750 was used this year, the older D800 and D300 were not used at all yet again.  It has been at least 3 years since these two cameras were used, and even the D750 has barely been used since 2022.

For the first time in a long time, I’ll probably get rid of a camera, my D300, which has not been used in about 6 years.  I still have it because I was offered about $200 in trade in towards my D850, and I ultimately decided it was just worth keeping around for that price.  My cousin or a nephew will continue to enjoy this camera for at least a few more years.

But why are these results so weird?  That is probably the biggest question.

The simple truth is that, for my 200-500 last year, I was probably taking images of the moon from the front of my house.  I only went on a few small excursions during the year, and thus did not otherwise take many photos.  If we exclude the moon images, I did not use my cameras much at all.

The Good Stuff

Let’s talk about the good stuff. 

While I made some money off of stock sales, it still isn’t enough to cash out.  I closed my Alamy stock account as it had 0 sales after about 14 months and was not worth keeping.  I still have an Adobe and Shutterstock, but they are both terrible.  The shutterstock will get closed this year.  These sites are not worth the time required.

Adobe Stock for 2025 – $7.72 — considering my account has about $12 in it after 5+ years, that’s a significant improvement.

Shutter Stock for 2025 – $4.68 — this will get closed in 2026, too much work, and not worth the effort.

Alamy Stock for 2025 – $0.00 — I closed this account, it took way too much time to manage and they are not good.  I cannot say anything positive about Alamy other than they made it really easy to close my account.  They suck, don’t use them.

I do not expect to report on stock photo sales into the future, it earns 2-3 gallons of gas per year, and because after half a decade I still cannot cash out, I think this effort will wind down.

However

There is a big reason I didn’t use my cameras that much — I started a business.

I was warned that the differences between the business and the artistic side were stark.  Let me confirm, this is an understatement.

In 2025, I made this whole venture into an actual business (fully legal and registered properly).  I’ve navigated sales in multiple states, paying sales tax, and fille out a million government forms that just don’t make sense.

The business had sales, which was quite a positive step – print sales make significantly more income than stock sales, although it is a much more active activity.  A good portion of that was run through my store website — https://store.bradleymolnar.com/ — and for any of the tax people reading, those sales are handled by Zenfolio where the proper sales tax is paid and I receive the profits (sale price – costs – tax – shipping = my share, believe me the government always gets their share even when I don’t).  I also had in-person sales, and yes, I had to collect and send the correct sales tax back to the state.  It was not as difficult as I thought and I learned a lot.  This is good news, even if my year 1 income wasn’t huge.  The business will still have a loss for the year, the start up costs were significant (see previous posts for details, but they are not exhaustive of all costs), about double what I’d anticipated.  I do hope 2026 will be closer to a break-even year, most of the major purchases seem to have been made, but I’m sure something will surprise me.

Let’s Focus on 2026

In 2026, I have an in-person event in Cedar Key Florida lined up for Mid-April, and will probably try to do the Ocean City NJ event in August that I did last year.  The background government costs will probably eat up most profits (you have no idea, if I didn’t want this to be a real business, this would make me want to quit), but we’ll do our best.  I think the secret is that you really need 2-3+ events in an individual state per year to make this worthwhile.  In the future, I’m working to tie together 2-3 back to back weekends in an area, especially if I have a free place to stay and can simply hang around an extra week and work remotely.

So yes, in 2025 I had real income from photography for the first time.  I just want my income to be larger than my expenses in 2026.

In November 2026, I will be a part of an Artist in Residence event at the South Carolina State Park, Dreher Island.  I’m sure more details will be shared in the future, but throwing that out into the world.

Goal: Really increase the sales from the photography business.  We had a good start in 2025, but I want to expand the presence and the products.

Goal: As always, post more!  I had 11 posts in 2025, including my year in review.  I want to increase the post number while keeping the quality up, two goals that are sometimes at odds with each other.

Goal: Website revisions.  I built the store site in 2025 and I now need to integrate it into this main site, as well as probably do blog revisions to keep the things cohesive.  Lets see where it goes.

Goal: As always, more trips, more travel, more photos.

I hope 2026 will be awesome.

To the future-

-Brad