Dreamstime has announced a competition for “best blog” post on their site and so I have had a go at my first blog on the Dreamstime site. **Update** – it doesn’t appear to be visible on the site yet. Perhaps in moderation? *** I decided to write about a tricky subject – how to come up with ideas (and images) to illustrate things in the news. If you have an account at Dreamstime, would you mind having a look at...
What a strange title! But I realized over the past few days that what I have been doing with editorial shots was not only a lot of hard work – it was unnecessary as well! For the past year, I have been uploading editorial shots to the stock agencies using the guidance in this Shutterstock blog article, Creating the Perfect Editorial Caption. Basically, a perfect caption is like this: It has the date, location, then a description, then the location...
As I think I mentioned, I went on a cruise in September around the Baltic Sea. 11 cities in 15 days! Apart from a cruise being a really relaxing way to spend your time, how does it match against a travel stock photographer’s needs? How do I approach a day in a new city? I thought I would illustrate this with one day’s shoot in Copenhagen – I just finished keywording and uploading this particular set yesterday. As I had...
One of the things that proved invaluable on my travels was the ability to take great images in dark indoor spaces. Of course, it would be nice to use a tripod and a low ISO, but almost all churches and palaces don’t allow tripods and there are few places where you could even rest your camera or use a small portable tripod. Modern cameras are getting better each year in terms of noise performance, but for stock images, the agencies...
One of the issues with Alamy is that while you can look at a page of sales with small thumbnails, it is hard to understand how much you actually earned as it shows the gross sales price. I’ve become a keen user of Microstockr Pro over the past 6 months – to be honest, I didn’t think I would as I’ve never been one to pore over the sales, but I actually have found it pretty instructive to see when...
I’ve converted my recent blog post on creating new stock photos into a Bored Panda article. It is my aim to get picked up in their “Trending” area and get more viewers of my blog via that! If you wouldn’t mind, please “Upvote” on the article
Since I moved to the Sony from Canon, I’ve had to buy some step-up filter rings to use my 77mm filters on the various Sony lenses. Simple solution, and to some extent it is better having larger filters on wide angle lenses to avoid vignetting. But what when the ring has been on your polarizing filter for some time and it refuses to budge? The polarizer is quite thin, it rotates of course, and so the amount of “gripping” space...
Today I’ll give you some insight on how I approach a new concept. I saw a drawing of three hands holding a bitcoin (very stylistic) and thought it would be nice to cover something similar as a photo, especially as bitcoins are in the news a lot as they hit record prices (and will be in the news when the price collapses!). I already have some mock bitcoins and an ethereum coin (a different sort of bitcoin) and so I...
I don’t know how many of you have seen photography articles on Bored Panda? It often has some pretty interesting pieces and I wrote a short article tonight on stock photography. This is my first attempt, but if you can spare the time, please have a look and comment or upvote the piece! Thanks! Steve
Sometimes (often?) you travel to a location for a sunset photo, but the weather just doesn’t co-operate! On my recent UK vacation, we were driving back from visiting friends in Snowdonia National Park and I thought a detour to take a sunset image of the Vale of Llangollen would be nice! The roads up to Panorama Walk are really narrow and steep, but once you are there it all opens up and you get a great overview of the vale,...
