Category: “How-to” articles

How to take great images in dark buildings

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...

Microstockr Pro now handles Alamy sales

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...

Another Bored Panda article

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

Remove a step-up ring from a filter

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...

Thinking of new ideas for stock photos

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...

Trying to get some traction on Bored Panda

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

Work those images!

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,...

How much effort should you put into a photo?

I was thinking about this question recently. I have many, many images that I sell via stock agencies and then I have a smaller subset that I try to sell as prints via Fine Art America and also Photo4Me in the UK. I sometimes even print my own images but there is a limit to the amount of wall space I can dedicate to my own prints! So there is a conflict between the commercial calculation of time spent versus...

Trying to increase Fine Art America Sales

I’ve been spending time adding more “fine art” images to Fine Art America recently, adding perhaps 40 or so in the past month. My latest images can be seen here. But how to “goose” those sales? I decided to try Facebook advertizing for an image that I created in black and white of San Francisco: The image itself needed a bit of work as it was taken using a 200mm lens (on a tripod) from the Marin Headlands near the...

Travel Photography – Seek out the unusual

Last weekend I went to Washington DC with my local camera club and, as some of the attendees were new to DC, we mainly covered the popular sites that I have visited many times before. So how to take something new that I could upload to my stock portfolio? The answer for me was to seek out the unusual view of those places that have been covered in thousands of images already. While not many of my readers will visit...