Back in 2014 I decided to create my own “Fine Art” portfolio website. It was not particularly to sell images from the site (as I know how hard that is!), but to have somewhere where friends could look at some of my better photographic efforts. I decided to use the Photocrati Theme and explained the process back in this post. I decided that it was the best wordpress photography theme that I could find and at the time, I thought...
I was just playing with some photos I had taken at Coopers Rock overlook near Morgantown in West Virginia and was pretty unimpressed with what I saw: Pretty bland colors and the sky is very dull – not blown out but uninteresting.
I noticed a relatively prominent sensor spot on some of my images after my last field trip – one of the potential issues with mirrorless cameras is that there is nothing between the lens opening and the sensor and so changing lenses is always going to have the risk of introducing dust. Anyway, I used my trusty Visible Dust Arctic Butterfly which works by using static in the fine brush strands to pick up the dust from the sensor, but...
In my review of Microstockr Pro, I forgot to mention one neat feature that saves a bit of time. If you click on an image thumbnail, you get the screen where the historic sales of that image are displayed. Hovering over the thumbnail on that screen shows two icons – a chain symbol that takes you to the image page on the stock agency, and a magnifying glass. Clicking this opens up the image search page on Google with the...
I was doing an attempt at an ImageBrief brief recently – one about perfectly shaped water drops on a piece of polished wood – and came across the first area where my Canon kit was much better than the Sony A7R! Macro focus stacking. The picture I was attempting needed high definition focus from front to rear: It took me a bit of time to sort out the lighting (which needed to be low and behind the drops to get...
I recently came across an interesting blog post by Craig Dingle entitled Why be exclusive on iStock? His blog is worth following as Craig is an Australian wedding photographer who also does stock photos as an extra income stream, and chose to join iStockPhoto as an exclusive back around the same time I was starting as a non-exclusive. His reasons are valid, but I’m not sure I can get over one of the biggest issues with exclusivity – you are tying...
Update: See the final paragraph as I discovered a flaw in this approach! As readers of my book know, I have been recommending StockUploader for some time as an easy way to upload your files to many different stock agencies in parallel. Unfortunately the developer stopped supporting the software due to other priorities but he continued to provide a working copy for anyone who had bought my eBook. However, even that arrangement has come to an end and so I...
In my book, I talk at length about using DeepMeta as a way to ease the pains of submission to iStockphoto. iStock has two annoying steps in submission – one is to select a category (which isn’t that hard, although there are a lot of them), but the key annoyance is the matching of your keywords to their controlled vocabulary. They have a unique system of doing their image searches on a standardized set of keywords and so you need...
I have four Canon flashes (three 550EX and one 580EX) as well as the Canon ST-E2 infra-red controller. With my change of camera outfit from Canon to Sony, the next question is whether I can effectively use these flash guns with the Sony? There is a great article by Tim Ford, where he concludes that an optical flash adapter is the best way of getting the highest sync speeds, but he is using the 580EX II – mine are the...
I don’t often recommend books, but one I have really enjoyed reading and also found very informative is Alain Briot’s Marketing Fine Art Photography. He gives lots of good advice about what sort of photographs sell, where to sell them and how to go about marketing prints of your work. Making money from selling prints yourself isn’t easy, but it is very rewarding to get the personal satisfaction from someone deciding that your image would look good on their wall....
