I’ve not done much outdoor shooting yet, but I wanted to try the new Sony in a more difficult setting – a backlit indoor shot using natural light. I have the Sony set to ISO 100 unless the shutter speed is going to be less than 1/60th second, in which case, it moves to Auto ISO (nice feature!). This tricky lighting condition with a sunlit window in the background and exposure compensation set to +1, meant that the final exposure...
Right – now we have the camera and the Really Right Stuff L bracket installed, it is time to set the camera to my liking! You would think I would be out taking some pictures as it is a balmy 83 degrees and sunny here in West Virginia, but we are looking after our grand-daughter this week (and the two dogs) and so free time is not really available! So what do I like in a stock photography camera?
I’ve written about the new independent stock agency Symzio before – it is linked to the Symbiostock personal agencies and basically you choose which images to send to the new agency and how much to charge for the full size image. The developers have started a new blog aimed at stock illustrators and photographers and a recent post caught my eye: 5 Tips on becoming a stock photographer! I’m sure many of the readers of my blog will know most...
I am trying hard this year to get my own stock agency, Backyard Stock Photos off the ground. This is based on wordpress with the free Symbiostock plugin – I wrote about the way I migrated from my old site in this earlier post. The developer of the plugin has created agency where all the users of the plugin can choose to include their images (on a one by one basis if you want) and choose the price for the...
Isolating an object against a white background is usually a photoshop task. With selections, curves and the rest, you can easily get rid of flaws in what should be a pure white background. But what can you do if the image includes currency? As I have been finding, Adobe has built some complex algorithms into the latest releases of Photoshop that stop you from opening or editing a photograph that contains even parts of US dollar currency bills. I’m sure...
I’m putting effort into my Fine Art America images by adding the digital art paintings created by the Impresso Pro plugin. I decided to look at my pricing at the same time and spent some time this morning looking at the pricing of images that had recently sold on the site. I focused on photographs and checked the pricing on about 24 of them. This table shows the sale price of a basic print in three sizes on the longest...
I first mentioned this last week in this post, but I have been playing with the Impresso Plugin that produces some really nice oil painting effects in Lightroom and Photoshop with very few steps (although there are many options I haven’t fully got to grips with yet!) and after I completed one recent image I went back and looked at the progression from the original shot to the finished item: An artist shouldn’t really show the original photo as it...
I’m still interested in exploring more ways of selling fine art – and so have revisited Fine Art America again to see if I can get some traction. I’ve had few sales this year. I talked about my pricing strategy at FAA in an earlier post and I haven’t changed that, but I’m investigating uploading more artistic images rather than my normal stock photos. Looking at the recent sales on the site makes me think that people are after a...
Just two days ago, I was complaining about not being able to get my earnings above the $2-$3K per month level, but later that day I finished the keywording of my images from a week’s trip to Kauai in early November – looking at those pictures of the warm sunny days made me realize that this is not a bad way to make money! Even better, I got the results of the upload to Shutterstock – 103 images uploaded, 100...
Parts 1 and 2 of this extended post have discussed what to take on a travel vacation and then how to select and process images on your return. I’ll now turn to keywording and uploading the images. I finished processing most of the images in mid October and eventually ended up with 389 images that I thought were worth keywording. I generally follow a simple rule about what is going to be “editorial” and hence only uploaded to my own...
