OK – this is really about my sort of stock photography, which focuses more on travel, outdoors and some still life studio shots rather than people, but hope you find it useful. Counting down from number 10: 10: Spend time on keywording Too often we enjoy the photography but not the mundane keywording. Don’t over-stuff keywords, keep to the facts of who, where, what type of questions but outlining some conceptual words is OK if that is what the image...
I’m not saying that this is a great stock photo (in terms of its commercial potential), but sometimes we have to let our artistic side shine through! I was walking around Regensburg in Germany on my recent river cruise. Cloudy sky, bit of drizzle, certainly not the conditions to create fantastic travel images with a blue sky and billowing clouds. As a result I was looking for details that could enhance a travel article about the medieval town and I...
I use Lightroom all the time for both processing and keywording and describing my stock photos, and I now have 68,000 images in the main catalog or database. Basically, all my images since 2001 are in this catalog and I keep it like this as it is important to me to be able to go back and find any image from the past, however long ago I took it. The early ones are not keyworded very well, but pretty much...
One thing that beginners don’t appreciate is how much work goes into stock photography. If you track your earnings per hour, it can sometimes look pretty depressing unless you are taking the photos because it is also something you enjoy doing. As a practical example of what I mean, I recently went on a short trip to Colorado to see some friends and, or course, take some photos, including the climbing ones I blogged about last week. Total time in...
I’ve been working with Image Brief for about a year now. It is basically an online image request service – a buyer with a specific need in mind posts their requirement and budget and photographers get to upload up to 10 images that meet that brief. I’ve been awarded one brief to date (and got $220 for it) – an image of the Acropolis in Greece that has ended up (I think) in a travel magazine. One key thing to...
My previous post covered the first two days of my recent trip to Tampa and how I approached it as a stock photographer. This post expands on the opportunities around Tampa if you are there for some other purpose (as I was) but have a bit of free time. I was still searching for a good sunset, and so on the Tuesday evening after dinner I decided to try the city again, so back in the car and down to...
I had an opportunity to visit Tampa last weekend because of a business trip to the area, and so decided to travel early and spend a couple of days shooting the sights (and sites) to extend my portfolio. This long post (which I might break into two) is intended to give a photographer’s view of the area and the best places I found to take iconic photos of this area. I must first give a word of thanks to Andrew...
A recent reader of my eBook, Getting Started in Stock emailed me recently to ask if it was too late to make a start now with Stock Photography. If you read the microstock forums (and sometimes that is interesting but be aware of a lot of angry and negative people on some of the forums), you will often see references to the good old days in the mid 2000’s when it was easy to get images online and they sold...
We are always looking for something to move our images out of the ordinary to really capture the interest of the buyer (and hopefully the general public) to our stock photo images. Building up expertise in exposure, composition and processing in Lightroom (or Photoshop) helps tremendously, but what tools can give our photographs the edge? I’ve been experimenting with the Singh-Ray Gold-n-Blue polarizing filter which can make some spectacular changes to the scene in front of you – the sort...
Sometimes, on a dark winters night, it is fun to just see what can be created from little bits of photos that are already sitting on your hard drive. Here is one such effort, that I think nicely illustrates the concept of “being adrift” and can be used as a stock image for many leadership (or lack of) illustrations. This could have been a beautifully seen shot with a boat floating on a calm sea, or it could have started...
