One of the biggest determinants of a good month on Shutterstock is the number of Enhanced Downloads (or EDs). What is an Enhanced Download? Strictly speaking it is an Enhanced License Download – a standard license on Shutterstock lets the buyer use the image for personal non-commercial uses with duplication up to 250,000 copies. If someone wants to print more than that, or use the image in a commercial way – as a print in a hotel, or as an...
One of the topics I cover in my Stock Photography eBook is how to get the best placement of your images in the search engines of the stock agencies – with a chapter on advanced keywording and various tips that I picked up about specific sites. One that seemed to make a big difference to my sales was the ability to “Fave” your own images on 123RF. I covered this about 6 months ago, but I suddenly realized that is...
Isolating an object against a pure white background is one of the challenges of stock photography, especially for light colored objects. If you place it on a white card and boost the lighting to get the card burnt out, the object suffers as well. I set about building a simple approach to the problem using things I have around the house. The project starts with a glass topped table, placed close to a white surface. Under the table you place...
I’m occasionally asked what equipment I use for stock photography, so here is a summary of what I have, what I use, and why. My main camera is the Canon 5D Mk ii – the full frame 21M DSLR. Why? Because I like the low noise from the large sensor, I can crop well into the image and still get a usable stock photo, and when I am using most of the frame, I can downsize to around 4600 pixels...
I rushed down to Washington DC yesterday morning to join a cast of thousands waiting for the Space Shuttle Discovery, mounted on its Boeing 747, to fly over the city. I got to my chosen spot about 15 minutes before the time the plane was due to arrive, but, thanks to some poor planning on someone’s part, the shuttle arrived 10 minutes early and flew low over our viewing location. Luckily, I had my camera, 70-200mm and 1.4x extender all...
This short article covers a photographic isolation – setting your subject against a pure white background to make it easy to change the background or add the subject to a different composition. It is similar to blue (or green) screening but is sometimes easier to achieve without any specially colored backgrounds or cloths. A typical picture isolated against white would look like this: And after a little bit of Photoshop work, the background can be removed and replaced by a...
Alamy is one of the sites I upload to, and I’ve been bemused for a time when I’m adding some main keywords that major keywords seem to be missing. My recent trip to Kauai brought this home as the keyword “kauai” was missing on the uploaded files. At first I thought I had forgotten to add it, but it was there in Lightroom, as “Kauai”. At first, I thought this was the reason, but no, there is a deeper reason....
As mentioned in a previous post, I’m still working through my 1400 images from a recent trip to Oahu and Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. One of my experiments this time was a timelapse movie that I will upload to a few stock video sites. The steps are not that complex if you haven’t done this before: Set your camera up on a tripod and carefully frame and level the shot Set the quality to Jpeg and, if you can,...
Well, my new year resolution to post every week got forgotten last week! But I did have an excuse – I had to go to a conference in Hawaii and tacked a week’s working vacation (taking photographs) in Kauai onto the trip. Over 1400 images later, I am struggling to go through and edit the ones that I think have potential as stock images. I also had my first attempt at a time lapse movie during the week, taking a...
I’m keeping up with my resolution to take and post new images every week! This first one was a real joy to produce. I saw a video on PhotographyTalk forum which showed how to get a shot of wine flowing from a bottle. His example was one where the wine appeared to shoot straight up out of the bottle, but I thought I would try something a bit harder – make the wine go into a glass! The idea is...
