It has been a while since my last premium article, although I hope you found the more general topics I have been writing about useful as well. After a lull in creativity, I’ve been quite active again as you can see from the green screen work and I encourage you (as I will explain) to think about using yourself and some older images to create new concepts that might sell. I’ve continued my green screen work (it is so easy...
I wrote about my tests of Green Screen extraction plugins for Photoshop a month or so ago, and then went through a lull in creativity and didn’t do much more. My chosen solution at that time was Key36, a unique approach that seems to combine actions that run in Photoshop with some on-line control. They offer both online extraction where you upload the file to their servers plus this Photoshop action and their payment system is quite unique as well...
This is the follow up article to the one I published earlier this week about the value we put on our art“. Although I talk a lot about “images”, I’m using that as a bit of a shorthand to include videos as well. The key message that I ended with in that article was the following: Your aim should be to maximize the earnings of your portfolio with the minimum effort needed to achieve those earnings Exclusivity – a club...
I was recently pointed to a discussion on the Alamy forum that mentioned a post of mine on whether selling an Alamy image on microstock sites was a good idea. It is actually a very respectful discussion bearing in mind some of the tensions between those that think that the microstock sites have ruined photography and those that think that is just an old fashioned view and it would have happened anyway. But reading the various comments made me think...
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been neglecting my stock portfolio in the past few weeks with very few images being created and uploaded. Sometimes I feel a bit bad about doing that, but always remember that creative activities are not something that you can just force yourself to do – you need to feel creative to be creative, I think. I have some ideas kicking around in the back of my mind for illustrating financial issues as...
I’ve got to say, from the start, that I have not been very productive in the past couple of weeks. I had a flurry of activity around the green screen work I did and I composited those shots into various backgrounds, but I have not been very motivated. I’m sure you know what I mean! I have even bought a box of 50 face masks to incorporate into my images, but so far the box is unopened. But what I...
As I write this, countries around the world are starting to experiment with opening up their businesses and activities. My particular area has not been heavily closed, and I’ve even managed to have two games of golf, but this change is opening up new ideas for stock photos to illustrate this next stage. I think there are lots of opportunities to think of here. A couple of trends will be important in my view. One will certainly be that people...
As I outlined in my end of April earnings report, I’ve managed to keep my earnings above water, with a lot of help from Coronavirus related imagery. In this post, I’ll walk through the sort of things that I’m working on now and what I’m thinking about for the upcoming months. As I’ve discussed before, I think this new state of affairs will be with us for a long time and we will just have to get used to some...
It is getting harder to remember life before the virus. I guess it is a month now since West Virginia officially started sheltering in place although I think I probably started a little time before that. And really, no end in sight to any semblance of getting back to normal life. I know I tend to be on the more pessimistic side of things but my current view is that we will not get anything like normality until the middle...
I was at a loose end this morning (there is a limit to the number of studio based stock images I can think of!), so I decided to look at some of the trends that I could see from Microstockr Pro. I signed up to this app many years ago now, and I find it invaluable for tracking where I am in the month (which is interesting, but not something you can impact), but more importantly, to look at the...
