Examples of Stock Images – 28 May 2012

My new year resolution to post images each week has taken a beating this month. It has been a busy month for my non-stock photography activities, with a week’s conference in Chicago earlier in the month and then a few days vacation in St Michaels on the Chesapeake Bay to celebrate my wife’s birthday. Of course, the camera went along as well, but it has taken me some time to finally process and keyword all the images before finishing the uploads this weekend. Chicago is a great place (at least in the center), but for a stock photographer the city is full of copyright issues. Many of the buildings were designed by famous architects, and so the copyright status is tricky at best. I think the general rule that an image which focuses on a new building needs to be uploaded as Editorial, one that is of a more general skyline (which may include the building in question) is commercial. I’ll see how well that rule is applied in the various agencies! First up in this installment is one from my newly created white table mentioned earlier with some focus stacking using Helicon Focus to get everything sharply in focus. If you like combining multiple images taken at different focus points, then Helicon Focus is the way to go – much faster than Photoshop and the accuracy of blending seems to be much better.

I have a pretty large garden and I mowed it all in one day earlier in the month and thought that a series of images of someone trying to crop a large area of grass may be useful for an article about “challenges” and so I set up my camera and flash (using the Promote Remote to trigger a shot every 10 seconds) and took some gardening shots:

Chicago was a great location for architecture shots – here is one from the Ferris Wheel of a spinning carousel ride on the Navy Pier in Lake Michigan:

During a break in the conference, I thought it would be interesting to take some shots that could be used for meetings, business events etc. Here is one of a close up of my hand with pen with some out of focus colleagues in the background:

Next up were some red roses that had been ordered for our room in St Michaels. While we were there, I also took a number of shots of the white painted garden chair overlooking the bay, and finally a close up of the ice bucket with bay in the background: