Fine Art America – greasing the wheels

I hope my title makes sense in other languages! This post is about how we can maybe work together to get more sales on Fine Art America. I don’t exactly know how they rank the images that they show on FAA, but I’m sure previously sold images will rank more highly, but I suspect that images with likes, favorites and comments must be taken into account when the results of a search are displayed.

I went down into Morgantown, the college town of West Virginia University on Sunday evening to see if the sunset would be good to me. As it turned out, it was a pretty good evening and so I took a number of images of the old (and famous) Woodburn Hall at WVU.

As the evening wore on, the various lights started to come on and so I hung around for an hour or more as the sun slowly lit up the clouds until finally the full set of street and building lights were illuminated:

Each of these images was taken on a tripod with 5 shots that were one stop apart and I then blended them in Lightroom to create an HDR version. I’m always very happy with the way that LR does this merging – it handles slight movements very well and I don’t think the colors are too much like the old HDR shots!

Back at home, I wondered how I could improve the shot for a print and tried Luminar 4 to replace the sky with a more appropriate sunset shot. Incidentally, I’m always very impressed with the way the sky replacement works – it handles those small railings, tree branches and even the windows in the tower. Very clever! You can get it with a $10 discount using my link and code in the right hand column. I chose a more dramatic sunset sky and ended up with this version:

I think this would make a great graduation gift for someone leaving WVU (and I’m sure there are similar shots at universities and colleges near you) and so I did one final version for FAA with some text:

So this comes round to my idea for promotion. If you click any of these images you will be taken to my FAA site and you can either like or favorite an image (perhaps this one with the text) and if you feel like it, add a comment. Then in the comments below, add your own FAA image and I, and hopefully some readers, will check out your portfolio and similarly rate and comment on it. As the colleges in the US will be entering graduation season soon, this might be a perfect time to try the approach with this shot. I’ll report back if it actually works!