How to come up with new ideas

I spent the weekend in bed with a fever (and a possible Covid infection for which I just received the results (negative!)) so I had time to think about many things. One was how to leave your stock photo portfolio to your heirs (which I really need to investigate), but I also started thinking about where ideas for stock photos come from – what makes a good stock photo these days? Of course, there are always needs for models doing different things and as styles and fashions change, and diversity becomes a key component of many campaigns, those always need to be refreshed. If you like taking (and are good at) those sort of shots (and can afford the budget), then you will have many takers for the images. But the area I have had success with is trying to illustrate concepts that are going to be in the news or more particularly in articles and blog posts. Real-time news articles almost always use real images of the event or the people involved in the event. Think fires in Greece or the West coast of the USA. Many many articles, but all using some version of one of the fires burning buildings or forests. Unless you happen to be there, there is no chance of your images being used. I don’t think I have seen any articles that use a more conceptual image as their headliner shot.

So what we are looking for is not real time news, but things that will be in the public attention for more than a day or so. If it is short lived, then there are going to be few sales, so we need something that has some life to it as well as it being a subject that is difficult to illustrate with a “news” photo. What made me think of writing this article was actually a couple of things I saw over the weekend – an emailed comment from one of my subscribers (which I will come back to) and then an email from 123RF promising details of trends to shoot for August! What a great idea – a stock agency using its search patterns to tell us what to shoot this month! So I happily clicked the link and found the 2 minute read article:

I’ll save you the time and effort of going to their site – their topics were Autumn, Business, Coffee and Cat. Wow! I guess I might be in for a good month with my existing cat pictures, but do they really believe that those are topics that regular stock photographers can turn into new saleable pictures?

Which I guess brings me to the comment. As you probably know, I have a premium section (now about 18 months old), where I write at least once a month about things I have created and topics that I think are worth illustrating but I haven’t got round to yet. I try to always come up with ways that the topic could be illustrated. I can’t claim to always get things right, but some of my predictions have been pretty good. I mentioned in my latest post about some images I uploaded for a new milk alternative product called Not Milk that is really good to drink and can be used for all the things that milk is good for. A bit like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, which have sold very well for me, I think that this product could catch on with the public and hence be in many articles on food sites and in the news more generally. However, it is pretty difficult to get hold of – being on sale in the US only in Whole Foods store. We do shop there from time to time (the nearest is 90 miles away…) so I bought a box and created my own images of cereals, glasses of milk, isolated shots etc. When searching on stock agencies, I saw that I had the lions share of images illustrating the product, but there were two images from Malaga in Spain where they had cleverly used the company website on a laptop instead of the real product (which I guess is not available in Spain). I commented in my blog post that I wondered if this was from a reader of my blog and hence the email comment. It read:

Hi Steve

We plead guilty ! We are your subscribers from Malaga :)… That gives us the opportunity to thank you for all the great ideas in your posts. Best five bucks invested in our life (we make around 150 $/month with 3 agencies).

Following your tips changed our perpective on stock photography. Before we were only shooting “real” photos but didn’t sell much, probably the city (and country Spain) is not highly demanded and… we are not talented enough to produce very high quality.

We’ve decided to make more “conceptual” photos and … we are still beginners but we do sell a lot more. For example, we recently followed your advice on making concepts with the “greenpass” (european covid sanitary pass) and it sold three times (on adobe and shutterstock) just a few hours after being uploaded, same for the “four day week” that sold two days after being uploaded. We try to get some ideas alone by paying more attention to the illustrations when reading articles… For the moment we have to admit that your ideas are better :).

Thanks

Now you might read this just as a blatant attempt to get more subscribers. I was really moved by the impact I had had with this stock photographer and it made me more determined to continue to dream up new ideas and spread them about. Now why do you have to pay for this? Clearly, if I come up with ideas and simply tell the world before I create my own concepts, then I am creating a lot of competition for my own images. So making a small charge is a balance I came up with to earn something from the idea even if it means I earn less from the resultant images I create.