Ideas for stock images and video – Jan 15

I promised to update you with ideas that I have for new images. Most of these are ones that I haven’t got my own head round and so I will rarely have competing images, and I will also explain why I think it might be a good subject to try to illustrate. You will probably find that some of these are US specific, but as I mentioned yesterday I believe that the USA is probably the biggest single market for these type of illustrative stock images and even if you don’t live in the USA, I believe it is worth catering to that market if it is feasible to do so. You might have to buy props from eBay, but hopefully the rewards will exceed the costs.

I do the same for other markets, such as the UK – I mentioned the Brexit saga yesterday and I am sure that illustrations about trading difficulties will become a major theme this year. I’ve no idea if it will get as bad as shortages of basic products, but I don’t think it will be easy sailing. I did some of a “truck driver” looking at regulations for exporting goods. These aren’t particularly good, and I will try later to do them better (and make some videos).

I was reading an article yesterday about serious clinical trials that are underway into the properties of hallucinogenic drugs and in particular psilocybin obtained from mushrooms (magic mushrooms!). This whole area has been shunned for many years but it looks like it could become a bigger story later this year. Here is the article if you want to read it. There are quite a number of magic mushroom stock photos, considerably less for psilocybin and not many of those give the impression of serious medical uses. So I will put this into my mental wheels for consideration. I don’t think this will be a major story because although many people are on anti-depression medications, this seems to be more for people who can’t tolerate normal drugs. In terms of illustrating it, something with prescription bottles would make sense I think. But give that some thought.

I also mentioned the US elections and the serious risks of claims of voter frauds and assaults on the voting process this year. Of course elections take place in most countries around the world and so some generic shots are always helpful. I bought rolls of “I voted” stickers (trying to make them not specific to any country) from Amazon and created numerous shots such as this one with the US flag behind the roll.

You would think this sort of thing was very well represented on the agencies, but the series has earned over $600 or so, including videos like this:

I made the video by putting a circular wooden tray on top of my Edelkrone Surface One (now Dolly One) which was set to rotate in place. I think I then stabilized it in Premiere because there are always small movements in macro type videos. However, it didn’t take long and certainly has rewarded my efforts. I plan to do more election related images and perhaps include different country flags in the background. It would be easy to change those out in Photoshop as well and while I don’t recommend using other stock images in your submissions (against the rules of most (all) agencies), a blurred flag is highly unlikely to be identified. You can also use images from friends (if they agree) because it is OK to use an image if you have been given the copyright to it. I used a European Union flag from a colleague to create the UK/EU symbol on my Brexit shots:

I hope this gives you a bit of insight about how I think of these things!