Ideas for Stock Photos and Videos – January 17

I won’t do these every two days going forward, but I wanted to mention a few things on my mind as potential subjects. First though – check out the daily email from The Hustle. It’s a short email with interesting slants on technology and business news and often gives me things to consider as well as ideas for new stock shoots. There was a recent one about three big lawsuits building up – Google vs Oracle over open source code, Apple vs the US Justice Department over backdoor access to smartphones and encyrption, and the final one between Google and Sonus over the ability of massive companies to ride roughshod over smaller ones. Each of the topics will reverberate around for a long time this year and so could be worthy of some illustrative editorial shots.

Staying with technology, there is yet another streaming video service going to be launched (in the USA, but think about how you can create images for the market even if you don’t live there) called Peacock by NBC Universal which is owned by Comcast, one of the biggest cable companies. There are many competing streaming services – to the extent that it is becoming a bit like Cable TV had become where you need to subscribe to endless channels just to see the shows you wanted. I think there is a nice opportunity to do a series on “cutting the cord” from traditional TV but perhaps showing all the Apps for these various streaming services on a smartphone screen. It will be editorial, but that isn’t an issue for this sort of subject. You could make commercial type options where the focus is on a traditional TV remote control with all these Apps on a screen in the background and out of focus. I have some plans to do some shots like this, but nothing in the next few weeks. I’ve earned $450 from various “cutting the cord” type shots in the past:

And I think it would be intriguing to build this story into a more up to date streaming competition story illustrating the difficulties that people will have on choosing which one to subscribe to and keep their bills under control. You could do a mock cable TV bill but list all the streaming services instead perhaps?

A little more broadly, I’m increasingly of the view that the current stock market highs (in the US and many countries) is becoming a massive bubble and a big correction is due (probably this year?). We have had growing markets for so long that there are probably not as many “crash” images and particularly videos as there could be. I don’t have any particular concepts in my mind yet, but well executed videos showing financial panic and despair could be successful this year. Think of them as a Put option on the stock market!

Finally, when you get a new product, especially if it is new to the market, always photograph it. I try to do that on its own as well as in use. I got an Amazon Echo Auto over the holidays (it was free from my car insurance company for some reason) and it puts Alexa in your car. Not particularly useful in my mind, but I still photographed it against white, on a shiny black surface reflecting a blue background and also in my car. They don’t sell often, but they were easy to take and could get some traction as the whole subject of electronics in cars becomes a big story for the next few years. Talking of which, privacy will continue to be a major story and is hard to illustrate so think about that!

I’m off to a conference (technology, not photography) for most of next week so I’m not likely to be posting more. I’ll keep my “thinking cap” on, however.