Latest stock photo images – 29 July 2012

It is an age since I last showed some of my stock photos, but I can assure you I haven’t been idle. I try to upload 50 images a week now – sometimes a few more, sometimes less, but that is my target. I generally pick 25 of those for iStockPhoto each week to try to build up my portfolio there. Here are some uploaded in the past weeks.
These are in no particular order, but selected to show a range of topics that attracted my eye in the past few weeks. It has been extremely hot here recently and so many of them are inside shots, but I did sweat for some of the outside drinks images!

Each of this series was trying to create a warm holiday feel of a cold drink by the side of a blue swimming pool and I went through other drink types – champagne, cocktails etc. The one inside was more to create a warm image of beer lighting up a senior man’s face. This was lit by a flashgun behind my head focused on the glass from the rear with some fill light from the front.
Sticking with the food and drink theme, I took a series of shots of a home made apple pie just out of the oven. Some were isolated (later using the pen tool) in Photoshop, others had the wooden table as the background.

I had to change the air-conditioning filters and only had a small step ladder – cue another photo series – of a senior man reaching up for an air conditioning filter. A trade secret here – the filter I bought is too big and fits into the exterior opening of the vent, leaving no room for the grille to shut! Of course it looks OK in the photo!

Next up – some macro images. I really enjoy taking photos with my 100mm macro and the ring flash I reviewed earlier. I’ve been using that combination for quite a lot of shots recently. The screw was rejected by BigStock, even though it is of immaculate quality, because of chromatic aberrations! I think the reviewer confused the naturally occurring colors in a macro shot of nickel with a lens problem! The marzipan was taken to try to give a christmas feel with the white wine and glass in the background. Finally, the sage shot was taken using the remote control feature and image stacking that comes with Helicon Focus – a great program if you take a lot of macro shots. This was constructed from 7 separate shots taken a small focus increment from each other and assembled into one super focus image. I’ll write some more about that in a later post.

Up next (or somewhere in this sequence) was July 4th – Independence day in the US and the cause of much celebration. I went down to DC on a scorchingly hot evening to take shots of the fireworks over the Mall. I think reprocessed some images to make more generic firework shots that could be put into another photo:


Returning to the Macro theme, a couple of music related images:

To round out the month, here are some images with my favorite model(s):

And my final image – Cloud computing is all the rage in technology, but how do you illustrate it? Here is one idea.