I’ve got to say, from the start, that I have not been very productive in the past couple of weeks. I had a flurry of activity around the green screen work I did and I composited those shots into various backgrounds, but I have not been very motivated. I’m sure you know what I mean! I have even bought a box of 50 face masks to incorporate into my images, but so far the box is unopened. But what I...
I’m breaking the habit of a lifetime by posting some thoughts on the announcement that Shutterstock made today about their new earnings approach to be adopted in just 5 days time. I normally like to see how these changes are explained and then re-explained before commenting, but it is such a train crash of an announcement that I thought I should comment a little more quickly. First, let me say that in 40 years of senior positions in various companies...
I’ve been doing more green screen oriented stock photos recently because my travels have been sorely restricted! Why a green screen when it might be much easier to extract against a pure white background? Well, I wanted to produce both videos and stock photos of the various ideas and Premiere already has a great extraction tool with the Ultra Key effect and that seems to do an excellent job with getting clean edges and a smooth video composite as you...
As I write this, countries around the world are starting to experiment with opening up their businesses and activities. My particular area has not been heavily closed, and I’ve even managed to have two games of golf, but this change is opening up new ideas for stock photos to illustrate this next stage. I think there are lots of opportunities to think of here. A couple of trends will be important in my view. One will certainly be that people...
I’ve been a proponent of taking photos wherever you can, even though there may not be an immediate market for them. As an example, when I was booked on a early flight from Dulles airport in Washington, DC (remember those days…) I spent my waiting time taking a few shots around the terminal and the gate area. As it was early, there were very few people around and I think I uploaded the shots as editorial and they have probably...
As I outlined in my end of April earnings report, I’ve managed to keep my earnings above water, with a lot of help from Coronavirus related imagery. In this post, I’ll walk through the sort of things that I’m working on now and what I’m thinking about for the upcoming months. As I’ve discussed before, I think this new state of affairs will be with us for a long time and we will just have to get used to some...
A full month of sales during the Coronavirus lockdown! So how did I do? Surprisingly well! My earnings were pretty solid all through the month and I didn’t really see as much of a drop at weekends this month: The first week included Easter, which is obviously a holiday in many parts of the world and that was slow, but after that, things were good for the rest of the month. Overall earnings ended up being $2805. This month is...
It is getting harder to remember life before the virus. I guess it is a month now since West Virginia officially started sheltering in place although I think I probably started a little time before that. And really, no end in sight to any semblance of getting back to normal life. I know I tend to be on the more pessimistic side of things but my current view is that we will not get anything like normality until the middle...
I was at a loose end this morning (there is a limit to the number of studio based stock images I can think of!), so I decided to look at some of the trends that I could see from Microstockr Pro. I signed up to this app many years ago now, and I find it invaluable for tracking where I am in the month (which is interesting, but not something you can impact), but more importantly, to look at the...
As you will have seen from my post yesterday about what I have been up to in early April, I’ve concentrated more and more on shots that I can create at home that I think will gain some traction during the current emergency. We are able to go out (but not in any groups) around my area, and so I did take a few drone shots when the weather was nice last week, but it is cold and miserable now...
