Being isolated at home can be OK for a time, but unless you are active in some way, the days can get very long. If you are able to work your normal job from home, that is great, but if that isn’t possible then what can you do. To some extent I am used to this sort of life, having worked from home for about 10 years now, but I’m missing the trips to see new places and I am...
I’ve written before about the amazing way that Luminar 4 can change skies and can now, with the latest release, seamlessly add clouds or other objects into your own skies. I haven’t been playing with it too much recently as I have been working on new images to fill the growing need for illustrating our new normal, but I just got to know that they have an Easter Sale starting today. I’m sorry of you bought this at the higher...
After building my new computer, I spent some time reloading all the apps and thinking about how I was protecting my “assets” – the still and video files that are the core of my business as a stock photographer. I’m also a technology consultant (in my spare time) and so I have those files as well to think about. I maintain a system where things are reasonably well structured across various hard drives, the core of which is: Storage structure...
As I explained earlier, all the news and most of the magazine/website articles for the foreseeable future will be all about the virus and its impact on life everywhere on the planet. I still see sales of travel images, but since the start of April, they have been somewhat fewer than before. Of course, you can’t really take many more travel shots, but it might be a time to go back through your portfolio and see if there are images...
Another month goes by and what a month to remember! Although I doubt if we will feel any better at all about April (and May…). However, on the stock photo front, things really picked up for me. I ended the month with $3141 which is the best result for quite a few months. For various reasons (mainly to do with having $600 in video sales), March 2019 was way better than this at $3675, but with all that is going...
Way back in 2015, I built my last computer and while it was pretty good for the time, I’ve become frustrated by Premiere in particular when working with 4K videos. The playback within the app seems to have been getting worse and I started using proxies for editing and color correction, but of course it takes minutes sometimes to create the proxies from the 4K video in the first place. So with expectations of a tax refund from the IRS...
It is very hard to find any positives in the virus that is sweeping the world and creating havoc with every economy, and I hesitated to even write the heading above. But… one thing that is happening in our stock world is that images and videos are being sought by buyers that just never existed before. I know that Shutterstock now has 306K images with the keyword Coronavirus, but I’m still able to create and upload new images that are...
What a difference a few weeks make! Just over a week ago I was about to go to Disneyworld with my family and now we are pretty much housebound as I am sure you are also experiencing. At least, as stock photographers, we have some income still coming in and our job is to see how to improve and increase that. As I mentioned before, I ignored my own advice to create and get coronavirus images online until I really...
I do wonder if this is “fiddling while Rome burns”, but Luminar 4 has a new update (4.2) which has added some interesting features to the base program – particularly in terms of adding things seamlessly to the sky that you may have just replaced. I’ve written about my experiences with replacing skies in previous posts. I played with it a little and added some clouds to an otherwise blank blue sky in this image (together with some sun flare...
I enjoy adding painting effects to my images and sometimes upload them as stock. I tried to learn Corel Painter a few years back but that was too complex for me and so I’ve stuck with Jixipix which has water color, oil painting and also drawing tools that are very easy to use. I bought mine when they had a 40% sale, but today they have upped that to 50%. The coupon code to use is LUCKY50 with the link...
