As you know, I take two basic types of stock image – places and things. This article is going to dig deeper into how I decide what “things” to take! The whole genre of taking stock images and videos of people is very profitable (if you are good at it), but that isn’t really my scene and the risks (of lawsuits from unhappy models) is much greater. Breaking down my approach to the next level, images of places are pretty...
For a long time I have wondered whether this blog would be more valuable to readers (and to me!) if I explained what sort of ideas I am having for new stock concepts and how I plan to explore them with still photos and videos. Up until now, I have kept those to myself and mentioned them well after I have had plenty of time to reap the rewards of my creations. The most recent example was with Juul vaping...
I’ve been anxiously awaiting my earnings from EyeEM after their extended holiday break before I report the full December earnings and now they are in! $22… Perhaps forget that now and come back to the main story. The month was pretty quiet in the second half, as usual, and I ended with $2630, about the same as last year. Quite a drop from previous months, but, as you can see from the graph, this is pretty normal. Just to add...
I received a question in the Ask Steve a Question post about my workflow for video. I’m not sure if I have ever written about this, so here we go. First, the question: I know you dealing with both photography and Videos …and you mentioned that you use Ligthroom as your main program for photos – viewing and sorting ect – my question is how do you treat video ?? I mean do also use LR for viewing video ???...
It will take me a bit of time to get my earnings together and I like to do an end of year report as well. It also looks like EyeEM will not be back from the holiday celebrations until January 6th! Nice for some! So I’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year and hope we can all look forward to some sales in 2020. The image I chose to illustrate this post (which I was quite impressed...
Taking a break from some of my other work (and I did finish all my uploads of Portugal yesterday!) and so I decided to look at some of the questions I received but haven’t answered yet. The first one was via the contact page on my site and was: Thank you very much for your website, which is very useful. I wanted to ask you two questions. Bigstock belongs to Shutterstock ?. In the list of StockSubmitter agencies are separated....
After much effort, I have completed the updating of my eBook – Getting Started in Stock and published the 2020 edition. I’ve extended the title a little for this edition – adding the word Photography to avoid it getting mixed up with books about stocks and shares on Amazon! The book has been brought up to date and I’ve added my latest thinking throughout the book, including a new chapter on what to take and what to think about when...
Adobe have recently started accepting editorial images from contributors with more than 1000 lifetime downloads, but what does that mean? What is an illustrative editorial image? Firstly, what is an editorial image? It is an image that is intended to be used to illustrate or help explain an “educational” or news or commentary article rather than be used to promote a product or a point of view. To take an extreme for clarity – a picture of an Hispanic person...
I’ve been taking a break from stock for a few days to get ready for Christmas, although I did take the opportunity to photograph my grandchildren in front of the Xmas tree. I rarely use them as models for stock photos – there are possibly too many ways that images can be misused, but certain shots are less likely to be taken out of context and so I do upload those with a model release. This one really caught my...
I wrote about Luminar 4 and its AI driven sky replacement capability a couple of weeks or so ago and have been playing around with it from time to time in between other tasks! I am thinking of applying to Archangel book images (I will write about that if/when I get accepted) and wanted some moody images to go with their general house style. Not sure these are “winners” yet, but the ability to quickly change the sky alters the...
