I’ve written before about the sky replacement capabilities of Luminar 4 from Skylum, although, of course, the program does much more than that. To be honest, I’m so used to Photoshop and Lightroom that I haven’t had the time or inclination to investigate its other features, but if you are looking for more “One-click” improvements to your images, I’m sure it can deliver! I’ve been playing with its sky replacement functions when I have either a concept in mind that...
I think I’m already a bit late with this one, but I have a feeling (and a big worry) that it will turn into the biggest story of 2020. As such, it could generate a demand for a whole range of illustrative images and videos. I’m talking about the corona virus epidemic in China. First, I suspect it is a lot worse than we know, and if it spreads in another country, it will be the subject of endless discussions...
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,...
2019 has now come and gone and its time to review how the stock business performed during the year. Overall, it was not too bad (and could certainly have been worse) as I ended up with total earnings of $35,595 compared with $35,790 in 2018. I would really have liked to continue with some growth over previous years, but the slow second half of December put paid to that. Here is the trend: As you can see from the above,...
I’m sure you have noticed some premium articles being published. I wanted to reassure readers that I will continue to post other items for general consumption as before. I’m not turning this blog into a subscription only website. I wanted to get a bit of premium content online, but I still plan to report on the 2019 annual results shortly and add more information on stock photography and videos going forward that everyone will be able to read.
I promised to update you with ideas that I have for new images. Most of these are ones that I haven’t got my own head round and so I will rarely have competing images, and I will also explain why I think it might be a good subject to try to illustrate. You will probably find that some of these are US specific, but as I mentioned yesterday I believe that the USA is probably the biggest single market for...
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 ???...
