I was reading an article in a photography magazine that made the point that you are the expert in your own region – you know where the best sites are, you can visit them when conditions are good and you don’t have to get back to your hotel or into the car for the next part of your vacation. Good advice and I took it yesterday to visit the Christmas lights at the Washington DC Church of Jesus Christ of...
I must admit that I am prone to modifying my images to try to tell the story better – I’ve been known to replace a person without a model release with one that I have approval from – but in my mind that is still a great image for telling a climbing story! I went to Bahrain a couple of weeks back and took some images that I really liked, but there were distracting elements. In the first case, a...
I’m not saying that this is a great stock photo (in terms of its commercial potential), but sometimes we have to let our artistic side shine through! I was walking around Regensburg in Germany on my recent river cruise. Cloudy sky, bit of drizzle, certainly not the conditions to create fantastic travel images with a blue sky and billowing clouds. As a result I was looking for details that could enhance a travel article about the medieval town and I...
I reviewed this earlier in the year – I really enjoyed reading each of the issues of Taylor Mathis’ Photographing Food series. I haven’t seen his videos (to be honest I don’t like watching instructional videos much), but I thought the separate eBooks were interesting and thought provoking, but expensive. I noticed that Taylor has a special Black Friday sale on his site with 55% off – Friday through Monday. If you are interested in having a relaxing read and...
I wrote about this topic earlier this year after an ocean cruise around Australia and New Zealand. The basic question was whether the organized trips and activities gave a photographer any time to create useful stock images. In the fall, I went on a river cruise from Nuremberg in Germany to Budapest in Hungary, and every day was structured – arrive at a new city, go on a walking or coach tour, see the sights… Nice for a vacation (in...
I use Lightroom all the time for both processing and keywording and describing my stock photos, and I now have 68,000 images in the main catalog or database. Basically, all my images since 2001 are in this catalog and I keep it like this as it is important to me to be able to go back and find any image from the past, however long ago I took it. The early ones are not keyworded very well, but pretty much...
As I was gathering my earnings for the month of October from the various sites, I got to thinking about which agencies I still upload images to, and why? I have tried various sites in the past, and have never actually deleted images from an agency, but for some, I just stopped uploading new images. I thought is would be interesting to put that in a table so that you can see how many images I have with each site,...
I’ve not been posting in the past couple of weeks as a result of a trip to Equatorial Guinea in Africa. In most people’s mind, a visit, at this time of Ebola scares, to West Africa is probably very low on the priority list, but I found it to be a fascinating location with a chance to photograph things that are not present in very many stock agencies. I’ve not decided what to do with my images from this trip...
I mentioned Image Brief before as a great source for ideas for future stock shoots, but it is also a potential revenue stream if you are lucky enough to win one of their briefs. You can sign up here if you are interested in joining them. They will check your portfolio so make sure you have a representative set of images available that shows both the quality and range of images you can take. I’ve just been awarded my second...
If you are anywhere near Washington DC, don’t forget that Nature Visions Photo Expo is on again this year between November 14 – 16th. We have some great speakers – Rick Sammon, Julianne Kost, Ian Plant, Jay Patel, Deborah Sandidge and a great photo exhibit as well. I organized the speakers this year so please come along and see what we have in store for you!
