Premium – a possible opportunity

As you know, I have suggested that many themes around the upcoming US election will be opportunities for stock photographers (and videographers) in the coming weeks as the various themes of mail-in voting, voter fraud, delayed results, false claims of winning, lawsuits over ballot counting, violence at the polls (and afterwards) all come together in early November.

This is an opportunity for readers around the world as the basics – envelopes and various campaign stickers can be created anywhere. The thing I wanted to cover in this short post is a realization that came to me this past week that we don’t have to stick to the message on the stickers – you can modify to support any message. Maybe not an earth-shattering realization, but it was certainly a new idea for me. So I’ve been modifying both old and new images to try to support the different types of message that we will need in the coming weeks.

First up was one to illustrate voting more than once (as our President seemed to suggest):

The same badge as I have used before but I used Content aware move to shift the Voted word upwards and then added the new message below. The font on this badge is Cooper Black and I found it already installed on my copy of Photoshop. Not sure if I had downloaded it in the past, however. I used the same colors as on the badge itself and added a little noise to the letters to make it look less artificial. Once you have this ability you can create whatever message you want:

Or perhaps a calendar to show all the votes that will be cast early this year:

You could also make up your own design for a badge as well for certain types of composite shot. So this is just a short post to put the idea into your mind. Perhaps you will have the winning idea for this year’s election in the USA!