Premium – April activity
As you will have seen from my post yesterday about what I have been up to in early April, I’ve concentrated more and more on shots that I can create at home that I think will gain some traction during the current emergency. We are able to go out (but not in any groups) around my area, and so I did take a few drone shots when the weather was nice last week, but it is cold and miserable now so staying at home is the sensible option.
So what sort of concepts have I been creating? I did mention the illustrative editorial shots, and I now have a range of different products that have some potential use in cleansing, disinfecting or maybe warding off colds:
As you can see from the above, I also took photos of my finger in a pulse oximeter which measures the oxygen level in the blood. This reading is one of the things that would cause you to go to the Emergency room at the hospital if you were really having trouble breathing. I also took a couple of images to illustrate the current debate (in the USA) about whether postal or absentee voting should be more widely allowed for the upcoming election. I think this will be a big area of controversy as we move into the summer and so I need to think of better ways to illustrate it. But for now, these will do!
I also decided to spend a bit of time cleaning up my social security card to remove any identification marks – I partly did this because I wanted to incorporate it into other shots, but as I had made the effort, I thought I would upload the clean version:
I also uploaded this to Creative Market and was surprised to get a contact from someone in Hawaii who had lost their own social security card and wanted to know if I was willing to create a new one for him! Sorry, but forgery is not something I’m into – he did seem to be quite understanding when I turned him down! I did the same with my medicare card and printed them out on matte paper to use in photos in their own right:
As I have mentioned before, I think this virus will put a lot of pressure on politicians in the USA for some other sort of health insurance system and so adding text to the image allows someone to just use it as it stands. I did upload the blank version as well. These are still sitting in Shutterstock’s long review queue so I don’t know whether they will accept them all. There will also be many debates about the cost of social policies, such as medicare and social security (which will struggle under budget restrictions) and so I did versions to illustrate that:
Most of these were taken in the white box I talked about yesterday. As you can also see, I decided to photograph and film the removal of fluff and lint from our tumble dryer. I made a few still photos and then created a 4K video of me removing and cleaning the filter. My shots of changing the furnace filter keep selling, so perhaps there are more opportunities here!
It’s important to keep those videos in mind when you come up with an idea. I did the same with the pulse oximeter as well – it was easy to do and might get some sales.
With my eye on things in the news (and I did mention this idea before), I created a mockup of a US treasury check and printed it out on thick paper. Then I was able to incorporate it into various images without a lot of Photoshop work. The US treasury actually has a photo that you can start with and federal documents are not copyrighted in the USA. So even if you are not US based, you can make use of these sort of ideas. Anyway, shots like this are starting to sell:
Overall, my coronavirus images continue to sell. That big seller with the cinema board is slowing down, but others are picking up. I’ve earned $655 so far on virus themed images including my “change of tax day” ideas. Many of those will still have time to have their day in the sun (I hope!).
As you can see, Shutterstock and Adobe provided the lions share of earnings, but it will be interesting to see what I sold on iStock in March when those results come in next week. Hopefully, that will bump up this total some more.
This month, things are definitely slower overall – few larger buys and mainly subscription sales. I did have a $28 video sale on Adobe over the weekend. It just goes to show that videos taken for other purposes can be used to illustrate current issues:
I hope you are all well and equally hope this will give you some more ideas that you can turn into new concepts!
