Premium – April suggestions for new stock imagery

April comes round and here it is arriving with a very pleasant warm spell, so there have been a few opportunities to get out and about with my camera. As I have written in previous posts I have been very busy on two projects – completing the video of my son’s opera (which had to be done virtually due to the virus) and trying to get some traction on my print sales to build an alternative to stock images. The video started inn December and I’m happy and relieved that the final episode 5 will be released on Friday evening this week. A long and involved project, but I learned a lot about video production! The print sales – not much to report, unfortunately!

But back to stock. I keep my eyes open for opportunities for new images, and this month I have a few new ones that I have been thinking about and working on. The first is one that I have uploaded one image (actually an illustration) and that is the Digital Dollar:

The background to this is that bitcoin and crypto currencies are everywhere in the news and I still sell some of my older bitcoin photos, but the Federal Reserve in the US (and I’m sure the equivalent in many other countries) are looking at how to create their official virtual currencies. In this US, this is currently being studied with a report coming out later in the year. So I think this gives us an opportunity to create some images to illustrate what they are working on. This example is pretty rubbish, as I know that I am not good at creating an illustration of something, but perhaps you are much better at this sort of thing. You could do the dollar plus other currencies and hopefully create something much more appealing than this! I’m going to continue to think about this over the next few weeks and see if I can come up with something better!

My next subject is the one of treatments for Covid-19. We all know about the vaccines, but Pfizer (and I would think others) are working on tablets or capsules that you can take if you start to take if you get the virus. These anti-virals are just being tested now and if they work, they would obviously be in the news constantly. So I did a few images to illustrate that:

I also did some with the Pfizer name in the background as editorial, but for some reason both Shutterstock and Bigstock rejected them saying that they no longer accept that sort of content. Adobe Stock accepted it though and I think my two images are the only ones they have:

I created the label myself and just used some capsules as I understand that it is the way this trial drug will be packaged. So perhaps more opportunities for this sort of image if other companies have trials as well.

I also saw an article that stimulus payments for social security recipients in the US were being delayed, so I created a couple of images to illustrate that. Not great sellers so far, but they were very easy to do!

There is also a lot of discussion about immunity passports or vaccination passports or certificates and many companies and some governments are working on them. Quite a number will be on smartphone apps, but without any clear indication of a leading vendor or approach, it is hard to create something specific. So I went instead for the simpler approach of a passport and a generic vaccination card instead:

As this was against a green screen and hence it is isolated against white here, I composited it into one of my airport shots, but of course, Shutterstock rejected it as a similar! Adobe, as usual, accepted it!

I plan to get out my luggage and try some more variations of this with the luggage and a mask – things that illustrate travel. Easy to do and they might hit a need.

Well, that is all for now – more ideas will be coming shortly!