Premium – are there any new concepts out there?

It is getting harder to remember life before the virus. I guess it is a month now since West Virginia officially started sheltering in place although I think I probably started a little time before that. And really, no end in sight to any semblance of getting back to normal life. I know I tend to be on the more pessimistic side of things but my current view is that we will not get anything like normality until the middle to late 2021 when vaccinations have been adopted widely and are proving to work. I was talking to a friend who has a vacation planned in Greece in June and she was saying that it might still be possible – my view is that people will increasingly be scared by and will reject “foreigners” and that will mean people from outside their area, not necessarily from a different country and so travel will be greatly constrained for quite a long time. But enough about that – what are the concepts that we need to be thinking about in the next stage of this crisis?

As you may have seen from my other post today, my Coronavirus shots (and that is now a broad description of them) have continued to sell well. $874 at last count. But increasingly I have been thinking of what the other impacts of this will be. My tax date change images have continued to sell (about $40 so far, which is not much but there were only about 3 or 4 of them created quickly here at home). Of course, there are a couple of months yet before the new “tax day” so they should have some life left in them. As I also mentioned earlier, I recommend that you try to keep up with the main news in the US as it is such a big market for stock images and many of them can be created wherever you live.

As I recommended a week or so back, I thought there would be interest (and issues with) the delivery of the stimulus money to households in the USA and of course, there has been. I did a range of shots after I created my own US Treasury check and I think they have got better over time. I often find that close-ups tend to do better than broader perspectives and so the full check image hasn’t sold well, but this most recent one is doing better. Altogether this range of images has earned almost $80 or so. I have also modified some to give them more traction. This one:

has become this:

I used a Dreamstime example here because Shutterstock rejected this image because of “sensitive information” even though the original is online. So I cropped some of the fictitious check numbers off the bottom and resubmitted. Still in the approval queue. I wanted to provide even more of a USA flavor to the image and hopefully get more sales as a result. I often look at my sales and wonder how I can change or improve the ones I have online and this is a good example.

Going forward, I think one of the big factors in getting back to work will be some sort of “proof” that you are no longer likely to be at risk of the virus – an immunity passport or certificate. Some countries are talking about this even though the technical way to do it effectively is not really available yet, but that has never stopped a good stock photographer!

I made my own immunity certificate and made images of myself in the doctor scrubs with this as a paper certificate as well as pasted into a cellphone screen. The idea being that we will have some sort of official “badge” to go back to work safely. My image of a scrubs hanging on a clothes hanger sells well, so I modified that and got it online as well:

These are very new and so sales have been limited, but as this becomes more of a talking point, I think sales should pick up. So now is the time to make your own versions!

While you are at it, perhaps there will be signs outside office buildings:

Pure photoshop work. An office building in New Zealand coupled with a sign from a Washington DC building and some text in Photoshop. I’m sure you have examples in your own portfolios.

Looking forward some more, the rate at which governments are spending will result in big deficits and debt issues (I often wonder which country has the money to spend on other countries debt these days? Maybe the money is just printed…). In addition, pensions and social security are heavily dependent on the money that current workers pay into the system. There is ostensibly a social security trust fund in the USA that will run out of money in 2030 or so, but in reality governments can’t keep separate pots of money like that for future use. Money paid out now to retired people comes from money paid in now by workers or from borrowing. So I think there will be big issues soon about the stability of both government pensions and also private ones, where companies will have lost a lot of value due to stock market crashes. I’m trying to think about how to illustrate that, but apart from this sort of thing:

I don’t have many more great ideas about that, but I keep mulling it over!

There is probably a market combining immune certificates with passports for travel restrictions in the future. Think of an island like Hawaii (or even New Zealand). You can imagine that they can reduce the virus issues to zero with enough social distance, but if outsiders come to visit on vacation, the massive risk is that they bring the virus with them. So either they close down accepting new visitors (which will bankrupt somewhere like Hawaii) or they have some sort of “proof” of immunity. So having some sort of stamp in your passport or official document will be part of your future travel plans perhaps.

By the way, my good friend Alex has written a couple of posts about his views of the future and the opportunities for stock photographers. I don’t disagree much with what he has written, but, and I hope he will forgive me for this, I think those concepts are too high level. I’m finding that illustrating topics that are being discussed widely is the way to success and so we need to turn those bigger picture ideas into smaller scale “what will this mean for me” sort of illustrations.

Finally, I put together a very short (5 question) survey that tries to find out what you think about my premium content. Please take a few minutes to fill it out if you would. You can find it here. There is a place for your name, but it is purely optional. I’d also be interested in hearing about any successes you have had with these ideas – confidentially of course.

And my very last point. While this is going on, look around you for other ideas. Some neighbors were having their roof replaced and so I took a few shots with a telephoto lens. These are starting to sell. A few shots I grabbed when some contractors were spraying a coating on our street have earned about $50 for a few minutes work. So never ignore the banal things going on around you.