Premium – August ideas

It is that time of month when I stretch my brain to its limits and see what images I think might be in demand going forward. But perhaps I will start with what I have been working on, and why, and then move onto the new ideas. As you know, I am always on the lookout for something that will be in the news and discussion articles around the world, but not be “news” in the sense that journalists will want to use live photos of the event or the person to illustrate their articles. I think that separates me from the listing the xPiks developed which is based, in part, on searches they see on Shutterstock and others. For instance, they had “the Olympics” a month or two back. To me, that is a pointless activity – first, the Olympic symbols are heavily protected, even in editorial images, and secondly, most articles will be about specific sports or athletes and will use images of those. But I’m not here to criticize other people – I just wanted to draw a distinction between our approaches.

I’m continuing my plan of obtaining products that I think will catch a wave of interest and photographing them. I see a company called the Not Company making quite some waves with their milk substitute product Not Milk. This is quite difficult to find (it is in WholeFoods in the USA), so I bought one and took a range of breakfast and then isolated shots in my kitchen and in a light tent. I haven’t uploaded all of these yet, but on SS, I have 11 of the 14 available images about this product. What is interesting is that someone from Malaga (perhaps a subscriber of mine!) couldn’t get the milk, but created images with the company on a laptop screen – great idea! The milk itself is really quite nice – I ate all my cereal and we then had some in a smoothie, so I double win! I have sold some images – not many so far, but we will see!

I also mentioned that I wanted to do some generic closeups of vaccination bottles and syringes and so I created a couple of different ones that could be used to illustrate general articles about vaccination:

What I found interesting in this image is that I was using a light tent with a flashgun (the Godox V1) pointing directly at the rear wall and a couple of LED lights illuminating the front of the bottle and the needle. The flash is much more powerful than the lights and so I had it at 1/64th power and I was intrigued to see that it made this pattern on the translucent plastic behind the bottle. I had a blue filter on the flash, which allowed me to properly light the front with a daylight light and get the bluish background, but I thought the cross shape was pretty neat. I moved the flash and camera to line things up and got this effect with no manipulation later in Photoshop.

Then I read an article about how the underlying technology for many of the Covid vaccines – Messenger RNA or mRNA – is being trialed for all sorts of different illnesses, so you could have a combined Flu/HPV/Covid shot in the near future. Even some trials on using it against some types of cancer. So I thought some shots that were just of that topic could be useful for articles discussing the technology.:

This one is dead simple – a vaccine with the words on the screen. I also did one where I held a piece of paper with the mRNA typed on it behind the bottle and took one shot with the paper there and one without. I could then composite them together to give me this:

Too early to say if these will be successful!

I also continued my uploads of cellphone towers of different types. These do get picked up and used and with the money being spent on expanding broadband to a wider population, it could be the subject of more articles. This issue of rural broadband is a tricky one to illustrate for a journalist and so a generic “technology” shot is what they often use. Whenever I drive around I look for towers that would give me a nice remote rural feel – fields and scattered homes perhaps. I’m still looking for that (and I try to find one off the beaten track so that I have less chance of being arrested flying a drone around the towers!)

While on the subject of vaccines, I saw that AstraZeneca were rebranding their vaccine as Vaxzevria. I plan to rework some of my earlier shots to introduce that into the background. A very easy change and it could sell.

Looking forward, there is no end in sight to the articles about the virus – the trick is thinking of something different to do about it. I think there is a lot more to be done and worked out with some sort of proof of vaccination. I know some countries have a national ID system that shows vaccination status and if you can photograph people using those, or hands holding the smartphone, it would be worthwhile. There is nothing like that in the US and so there is a mishmash of all sorts of corporate attempts, some state systems, some paper systems – a real mess. Now just illustrating that would be interesting, but going through the various alternatives and photographing those in different ways – the hand, the out of focus face, the finger on the screen – that sort of thing. You could composite different screens into shots of smartphones or get each one in turn on your phone and photograph that. That is going to be my next project I think.

The future of work is also intriguing. Many companies are moving toward hybrid solutions or working from home some days and in the office others. That is hard to illustrate and I can’t pretend to have the answer, but having shots of realistic long term work from home situations would be useful images.

In the US, my “I voted” stickers continue to sell – looks like the 2020 election will last me through to 2022 when we have our next round of national elections. Not sure what would be illustrated differently there, but worth thinking about.

Well, that is all for now – if I think of something in the next week or two, I’ll do another post.