Premium – December Opportunities

Another month goes by in our new world without travel! It seems so strange not to be packing a suitcase for another stock driven adventure and now six inches of snow have shown me that it really is winter now and time to settle down! As I noted in my normal review of earnings, I have been a bit sluggish at uploading new images with about 40 added during the month. One positive thing about the various sorts of lockdown (including voluntary ones) is that it does force some thinking and experimentation of new concepts for images and perhaps videos so let me see if I can come up with some new ideas for December that might pay off.

Firstly, what have been my implementations of ideas that I have mentioned in previous months? One thing I have been very slow with is the creation of specific images for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays that have a clear virus feel. Carrying in the turkey with a mask, a place setting with christmas crackers and festive decorations (with the tree in the background) with a new medical mask placed for each guest on their plate – I am sure there is still a market for those. We have finally finished putting up and decorating our own Christmas tree and I have a turkey defrosting in the fridge so I am going to be on to those very shortly.

I did come up with an idea that I could look at some of the best selling images in different genres and reshoot them with a virus message. Although that might sound a bit like copying, it is actually (in my mind) a valid use of inspiration from others to create your own work. So I started with back to school and bought a small chalkboard (and a toy shopping cart from Amazon) and created some images like these:

Then, with some books and my wooden table top (and with a green screen background to give me more opportunities for background for the image) I created these:

With the greenscreen (and I still use Key36 who have a sale on at the moment), I can easily then produce variants such as these:

Then I thought I would do some shopping poster type shots using my shopping cart and filling it with some pretend golden coins to illustrate savings or taking money to the stores for a sale:

I did variants without the text, but I think I was too late for this year’s event. Maybe next year! Incidentally, here is my behind the scenes shot on this sort of image to avoid green reflections on shiny objects, including the black plastic the cart is standing on:

It is amazing how good that Key36 action is for removing green – there are options in there for painting back the color where there is some reflected green, but not on a big reflective surface like this. I’m using my chalkboard for the black reflector here – everything has a use!

Then I bought myself a new Apple watch in the sales and so that can appear in a new editorial image with the cart:

Will any of these be massive sellers – I doubt it, but you never know which ones will catch on. I’m going to focus a lot more on normal stock shots with a virus feel – even though the vaccine might be around the corner, I think there is a lot of life left in that topic.

It is a bit harder coming up with a new big idea at the moment. The vaccine is definitely one, but I don’t just know how best to capture it with the things I have. I’ve seen a nice shot around that has four small bottles that are used for an injectable drug with a needle lying down and each has a simple label saying covid-9 vaccine. Then in the background is the logo or name of the company making a vaccine. It is obviously put together with simple things and probably stretches the definition of illustrative editorial, but I see it all over the place. What buyers want is something simple and direct that gets the message across so that someone will read their story – they don’t care that these aren’t real vaccine bottles, so if you have access to (or can buy) some medical items like that, I think there is a big opportunity there. Make some with different languages as this will be a worldwide phenomenon.

The US election is over and most of my sales there have dropped off. You will have seen my overall sales from 2020 created assets in my monthly report, and election, virus and eviction type images played a big part in that. I hope you were able to create some and catch the wave! I would say my election shots have earned about $1000 this year and the popular ones were the simple ones I have mentioned before of envelopes suggesting a mail-in vote, closeups of those election stickers and so on. Stickers with medical masks did well also. Again the message – keep it simple and direct. Close-ups did better than more complex setups to be honest – the sort of shot that takes five minutes earned more than one that needed processing and a lot more work. I might have been very proud of the technical quality of thisL

But so far it has made $2.82… This one, on the other hand, made $225:

There is a lesson there for all of us!

What might the stories of 2021 be. Confusion in the USA, certainly, but I don’t know yet what to do for that. The social media site Parler is going to be a big story as many conservatives are flocking to it, because their often false messages are not being blocked or flagged. So any images that show that site simply and clearly on a mobile phone screen should be a good seller. Keep it as simple as possible to handle any story about the application – I see that it is being flooded with pornography at the moment (so I’m told) so a generic image of Parler could illustrate those stories as well.

QAnon will probably continue to be in the news – it is harder to illustrate that as some sites don’t accept images any longer, but you might find a new treatment that works.

Remote learning and the digital divide will be a big topic for a few years and so I did go out of my way to take a mobile phone tower over a rural area that is starting to sell:

It’s not a great picture, and I plan to take more with a tower over a more rural open fields type of background as I think these shots simply tell an interesting story.

On a final note – a friend of mine in the industry asked me recently how I continued to sell (and even increased my income) in the past two or three years when he is struggling to maintain an income. I didn’t really tell him – I was saving the answer for my readers here! But it is a good question. I’ve been trying to be a travel photographer for many years because I like traveling and taking photos when I am out and about. Some of those are pretty good, some are good workman like shots that will get a sale every so often, but it is really hard to compete with photographers who live there and can create great shots in great light. I do think I have a nose for what might be a stock worthy image, but it is a hard way to make a solid living. Then I see some people who are similarly “travel stock” providers just keeping going doing that and then wondering why they are not getting the sales they once did. Of course, there are far fewer articles about travel at the moment which is a good reason, but also there is over-supply. What I decided to do (and had always done in the background) was to constantly try to improve my technical skills in the studio with lighting (and green screens), invest in some props (like Bitcoins and prescription drug bottles) and then constantly try to spot trends and create images to illustrate them. I read a lot (or at least skim a lot of images used to illustrate articles in apps like Flipboard) and ask myself why they have chosen that image. I look at those images and ask myself if I could improve them or make something similar on a different topic (or add a mask to create a new concept!) and then I set to work to create some of those concepts. I need to get them online quickly and I need to think about keywording and describing them.

It isn’t exciting or glamorous work by any means and I fully understand why some stock photographers don’t get any satisfaction from doing this. But that is what is currently selling and I think will continue to be sought out as new themes and ideas get into the news and discussions around us. So, if there is a secret, it is that you need to be mindful of the world (not around you physically) and what ideas and concepts are going to be discussed, argued over and talked about in the coming months and get out ahead of the competition in adding images (and videos) of those topics. I’ll keep trying to think about them and talk about them here in the coming months!