Premium – ideas for stock images in December 2021

I hope that some of you had picked up the thoughts and approaches I have been discussing in previous posts and created some Omicron images as soon as the news of the new variant was announced. I think there was some good money to be made being the first in line with an appropriate image!

I’ve got to admit that I was slow to the gate on this one – a friend of mine got a very simple image online early on and has had 24 downloads so far. Nothing clever – just one of those coronavirus blobs with the words Omicron and its variant number written onto the image.

I did eventually get my act together and made some Omicron variant vaccine images by taking one of my empty vials (bought some time ago on Amazon) and putting some white wine into it was my syringes (to make it slightly colored in the bottle) and creating some labels that looked somewhat official but were clear with the message that this is a new vaccine for the new variant. I think I might make some with a background message of the logos of the main vaccine companies in case they come out with new booster vaccines.

I can well imagine much discussion about the need for such vaccines if it is found that already vaccinated individuals are catching this new disease. Having some images up on the agencies in advance of the creation of the vaccines gives them a bit more chance of being found. By the way, Pi, Rho and Sigma are the next greek letters. Now might be the time to get ahead of the pack with some variants on the common themes with these next letters! May not become important, but the effort might be quite minimal!

While we are on Covid, I mentioned in the past that self-test kits could become important, even though they seem to be in short supply in the US at the moment. I did manage to get hold of a pack that is issued (free of course) by the National Health Service in the UK on request. So of course, I photographed that and tried to get a generic image that is commercial as well as an editorial-type image showing the name of the company.

I don’t think it needs to be any more than that, but I will continue to see if I can find some more on the shelves of my supermarket or pharmacy.

There are also increasing restrictions happening to keep these variants from spreading. I think that you will have to show vaccination status in a lot of places in the near future – domestic flying in the USA for instance – and that will be subject to much debate (and lawsuits). I plan to create some of my typical airport type shots with someone showing vaccination status both as a paper record as well as on a smartphone. There are various apps that allow you to store your status and so including those in your images would be worthwhile. I see that New York City is going to make vaccinations mandatory for all businesses and that is another interesting area for stock images. Office buildings with someone showing their status, for instance? This is a more tricky type of image as it is a mandate on the business and I’m also not sure that there will be as much call for imagery, but it is an idea.

There are far more onerous restrictions being planned in Europe, but again, they are not easy to illustrate unless you make a sign for an office type door, or for a gym perhaps? I might resurrect my old images of the cinema notice board and put something on there about requiring vaccinations! That sold well in the past, so there is a chance I might get a few more sales from it!

Another old idea finally came to fruition in my portfolio. I’ve done well with Impossible Burger images as well as Beyond Meat, and I mentioned in the past that there were going to be Impossible Chicken Nuggets on the store shelves. Well, finally, I saw a packet of them and took some initial images:

I haven’t cooked them yet (which will be another series of images) and so I thought I would start with pictures in the freezer – both where the packet is the main focus and this one that contrasts the plant based food with more traditional bison meat and buffalo burgers! So this is what the inside of my freezer looks like! To early to see if there is much demand, but it is again an easy series of images to take and upload.

I’ve finally seen a few sales of my Tether crypto coin images – probably because of the flash crash in the prices of Bitcoin and others over the weekend. Not enough to justify buying the coins, but at least they are getting a little traction. I really need to see the price of those coins breaking below $1 to get a lot of sale of my images I think. Who knows?

As you probably know from my monthly earnings report, I have been putting more effort into getting all my existing images (the ones that would look good on a wall) uploaded to Fine Art America. I upload about 10 every day to keep things manageable and always have something new for people (and the search engines) to see. I also have started sending one product version of each new image to Pinterest, so I get 10 new pins there every day. Not unsurprisingly, my views are rising on Pinterest, but I think this is a very long game. Little effort though, which is important.

However, what is interesting for me is that while it is good getting $300 or so of profits from sales of wall art, it is not really that much in comparison to my stock photo income. Having diverse streams of income is important though as it might balance out ebbs and flows in each area. But each of these takes time and work and it is a case of trying to apply the effort to get the best reward. As I am basically uploading images that I have already developed and keyworded, it is currently a relatively easy task, but I need to avoid spending too much time on it.

I also had a look at NFTs – those records in a blockchain that prove that someone is the owner of a particular digital file. I was told that a friend of a friend recently made $800K on selling NFTs of his images from Ethiopia: Ethiopia by Joey L (quantum.art) I think that Quantum curates files into an auction on OpenSea – although I am far from an expert on this. I thought I might be able to sell some of my better images (the cats for instance) as NFTs, and the thought of all that cash is pretty amazing, but I read an interesting article which suggests (sensibly I think) that getting a good price for an image that has already been licensed many times would be very difficult. It is far from clear what you are actually selling as an NFT, but I doubt if someone would pay a lot for an image you can license for 10c.. The article is by Fabio Nodari and can be found here – worth reading! Interestingly he asks for comments from people who have actually sold NFTs – not one so far!

Good luck with your own ideas and if anyone has made a successful sale of NFTs, I’d be intrigued to know about it!