Premium – ideas for the next stage of the epidemic

As I write this, countries around the world are starting to experiment with opening up their businesses and activities. My particular area has not been heavily closed, and I’ve even managed to have two games of golf, but this change is opening up new ideas for stock photos to illustrate this next stage. I think there are lots of opportunities to think of here. A couple of trends will be important in my view. One will certainly be that people will be somewhat afraid and that masks will be worn by many of them. There are all sorts of masks around, from scarves through the standard blue mask to my “over the top” dust mask:

This little series has earned about $25 so far – not great, but it was a pretty quick production and I expect more will sell as we go forwards, but more recently I bought a pack of 50 of those blue masks from Amazon and I plan many more images that include me in a mask doing various normal activities. You will have seen the image I created against a green screen to create the businessman at an airport shot:

But I’ve also been taking many more similar shots that I intend to composite into various shots to illustrate different sort of scenes that my “senior adult” can take part in:

This one (that is just one of the ones I have just extracted from the green screen) is to illustrate the second trend that I foresee – the regular and insistent use of thermometers and temperature scanning devices before we are allowed to travel or maybe enter offices in the future. I’ve been creating both still and videos of these ideas:

This one is to show a shopping mall theme – I’ve done others in an airport and one in a sort of hospital or clinic. I do run into occasional rejections at Shutterstock because of their focus on similar images, but I found that if I simply flipped the head and arm to face in the opposite direction, I got them accepted.

I did the same sort of shot with a video:

This was again taken against the green screen and then composited onto a static photo for the background. I’m going to write a separate post about how to extract against green soon as I have been doing a lot of that recently. I’m thinking of extending the range to have a table and computer perhaps and be able to insert it into better locations that I can find about my home.

So start thinking about all the things that will now be done while wearing a mask and see if you can create some new variations that might be picked up. I’m not sure that any of these will be big sellers, but if each one earns $10 to $20, it becomes a nice addition to my overall earnings.

While I was at it, I also thought I would do simple close-ups that could be used to illustrate travel in the future:

A five minute job, but I think it nicely illustrates getting ready for travel.

What is next on my list? I think voting (in the USA at least) will be a big and continuing story over the next months and so I’m trying to get my head around voting by mail (I did some simple ones for this a few weeks back):

But I plan to try some green screen shots of my senior adult having one of those I Voted stickers applied to his shirt while wearing a mask to show how voting might happen in person. I’m not sure of the background yet for this, but I have experimented with submitting videos with the simple green background (this is actually a static green background that I added in Premiere after extracting the subject):

I’m not sure how well these will sell, and my Shutterstock upload was rejected for noise, artifacts etc. but I will let you know what happens. For videos in particular, this could appeal to a buyer who is looking to composite this into a background they already have. Although you might not live in the USA, you can get those rolls of voting stickers from Amazon, or you could make your own. I’ve said this before – the USA is a big market for photos, so try to illustrate stories that are big in the US.

If you live in a city, I think one of the big issues will be overcrowding on public transport and more people will probably walk or cycle. That could make an interesting series, but not one that I can make much use of. Also look out for signs outside a public transport building limiting access – they could sell as editorial shots.

Finally, I made myself a coronavirus passport – I think there will be many stories about needing to prove that you are immune before traveling or maybe going into office buildings and so something along these lines might be needed:

This was created from a photo of my passport with the existing symbols removed and then new words and a simple globe shape. Always remember – buyers are not necessarily looking for the real thing – they are simply after an image that illustrates a story about such a passport. So the clearer the message the better. Always go for clarity of the message over accuracy!