Premium – illustrating the current unrest

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been neglecting my stock portfolio in the past few weeks with very few images being created and uploaded. Sometimes I feel a bit bad about doing that, but always remember that creative activities are not something that you can just force yourself to do – you need to feel creative to be creative, I think. I have some ideas kicking around in the back of my mind for illustrating financial issues as I think those will become a key discussion topic in the coming months – I’m thinking of rising (and probably falling) stacks of coins isolated against white with one of the small plastic cubes that I bought on top of each one. You could add some text (as well as upload blank versions) such as 401K (a USA pension plan) to illustrate articles about retirement or saving for retirement. If you create these as isolated stacks (perhaps with a small reflection on the plastic surface they are standing on, then you can cut out (and in fact the buyer can cut out) one of the stacks if they only plan to use a three letter abbreviation perhaps. I’ll post examples when I have created mine. I also plan to photograph my home and put “For sale” signs and “Foreclosure” signs in front of it. Why my own home – so that I can sign a property release for it.

I’ve been a bit slow as well to recognize the opportunities of the recent unrest around the world following the killing of George Floyd. A friend of mine created some “Black Lives Matter” images that could be used for illustrating articles about the ongoing issues and particularly about any proposals that may come up. Of course, most of the current articles can use images from the protests to head them up, but as they become more opinion based (rather than news based), they will want something that is less specific, I think. I’m sorry I didn’t think of this and give you a heads up, but better late than never. I was down by my famous cinema marquee in Morgantown last week and took a broader view of the board and have added text to the board and uploaded them in the past day or two:

I also added the same text to my original board:

I think I prefer the brighter sunlit one, and I didn’t see many rejections on this from the agency. I did wonder whether the first image above, which positions the board within a more recognizable street, might have moved the needle more towards it being an editorial image (which really it couldn’t be because it is an invented sign), but I decided that the risk of anyone identifying this as being from a specific town or city was not high. It just goes to show that you need to keep thinking about the potential legal issues of your uploads and that there are no hard and fast rules here. I still think that the general public needs to be able to recognize a place rather than the owner of this specific building being able to recognize it that is the normal test, but there is little case law in this area.

I think there is also an opportunity to do images illustrating the ideas that are coming out of these protests in simpler ways – writing on a piece of cardboard perhaps. Also try to think of what the proposed actions might be to see if you could get those succinctly on a flat lay board, on a flag perhaps, or just on simple things like a piece of paper.

My virus images are slowing down significantly now (hopefully as the virus itself is!). My chart of sales currently looks like this:

In the absence of new creative thinking about potential trends, I revisited a couple of my older images to use my improved skills on them. I found a different version of my bag of ice that has sold well in its long career and carefully extracted it with the pen tool to give a different view of the bag of ice:

A colleague jokingly thought I should combine this with my other historic best sellers to illustrate cold cat. I didn’t know there was such a term, but if you look this up on an urban dictionary, it appears to be a sexual reference. Who knew! And who knows if this five minute composite will ever sell? Canstock rejected it as low commercial value…

Of course, the big debate in our own industry is all about Shutterstock and its earning schedules. I hesitated to get involved in discussions about the impact partly because I had a couple of big sales on SS this month (which I know are random) and one was for $119 for this cat image:

This has obviously increased by earning per download by a massive amount this month. But more generally, my initial calculations on the impact of the changes on my portfolio which I published here, are proving to be pretty accurate. After 236 subs downloads, my average price is $0.23, which is a 40% drop from $0.38. My ODs are averaging out at $3.22 which is a 13% increase over the previous $2.85. Over the past 30 months of earnings, I would have earned 7% less than I did or around $54 a month. That is for a Level 5 contributor. It is pretty clear that anyone below Level 5 is going to be seriously impacted. Level 5 may be neutral, over time, and Level 6 should see an increase in my view. Of course, everyone is hit in January.

I’ve been in correspondence with the CEO of Dreamstime after I ran that short post about the things they were doing. He was saying that they really didn’t want more contributors – they have more than enough, but they are pressing forward with their lawsuit against Google for possibly pushing more image search results to their competitors. I also commented about the apparently poor video sales over on their site and his view was that they had far fewer contributors of videos and perhaps that would give more of an opportunity for videos. I don’t know if that is true, but I did decide that I had nothing to lose in uploading my videos to Dreamstime, especially as quite a number of them are already online with Microstock Plus and so it is a very simple task to get that site to upload and submit to Dreamstime. They take both commercial and editorial videos. I’ll let you know if any sales result from this – but it fits into my philosophy that if a site is easy to support, then I might as well get the earnings from it, however small they might be. I have also asked him if he has any evidence about the extent to which buyers shop around for a specific image (either to find one, or to buy it cheaper). I’ve often thought that most people don’t do that, which is why you need to support multiple sites, but if he responds on that, I’ll let you know.