Premium – illustrating the new normal

I’ve got to say, from the start, that I have not been very productive in the past couple of weeks. I had a flurry of activity around the green screen work I did and I composited those shots into various backgrounds, but I have not been very motivated. I’m sure you know what I mean! I have even bought a box of 50 face masks to incorporate into my images, but so far the box is unopened.

But what I thought I would talk about today is my thinking process around what would make a good stock photo in today’s market. I am seeing quite a number of downloads of my Hawaii images because that is in the news about quarantines of visitors and so on, but I can’t go out and take more of those. I have what I have! So what makes a good stock image topic?

I did write about this earlier in the year, but here is my latest thinking. Our images are used for advertising, obviously, but it is hard to predict what sort of image someone is looking for and, to be honest, I rarely see my images in an advert for a product. My main sales, and most popular images, come from articles in magazines, newspapers and the thousands of online sources of news and commentary on the news. This might be Motley Fool for financial articles, Businessweek for business and political articles and so on. If a journalist is reporting on an event that is happening at that time – a train crash, for instance, they obviously want real imagery of the site of the disaster and it is very hard for us to compete in that space. If you live in a city, you can photograph demonstrations etc. but you need to know about it and be able to get there (safely). So I have few images that fit that bill. What I do have though, are many images that can be used to then comment on the event. As an example, there might be a fire in an office building and the initial news articles are about that fire. Then there are articles about fires in general, and protecting against them and maybe having sufficient insurance to rebuild after a fire. It is almost as though the writers see the real event and that triggers new ideas for them about articles they could write and pitch to editors. So an image like this will sell to illustrate those articles about generic fire issues:

So what we are seeking is a portfolio of images that can be used to illustrate as wide a range of articles as we can create and particularly to create images and videos to illustrate things that are going to be hot topics, but are perhaps not well illustrated yet.

I mentioned in an earlier post (before the lock down) that I think that there will be a big shift to streaming videos and cutting the cord of the cable TV companies for entertainment. I personally still have a TV service from my cable company (which I mean to cancel), but I can’t remember the last time I watched anything at all from that service. Maybe sometime last year or the year before! So photos illustrating that trend are in big demand. Those could be the icons of the many streaming services available (Peacock is the latest in the USA) which I suggested before (and haven’t done, myself), but even these simple ones sell pretty well:

Editorial ones seem to sell even better. This series (which I took when tidying up the wiring around my TV) sell regularly as both still and videos:

I’m sure there are other makes besides the Amazon Fire – so everytime you buy something new for your home, think about how it could be used to illustrate an article and photograph and video it!

So those are examples from the past. What do I think you should be creating now? Masks in every day activity, masks discarded, packets of masks with a hand taking one and made to look like a store perhaps. Children fitting masks, picking them up, grimacing behind a mask. Masks in summer activities – golf perhaps, on the beach, sitting in the sun on a bench – maybe even at a swimming pool or swimming in the pool? That last one could add some humor as well. Discarded masks floating in a pool. There are so many activities where we have never worn masks before that will become the norm. We need to think of what articles a journalist might be writing though – there is a big debate in the USA, which of course has become political, about whether wearing a mask can be used to show what political grouping you belong to. Democrats wear masks, Republicans don’t! I think that will continue to be a big discussion if/when we get a resurgence of cases later in the year.

In the USA again, this years election will be a massive story. You are seeing it now – anger about mail-in voting, voting fraud, problems with voting in person, disputed elections, disputed results. You name it, we are going to see it. I have thought of building myself a little voting booth from white foam boards so that I can create my own voting images and videos. I think that will be well worthwhile for this year. As I’ve said before, you should illustrate these big stories in the USA even if you don’t live here. Those stories use a lot of stock imagery!

Then I think we will have many more stories about unemployment. Quite a lot of that might be real news images, but I think articles about trends, about difficulties in finding work, about searching for work (online listings of jobs from major websites would be good as editorial shots), people in masks searching for work. Again, many things you can create a home with your own computer monitor and supply of masks. An editorial shot that you have posed for is generally OK – it shouldn’t be manipulated, but I had no issues getting this approved with Shutterstock although one of the sites rejected it as being posed I recall:

Now I look at that, it doesn’t look very safe! The first case was damaged in transit and returned. This one looks a bit insecure along the bottom edge!

I also think there will be many stories above mortgage defaults, evictions, foreclosures as the summer moves on. I have had good sales on those sort of shots in the past. This one has sold 9 times in May and I expect more sales in the coming months. I plan to revitalize it a bit with pictures of my current home and a foreclosure sign. You need to be happy to show your home like that though and usually have to attach a property release.

I think travel will start to pick up and I’m thinking of doing some more green screen shots of me as a traveler doing a video conference from an airport perhaps. Video conferencing is all the rage and so a series of a man or woman getting really fed up of endless meetings would be good. Head in hands shots with a screen (out of focus) of many small windows of other people could be good. Not to difficult to set up and you would not need releases for the other people if they were small enough and blurred to show the distance from our subject and the screen.

I’m still illustrating health themes because there will be an increasing number of temperature checks as we go about our business. I thought a simple illustration of a fever using an old mercury thermometer might be good:

This was a real thermometer but I added the green and red line in Photoshop and although I took it against a black background I isolated it to give a much cleaner background. I also focus stacked it so it was in focus from front to rear. Newly uploaded, so no sales as yet.

Well, that is enough for now. Hope some of these ideas trigger your creative juices!