Premium – January Ideas

Another month, another surge in cases of this virus! I’m still getting sales of my various covid related imagery and I have some new ideas for you this month. As you will remember from previous posts, you are looking for stories that have two main strands – they will be the subject of both news and comment-type articles and posts and they will need to be illustrated by something other than a straight editorial shot. One that comes to mind is the latest crazy idea in the USA that taking Viagra tablets will help you deal with the virus – who needs a vaccine when you can get two bangs for one buck (if you will forgive this terrible pun). So, if you have any blue tablets, this would be a great time to put them alongside a Covid test strip and get some quick and easy sellers! There is another story going around where anti-vax people believe that drinking your own urine also helps. Not sure I am going to try that one!

But first, what have I been working on this past month? I thought that it would be nice to try to capture all the various trends about Covid in one image and so I tried to create a big droplet on the end of a syringe and reflect all the Covid-related words into the droplet. Yes, great idea, but quite tricky to implement. I added some guar gum into water to make the liquid a little thicker and support a larger drop and then I focused carefully on the drop and the words I had printed out on a sheet behind it. Part of the issue is that when the words are in focus, the end of the needle isn’t, so you need to do two shots to get a clear focus in both areas. It basically worked, and the images are now online, but I’m not sure my implementation is up to the standard needed to be honest:

Still, the idea is there! Maybe you can make more of it. I even added some future variants in there – sigma, for instance – to give it a longer life.

After that studio work, I continued my external work of documenting the local town where I live by adding some images of the main hospital and also the university football field. The latter is a bit of an unknown quantity – sports articles almost always use current editorial images, but perhaps it will fill a niche in the future at some point. Perhaps if games are cancelled because of a new variant perhaps?

These sorts of shots are easy to take (not much traveling) and complete my portfolio of potential interesting scenes for articles about Morgantown. I have had some sales where someone has selected about 10 or 12 of my Morgantown images at one time, so there is definitely a market for these smaller places and also less competition.

I was a bit late with this next idea, but perhaps it will be useful for next year! We all had a Covid test before the Christmas meal as it was a gathering with some oldish people who have some health issues and so I took photos of actually taking the test and then with the results (negative!) on a Christmas type table cloth. If you are in the USA, there is a plan to ship Covid tests to each household and so that will get some coverage in the news – I’m planning to apply as soon as I am able to do so and then photograph the box arriving, the contents etc. Again, an easy to do sort of shot with no costs.

There is also going to be new recommendations about using an N95 mask instead of the collection of masks that people currently use. So some images of older, less effective face masks being screwed up, or thrown in the trash, with the better N95 or KN95 mask replacing it could sell.

Sticking with Covid (what else is there!), there are plans in many countries to provide a fourth vaccine shot. I created a simple #3 booster image:

This sells OK, and was a real booster shot with just the number written on the sticking plaster, but I have an idea that I could stick four bandaids on my arm and that would be one shot for the boosters, and then do a variant where I color them in Photoshop with a sort of red through to green transition to show how the boosters improve the antibody response. Not done yet, but on my list! What I also plan to do is to create some vaccination shots with my grandson who is under 5 and so there are no approved vaccines for him. However, these are in trials and so I think they will happen this year. So there will be lots of discussion about the need to vaccinate under 5’s and having a suitable set of images will be useful. I need to make sure that I don’t accidentally stab him with the needle though! Children that age are a little volatile!

Now for a reminder to keep photographing those basic tasks around the home. We normally have a ceiling fan running continuously in the bedroom but for some reason it was turned off and I noticed big layers of dust on it. That needed cleaning, but first it needed photographing!

Of course, everyone now knows how dirty my home is, but I have a chance of a sale! Changing batteries in smoke alarms is probably a good subject as well – that is written about every year and perhaps some updated images might sell.

Many months ago, I bought an Apple Airtag to photograph. I haven’t really found any other useful functions for it, to be honest and now it has actually earned back its purchase price! However, I think Apple has quite an issue building with this in terms of privacy and there are increasing stories about the tags being used to track potential victims or simply to keep track of someone without their knowledge. Although if you have an iPhone, it will eventually tell you that there is an unknown Airtag around, this doesn’t work with Android phones and so there is not an easy workaround. I have seen more sales of my images recently and I plan to do more versions – especially around hiding them in or on a car. This could be a good story for 2022 if you get the right sort of image.

I also think the general topic of cyber-crime and security will continue to be a hot topic this year. People are probably getting tired of using that hooded hacker with his face hidden in shadow! My plan is to see what else I can come up with. I’ll probably start by looking at current images on the subject and see if I can bring them up to date. That usually gives me some ideas, especially if you think of how those popular images might be impacted if the person was wearing a face mask against the virus, for instance!

Finally, on a related tack, a lot more people will work from home, many permanently, and companies are adding software to track what they are up to. There are some packages that can monitor the employee by tracking them with the camera and also record audio (and keystrokes obviously). There are certainly images showing that, but I think that could be an interesting concept to try to illustrate.