Premium – January ideas for new stock photos

Another year, but perhaps not a very different year… Firstly, I was amazed at how badly the year has started at most of the agencies, Shutterstock in particular thanks to that terrible decision to reset everyone’s level on January 1st. I can’t believe the open way they are just boosting their income yet trying to say it is “good for creativity”. However, let’s see if we can come up with some new creative ideas for 2021 and start to make a difference to earnings as the year develops.

I finally got my act together and bought a couple of vaccine bottles and a stock of syringes from Amazon. Even though I talked about this some time ago, I was really late in doing something about it, which I am sure I will regret. However, having made the purchases I got to work to create covid-19 vaccine shots. I don’t know if you have seen Alex’s post on the StockStudio site? He nicely outlined some of the ideas for new images around vaccines in particular and my first approach was actually one of those. I first found all the logos of the main vaccine providers (see this link for full details of the many companies involved in this) and my plan was to print them out and put them as the background of my shots. I found this was not very successful and so I decided to create a standard shot with a pure white background and composite the logos onto that:

This worked well for most agencies, although Shutterstock decided that these were “altered editorials” which they don’t accept. They are right of course, but I don’t really see the difference between the long winded approach of having the logo on a card versus this technical solution. So I only got a few accepted at SS and had to take a different approach of putting my hands in there in different positions and then putting the logo against one of those shots:

I’ve now managed to get at least one shot for each of the six companies I chose. The ones for Sinopharm has been the best seller so far (getting quite a few 10c downloads!!).

I’ve carried on with other ideas – including some people shots against a green screen to illustrate further ideas:

This one obviously needed the model releases plus a property release for the image in the background. I thought that was an OK way of introducing the covid vaccine words into the image. The syringe was empty and sterile!

Then I saw an article this morning about a nursing home in Florida (which got free priority doses) offering them to people who have donated money to them – ie a pay to play scheme! You have just got to love the way that people look to make a buck out of this! So this morning I created some more images to try to illustrate bribing doctors to get the vaccine early. I have no doubt that will become a topic of discussion!

Those are in the upload queue as we speak.

I think Alex had a good idea about discussions about side effects (and also the unknown duration of protection that we get from these vaccines) and so I will put my mind to how to illustrate that. The duration one could involve a clock ticking down perhaps, but I will need to think more about that. I also think some approaches involving a global map as a background would be good to illustrate how the distribution of vaccines will be uneven.

Keeping with the vaccine theme, there is discussion about the need for coronavirus passports to show that you have had a vaccination. I had some older shots about an immunity passport and so I reworked those to make it clear that they were now vaccination certificates:

Nothing very clever, but perhaps they will work for this idea. I did make an actual passport in the past:

And so I went back on Shutterstock in particular to make sure the keywords are up to date and include terms like vaccination and so on. It is a good idea to think about your older shots when new themes appear and update the keywords or description to make them applicable to the new idea.

That is probably enough about vaccines for now (although I am sure this will be a big story all year and so we need to be thinking of how it will evolve.

I read a report that said that eSports (the competitive playing of computer games) was a rapidly growing phenomenon and one of the things that stood out to me was how the players have little time to eat properly and so consume lots of drink based foods and the leader in that space is G Fuel. So I went online and bought myself a starter pack of all the best liked flavors of this product. It is still on its way to me. There are only a handful of images of this on Shutterstock so perhaps there is an opportunity to get some traction. My son also got a Playstation 5 last month and so my plan is to try to create a gamer area with my monitors and this playstation and introduce the food into that as well as doing some shots isolated against white. May come to nothing but I guess I could drink the stuff and get lots of energy and caffeine!

I still think that Section 230 story (reining in big tech social media companies) will be a continuing story in 2021 and so I am planning to do a few shots to illustrate that. Probably I will amend my Obamacare chalkboard images to cover this Section of US law. Those Obamacare ones sold reasonably well and take little time to make so it is a worthwhile investment.

Maintaining my approach of photographing new bits of technology, I did get an Apple 12 mini phone last week and so it will need to fit into some of my next shoots. It is surprising how often people want an image of a product that doesn’t come from the manufacturer. I guess they think that using a promotional image is wrong in some way and so use a stock photo instead. So whenever you get something new – photograph it with its box, against white and then in some use cases. Easy to do, costs nothing (as you already have the item) and may make a few dollars. In general you don’t necessarily know what is going to catch on in any given year so you do need to spread your opportunities but photographing things that you already have.

I have quite a few newsletters and some downloaded reports on trends for 2021 to plough through over the next week or so, and I will come back with an update if I see something (like the esport thing) that is on a trendline and can be easily photographed. I have focused a lot in December on Fine Art America and getting my images higher up the search order – I will report on that as well in the coming weeks.