Premium – March ideas V2

As the month has progressed, I’ve been thinking of what new images I can create and the recent passage of the American Plan Rescue Act of 2021 (the new stimulus package) gave me a few ideas. Yes, I know this is a US thing, but it is something that can be illustrated wherever you live with a little bit of creative Photoshop work.

I created a US Treasury check for the first stimulus package last year and the images of that have sold well over the months since. If I recall, I took an example image from the US treasury website (Federal creations are not copyrighted and so can be freely used) and modified it to look like a stimulus check. I’ve done the same again for the new package – the payment is now $1400, and got those online late last week. They are already starting to sell:

This is basically my old check revisited in Photoshop and printed out at around a normal check size. Those were easy to do and should capture some sales as the discussions go on about when people will get their payments etc. What was also in the act, and less well discussed, is that a child benefit payment (known as Child Tax Credit) was previously only available as a credit against federal taxes for each child and so poorly paid people (40M or so) did not earn enough to pay any federal taxes and so didn’t get this child benefit. The new act provides that as an actual payment regardless of whether they pay taxes, and starts to issue checks every month for $300 a child from July. This is doubly beneficial for us as stock photographers – there will be few images around for a government program that is new, and also with checks starting in July, there will be renewed interest as July approaches. Finally, it only last for 2 years (I think) and so there will be interest about whether it will be renewed when that time comes. So I created some images a couple of days ago to illustrate this. I think I will try to do some videos as well, although that may be more complex.

I got this series of six images rejected twice at Shutterstock for sensitive numbers such as credit card details. Only when I resubmitted with the marker (a resubmission and I wrote “mockup of check” in the case number, did I get these accepted as Shutterstock. So I have high hopes for these. The second is only a composite of the check on the table with an older shot (from Christmas) of a child blurred in the background to give it more context. It will be interesting to see which sells better.

There are also some more changes in this act about laying the groundwork for cancelling some student debt. That will get a lot of discussion if/when that happens and so I plan to try to think of some images about how to show that.

Hope this helps!