Premium – March Stock Photo Opportunities

Looking at my sales in late January and now February, I am just not seeing any trends or directions – images are selling, but they are very random and coming from my entire portfolio, rather than any particular subject or concept. On one level that is good – it shows that I have built a portfolio that has enough different subjects to continue to meet demands, but on the other, it is becoming hard to spot those new opportunities. As a result, I have uploaded very few new images, but here is my March summary of what I am thinking about for the coming months.

The top level themes for 2021 are very clear. It is just the question of how to translate them into winning images that is harder! I’ll outline my thinking, and hopefully that will trigger some concepts in your minds. The main theme is going to be “back to the (new) normal.” I actually booked some international air flights yesterday for later in the year to the UK, so that is a sign that something is happening! But the main direction will be the success of vaccination programs in an increasing number of countries, a big sigh of relief by many as they think about vacations and visits to see relatives and friends. I don’t think things will be normal in the old sense – still masks and unease in crowded places – but definitely a big change. Now how will that impact stock photo demand? That is where it gets difficult – you could see more editorial opportunities for more crowded beaches perhaps with some people in masks, but illustrating this for general articles is harder. I saw an image today of a syringe and vaccine bottle on a passport – that was a good idea. My vaccination passports have been very poor performers and even my real vaccination record card has sold only a couple of times. So it is hard to see what new approaches might work.

Then, I think we are seeing multiple bubbles forming in financial areas – bitcoin and even a made-up coin called dogecoin are soaring in price. I like a comment from one person – they are worth both anything and nothing at the same time as they are totally detached from any physical asset. I have my share of bitcoin images but ones of a falling market might be worthwhile. We have a lot of old Beanie Babies – those might be in demand next! I must remember to photograph some of them!

With those big themes, I see increasing number of articles about tech companies and their plans for either world domination or launching themselves on the stock markets. Every day there seem to be new apps that are going to revolutionize some activity and while that is unlikely to be true, it is true that there will be many articles written about them in the coming months and I think it would be worth spending some time photographing them as editorial shots – trying to clearly get a screen showing who/what the app is, and then something that shows its use case. These pictures won’t be big sellers (unless you strike it lucky with an app that comes from nowhere), but they are easy to take and don’t take much time to process and keyword. So think about all the new apps and services that you see in your own country and get some of them online. I have done a few recently. There is an ongoing fight between Facebook and Apple over privacy and so I thought I would illustrate that:

Then I saw that there was a big rising star in the world of short term financing – Buy now Pay later type solutions – called Klarna:

There is also an up and coming competitor to them called Affirm:

There are other variants of these companies – one for travel, I believe. Klarna is strong in Europe, particularly in Germany, so there could be some Alamy sales with a bit of luck! These took maybe 30 minutes to take and upload and there are many other similar ideas out there. I ought to take these with my phone as well rather than a laptop.

It would have been good to have had some images of the Robinhood stock trading app before all the stories in the past month. That is an illustration on how taking some simple shots could have paid dividends when they are suddenly all over the news.

Ones I still plan to take – a delivery company called GoPuff that is eyeing expansion into Europe and sees competitors in Gorillas, Weezy, Deja, Cajoo in different countries. Yes, this is what they are called! Then Nextdoor – a super local social media app, seems to be taking off, but also getting into issues about moderation. I understand that faith based apps are a big growth area – mainly because there aren’t really any good ones. So I plan to watch that space.

I’m also looking around for new views of mobile phone towers. I only really have one good image, but I doubled its chances of selling by replacing the sky and making it a sunset image:

These simple images are used a lot to illustrate articles about mobile phone companies and also rural broadband stories. I want to take some more against a clearer sky, perhaps a sunrise, a sunset with the sun in the picture. All of them can then be used to tell different growth (or slow down) stories about that area of technology. After all, what other ways are there to illustrate a mobile phone company?

So put your thinking caps on (as will I) and try to illustrate this concept of slowing getting back to normalish life…