Premium – recreating old favorites

It has been a while since my last premium article, although I hope you found the more general topics I have been writing about useful as well. After a lull in creativity, I’ve been quite active again as you can see from the green screen work and I encourage you (as I will explain) to think about using yourself and some older images to create new concepts that might sell.

I’ve continued my green screen work (it is so easy to use that Key36 extraction process that I think nothing now of taking a shot against green and extracting it for other uses. My most recent ones have included a new take on famous stock photos after I read an interesting email from the founders of Photocase (which is a pretty obscure agency that accepted about six of my uploads!). They tend to focus on realism and real people rather than the artificial looks of many models, and basically, this article was about how there was a lack of real imagery for many of the really popular shots in most stock agencies – think the pretty woman talking on a headset sort of shots. That got me thinking about an image I had been meaning to take for a while – a senior man working from home, but outside on his deck now that the warmer weather is here. So yesterday I got myself, my laptop, a headset (I’ve got smaller ones, but I thought this illustrated the message better) and sat outside in the sun. This was just before noon and so the sun was very bright and harsh and so I wanted to fill in the shadows. I think a big reflector would have done it, but as I had my flashgun in a softbox ready (from my green screen stuff), I used that and placed it by my side just out of the camera view. Then I’m all ready to strike up my pose as the happy call center operator with headset, or the worker keeping in touch with his colleagues or the grandfather chatting to his grandchildren during quarantine.

I took a range of images with different poses and have just uploaded them – time will tell if they will catch on!

The rest of the ideas in that email are worth thinking about just to give you some concepts that might work either with yourself or a model you have access to:

How would these Photocase versions look like? I see non-binary, elderly or other people with a headset who do not fit the clichéd image. Or is that not even a headset? I see the all-black business handshake or the homeless handshake. I see all sorts of things that can be considered a representation of the blue-ocean strategy in the form of a goldfish jumping from a crowded aquarium into an empty one. We have taken the trouble to list the top clichés:

Woman in a meadow leans back and embraces the sunlight

Family jumping on a lawn in front of the sky

Woman/man/child/animal holding an empty piece of cardboard

Hand from a heart against the sun

Businessman with thumbs up

Hands in different skin colors close a circle

Old woman doing the heavy metal hand sign or playing electric guitar

Person in front of monochrome background points at something

Child who does not like vegetables

Team meeting with everyone staring at a screen

Mansplaining – typically a man explains something to his typically female colleague by pointing to a board or screen

Man puts his ear to the belly of a pregnant woman

Man in a suit writes some kind of catchphrase on a transparent surface in front of him.

The hand with a bank note coming out of a computer screen

A plant grows between two hands

The cheering team, also as solo of a cheering businessman

I’m planning to go down this list and see how I can use it to get some images online that are a bit out of the ordinary. I should do videos as well, but I still haven’t really got my head into video production. I know I keep saying you should all do that, but old habits die hard.

As you can see, I have already done the piece of cardboard shot! I’m not sure whether to add messages to them or not. I’m definitely uploading isolated on white versions plus a composite, such as this:

I’ll also do some other expressions as well now that I have shaved off my stubble! The question of adding a message is an intriguing one. In the good old days, any designer would be able to take an image and composite it into a background or add suitable text to the board. But now I think that many buyers of stock photos just want to use it immediately with no other adjustment. So this one above could include the message “Statehood for DC” which is a hot topic in the USA and would be picked up for that, I think. But if I do that, I will run up against the similars rejections that some agencies have. A tricky decision and I’ll watch which images get purchased to try to inform my views going forward. I have been amazed with how many coronavirus images I see where the word “coronavirus” is just hand written on some bit of paper. I think they look very amateurish, but I see them all over the place and so they are hitting the sweet spot with buyers. So we should all bear that in mind.

I’ve also been trying to keep up with the news and saw something recently about the EU deciding which countries to allow entry from as they start to open up. There is some controversy as to whether the USA will be blocked (and I think is has been). So a couple of days back I took one of my tried and tested images and altered the text on the noticeboard to give me this:

As I’ve said before – always take images of simple things and keep them in reserve for future images. This noticeboard was originally something I took in Washington DC:

Talk about a boring photograph! But the sign has been perfect for illustrating other things as you have seen.

I’ve also been trying to illustrate different sorts of interactions:

This one could be used for a range of concepts and, of course, I uploaded it as an isolated shot as well. So while you have your model in place, try to think of as many different actions as you can and create new concepts that cost you little to create but could create new sales.

I’m finding that simple backgrounds are working well. I mentioned in the green screen article about creating a bookcase background. I uploaded that to the agencies as a deliberately defocused background suitable for zoom backgrounds etc. and that has been selling quite well:

I uploaded it in late May and it has earned $27 so far. Nothing fantastic but I think it will be a long term seller as it should never go out of fashion. The actual compositing of the various shelves was done very roughly as I knew I was going to defocus or blur it, so it was a quick project that is paying off in its own right.

In my previous article I mentioned creating some images with stacks of coins. I’ve done that now and got them online, but no takers so far:

I’ve seen articles about investing now in the FTSE (UK stock market) using something like this so I thought I might as well include this in my examples.

My plan now is to go through that list from Photocase and see which ones I can also give a coronavirus feel to – I think those could be reasonable sellers going forward as we all adjust to our new lives. I suggest you should do the same!