Premium – Stock Photo ideas for June 2021

As you have probably surmised from my other posts, I have been putting a lot more effort into social media recently to try to boost some print sales and stock has been just “ticking over”. I have added a few images as I have taken them, but, to be honest, not very many! I will continue to write these posts, but if you feel that the value is no longer there, feel free to cancel your membership. If you don’t mind continuing to support the ad-free blog – thank you!

So what did I work on? I still think my forecast of a big collapse in various assets is on the cards – Bitcoin and the various Alt coins (did you know there are over 10,000 various crypto coins that have been created…) did have a large drop, but so far, my images have not really seen any traction. Perhaps that is because they aren’t very good at illustrating this relatively tricky concept of falling asset values:

I guess there might be a market for these somewhere? I also added some images of the Apple AirTag and some of these have started to sell – nothing dramatic yet, but signs of movement.

I still think there are opportunities for images about evictions and similar housing issues. In the USA, the moratorium on people being evicted for not paying rent expires at the end of June and there is little sign of it being renewed. About 10M people are said to be a risk and so that almost certainly will result in many articles. So I’m hoping my older eviction images will get a new lease of life. These aren’t difficult to take and I’m sure there are more concepts that are possible to illustrate this. As I am sure I have mentioned before, this one has earned $356 to date:

The other theme that seems to be coming up is the massive shift from buying things (or services) towards subscribing to them. There are so many products now where the offer is to subscribe for only $9.99 a month, or perhaps have a free trial with an automatic move to a paid subscription at the end of the trial. For many people that might be buried away in a credit card statement and canceling these is not always as obvious and easy as it could be. I heard recently of one service where the only way to cancel was to call their customer service center. In the US, this subscription industry is now worth $650B and is forecast to rise to $1.5T in a few years. With complaints growing, this is likely to be regulated in some way and then, of course, more articles will be written about it. I think something like a made up credit card statement with various subscription services could work, or something that suggests the difficulty of canceling such things might make a great stock image. I haven’t done any yet, but they are certainly on my mind. I really should check my own statements – I’m sure there is something there I have forgotten! There is also a lot of discussion about the competing streaming offers – Netflix, Disney etc. I think images of smartphones with many different app icons could be useful here, especially if you include some of the newer and less popular offerings.

There is still time to illustrate Child Benefit payments that will be paid directly to parents each month in the USA starting in July. Although this is perhaps common in other countries, it is new and controversial in the USA and so illustrating direct payments could be used to use as the headline image for articles about it. I did some earlier which now sell from time to time:

This one above is set against white so it will blend into the page or can be overlaid over another image. I also did some with a child in the background out of focus to avoid model release issues.

Incidentally, I did try the $9.99 a month service (another subscription) that Xpiks started, but I have to say I was disappointed. It covered things like the Olympics and how there would not be in-person crowds and hence people would watch at home, but to me the Olympics are very tricky to cover with a very tight control over those 5 rings. I can’t recall any other items (and I can’t see it now that I have cancelled!), but it just goes to show how difficult it is to come up with the real success stories in stock photography. I’ll keep at it though!