Premium – stock photo ideas for November 2021

After my relatively poor sales in October, this continues to feel like a poor year for stock photos, I’m afraid. Although I have had some good days this month, I’m halfway through a business day and my count (on Microstockr Pro) is $10.61! Not a good sign!

As you probably know, I’ve been focusing more on selling photos as prints since the summer, with efforts in boosting my presence on social media. I think this is starting to pay off a little with a few more sales on Fine Art America than I have had in the past, but I will write about that separately. For now, I’ve continued to think about what might make a good stock photo and have actually taken some of them as well!

One thing that is in the news and will continue to be in the news for many more months (years) is the development of the metaverse – a sort of multi-faceted online world where people will spend time interacting with each other and with games, shops, and many ways to see advertisements, I’m sure! I’ve done a few images but I’d be the first to say that they are boring in the extreme and I have earned a massive $3 from them! But I still think this is an opportunity to get some generic images out there that can be used as a placeholder cover image when a journalist doesn’t want to use a proprietary image of a VR headset. So I continue to mull this over and try to think of something a bit more exciting than the ones I have created so far. This is the sort of boring thing that is my best seller in this area:

I wish I could give you an example of something better – there are 11 pages of metaverse images now on SS. I must admit this is much better than mine and shows some more inventive ideas of adding boxes and things floating around in space:

I think there is plenty of time to get something new out there and have it catch on – just need to get the concept right.

Looking forwards a little, I think there is an opportunity to do more Thanksgiving/Christmas shots with a virus feel. This virus will be with us for a long time I suspect and so people taking precautions (or eating alone with headsets on in a sort of VR future!) can be photographed better than the ones out there. I also think examples of giving a vaccination certificate as a gift might be an intriguing option – trying to illustrate the hazards of talking about these very partisan issues (masks and vaccines in the USA) with your relatives over a family meal, or trying to persuade someone who is against vaccines to actually have one. There will be many articles written about how to handle tricky subjects at the dinner table so having a few images that help illustrate that would be good.

One of my ideas that has been an absolute flop so far has been the illustration of newer crypto coins. I read a really interesting article about the money that has gone into Tether – a so-called stable coin that is supposedly fixed in price at $1 and backed up with assets to ensure people can get their $1 back if they want to sell. These coins are often bought using real money and then traded against more exciting coins such as the Dogecoin… The article was digging in to where these supposed assets are. I’m guessing at the numbers a bit now, but about $70 billion of these Tether coins have been bought and so this money is somewhere safe. But where do you put $70B? Well, it seems a bank in the Bahamas is involved somewhere, and other traders in traditional bonds report that no-one has bought that many bonds as a safe place to keep money. The overall slant was that it was very difficult to see where this money actually is, and so if there was a flight away from crypto and people tried to get their money back, it might not be there. So I bought a pretend Tether coin and uploaded that:

So far, I have spent $20 on the coin and earned 32c on Shutterstock! But it’s time will come, mark my words!

I’m a great believer in taking photos of things that turn up in your life. You never know when they might sell, and they cost nothing really to take. We had to renew our UK passports recently (a very efficient online process, by the way) and the ones that arrived are the new blue ones that no longer mention the European Union. So of course, I had to photograph them and they have sold a few times. Of course, you can’t repeat this, but just think of the idea whenever something turns up that might be interesting to illustrate a story:

The supply chain shortage is going to be with us for a time and also inflation is increasing (in the US at least, but I suspect elsewhere as we are all tied together in global trade). I have few photos even trying to illustrate that and so I’m going to try to create something that shows rising inflation. Perhaps the traditional man (or woman) with their finger on a see-through graph of rising prices? We need to get that personal involvement (as a simple graph is so easy for someone to create themselves) and so images of a worried senior man looking at a till receipt from a grocery store (with the items of the table perhaps) would be an easy editorial image to take. Certain items are rising in price faster than others (meat for instance) and so some images that show that (and perhaps show plant based alternatives as well) would be good for articles that ask if people are moving away from meat. Energy prices will rise this winter for many reasons, and so utility bills with a shocked person could be good. And how about someone checking how much money they have as they are filling their car with fuel? All of these could easily help some journalist illustrate a story for the coming months. I haven’t taken any of these images, but they are all buzzing around in my mind!

The other big topic that will continue to resonate is Global Warming. Now that is a tricky one to capture, but just having images to pick up some sales as the discussion ebbs and flows is worthwhile. This is something that could be on your mind as you travel around – photographing empty lakes, drought in rivers, floods etc. and make sure you add Global Warming and Climate Change to the keywords. Taking pictures of power stations (especially coal powered ones) is worthwhile. I sell quite a lot of images (and videos) focused on the fumes coming from such installations and so whenever I see a good view of one, I try to take it and properly keyword it with its location and name. Similarly if you can see coal being moved (by train or river), those are worth having in your portfolio. Not very attractive as images, but they will be in demand. I do sell images of solar power stations from time to time, but there seems to be more demand for what is being closed rather than the newer replacements. If there is a new installation of powering equipment for electric cars, that would be worth photographing as well.

For some reason, my videos sell better in this space. If I search Microstockr Pro for “coal” I see I have made sales of over $700 for images and videos with that in the title. The best seller is this video:

This has earned $160 and didn’t take much effort – no drones, just my camera with telephoto lens on a tripod and capturing the smoke and steam from the power station.

Back on the Covid story again, I made some simple shots earlier in the year about potential drugs to help with the symptoms (and I missed that horse paste one, I know!), but these shots with the company name behind the pretend capsules keep selling whenever there is some action such as approval of the drug. So keep an eye out for any new contenders and just create a new version of the photo for that company. So far, I have Pfizer and Merck online:

I’ve written this post over two days to allow myself some time to think of new topics, and so I should finish with an update on sales. Yesterday I was depressed that my sales had vanished, today I woke up to see sales of $90 already recorded for the day. The reason was a sale of this panorama on Shutterstock for $86.

It just goes to show that you never know what is going to happen in this business!