Premium – subjects for February 2021

I’ve been very slow this year on creating my own images (due to a focus on the Opera video and updating my stock presentation), but I have managed to add a few new images to try to capture the latest trends. As I mentioned last month, there is a big growing demand and interest in e-sports and I did talk about a very popular drink among gamers called GFuel and my order finally arrived a week or so back. So today I got round to taking some photos. I borrowed a PS5 controller to add a bit of realism and put a playstation boot screen on my TV to have in the background and took a range of images:

I’ve no idea if they will become a seller, but there are very few competing images – Shutterstock has two, so there is a chance it will sell. And I now have a whole set of different flavored energy drinks to get my metabolism going in the morning!

I also know there is some debate about how to make our fancy smartphones recognize our faces when wearing a mask. Apple is releasing something soon which works if you also have an Apple watch, and so I created a couple of images to try to illustrate that:

I think that whole subject of security will continue to reverberate this year following the massive intrusion into many government and corporate networks using a modified version of some software from Solarwinds. I haven’t created anything for this, but it is in the front of my mind as I expect to see many reports and articles about it as the year goes on.

Vaccinations will be the in-thing this year with images both of the company vaccines involved plus different examples of the process. Then I think there will be articles about how vaccination is either freeing us up (or keeping us locked down…) until a broader group of the public has been treated. Of course, many people will reject the shots and so illustrating articles about people refusing the vaccine would be a good subject. I created a range of images for the vaccines in January and I’m pleased to say that those are selling, especially the Chinese and Russian vaccines. I’m still trying to get them all onto Shutterstock – I, of course, fell foul of both the similars and the altered editorial rejections that SS is famous for! However, I did manage to get at least one of each variant online and they are being picked up across most sites. I wish I had got there earlier (the idea was there, not the execution!), but things are as they are! What hasn’t sold (and surprised me) was the images I took of my own vaccination certificate. Obviously the real thing is more boring than some of the made up ones I have had before.

I also created some images of Parler before it was taken down (I talked about this last year) and those have sold reasonably well – not great, but then they cost next to nothing to produce.

I was going for the “dangerous” look with this and had my flashgun set to its lowest power on a table just below my hand and facing a blue foamboard sheet to give the spotlight effect, and then I just used the light from the screen in the foreground. A few attempts were needed because of the slow shutterspeed, but I did get there!

Looking forward, I’m not really seeing a great new topic that will be all over the news and comment websites. I think it will be more of the same for a while and the main subjects that you could think about illustrating include:

Student debt. This is a major issue in the USA and there is talk about cancelling some or all of the debt that is owed by students, especially those that went to some dubious “for profit” colleges that seemed (in my view) to be attracting any and all students just to get their fees, which were paid by loans from the government. The education and the resultant degree was not worth much and so millions of people have no chance of paying off this debt. As this will be in the news regularly, a few images to help illustrate it would be worthwhile.

The USA is debating, again, a new stimulus package and so refreshing any images you have of stimulus checks (I talked about creating my own in this post last April) and it might be worth doing that and coming up with some new ideas. Also, in April this year, the US tax year ends and there is some considerable confusion both about how you report the stimulus payments and also how the people that failed to get a check can claim the amount on their tax return. So I intend to create images for both. You can download a copy of the US tax form (1040) from the Treasury website, so you don’t need to live in the USA to do this.

Also, this is the first year that there is a concerted effort to tax cyber currency gains and so images linking tax forms and similar ideas for paying taxes with bitcoins or other cyber coins would be worth creating.

There is a lot more focus now on Global Warming (in the US) and also electric cars. I’m not sure of how best to illustrate that, but perhaps think of images you already have on those concepts and take newer versions of them. My bitcoin images sell rarely now (because there are probably newer and better ones around) so it is time for me to try some new ideas or even just take similar shots to earlier successful ones and get some more traction from that subject.

Eviction will still be a subject – it keeps getting kicked down the road with moratoria on evicting people, but nothing much is done to solve the basic issue that they have no money to pay the back rent. So at some point this bubble will burst I think. So making some eviction/foreclosure images will be worthwhile.

I’m sorry that I am running out of ideas today. As I think of more, I will, of course, update you all!