Premium – the new normal

As I outlined in my end of April earnings report, I’ve managed to keep my earnings above water, with a lot of help from Coronavirus related imagery. In this post, I’ll walk through the sort of things that I’m working on now and what I’m thinking about for the upcoming months. As I’ve discussed before, I think this new state of affairs will be with us for a long time and we will just have to get used to some pretty extreme social distancing rules that will impact most of the things we used to do – hence the new normal!

But first, just an update on how the images I created for the virus are helping with my earnings. As of today, the virus plus economic stimulus images have sold 1332 times for $1050 and they continue to sell. Within that total, the ones I created to illustrate the things the government is doing to help people cope economically, such as my stimulus checks, have sold for $152. All of that latter group were pretty much created at home. Outside of those totals, I think images and videos I created in the past – such as a cruise ship bow heading into stormy waves – are probably being picked up to illustrate either the cruise industry in trouble, or maybe just a general metaphor for the world heading in the same direction! I’ve mulled over whether I should update the keywords on some of these to give them a more direct virus link. I haven’t done that a lot, but I did update this one:

I made this quite some time ago and I think it is being used now to illustrate how the virus moves between people, social networks, and finally, it could be used to show how tracing of virus between people could occur. Not a big seller, but maybe something you could think about going forward. I also updated the keywords on this one:

The home schooling that is currently underway is probably a big topic that uses an image like this.

The things I’m thinking about now are more about how we will transition to our new lives. I read a long article about what life in Wuhan is like now – they are back at work and going out, but the controls on people are immense. Temperatures are taken constantly and the results recorded in each citizen’s personal record. They all have apps on their phone that show their currently reported status – green is that they are clear and can go to work, yellow means they have been in some sort of contact with a person who now has the virus and must return home and quarantine themselves again, and red means they are infected and must not be out of doors. Factories are intensely invested in keeping workers safe as one outbreak of the virus will close the factory again and so temperature checks and distancing are everywhere. I’m not sure that western countries would accept that level of control (you only need to look at the story of a security guard in a food store in the USA being shot and killed because he insisted that a shopper needed to wear a mask to see the tensions) but the concept of tracking will be in the news for months to come. As a result, I’ve reworked my cinema board to show the latest phrases being used in the UK:

I haven’t uploaded these yet, and expect trouble with Shutterstock and their insane “similars” policy, but I think other agencies will accept them. I also created my own “traffic lights” smartphone app screen to add to other images I have created in the past:

I often find that the simpler the illustration of the concept, the better it sells. The real version of this in China includes one of those machine readable square icons, but those are rarely accepted in stock photos because they could be “real” and lead to a website with its own form of viruses! I also don’t think you need any words if the idea is clear enough.

I also usually find that I start with one concept and then other versions come to mind that improve on it. For instance, there is the Presidential election in the USA this November and I’m sure there will be big debates about allowing far more voting by mail rather than in person. So I used one of my voting stickers on an image of a mailbox I had:

This is OK and gets the message across, but after seeing a sale of this green hill, I thought that a more generic version might work better, with more space for copy text so I used that older picture to create this:

This has a different feel and more of an aspirational use – illustrating the aim of the Democrats in particular to get this in place for November. As I’ve said before, you don’t need to live in a country to create images to illustrate stories in that country. Even my boring ones of an envelope have sold a few times already:

I also think a lot more temperature checks will be put in place. I have one of those thermometers that you run across the forehead and so that would also look OK being used as a sort of temperature testing radar gun. I haven’t done any of those pictures yet, but they could be composited into office and travel related imagery going forward.

Another one on my list (although time is short for this) is Mother’s day in the USA on May 10th. I was thinking that people would have trouble buying real cards and so a male hand holding a hand drawn card for Mother’s day would be an OK concept for this year. A similar idea for birthdays might work as well.

And one more on my mind – there is a growing movement from the “ultra right” in the US and elsewhere to create conspiracy theories around the virus. As a result, I redid my QAnon image from a year or two back to give it more flavor:

Of course Shutterstock rejected it and said it should be an illustration so I have resubmitted there. But the underlying Q letter in flames has sold a few times recently and it was pretty easy to do in Photoshop. So maybe there are other concepts there that you could try? While I was certainly lucky to get all those sales from the cinema board concept, I also find that it is a pretty rare occurrence to have such a best seller and consistent earnings come from lots of concepts each selling a few times each every month. As long as you are not spending too much time on each one (unless you have nothing else to do), then it is worthwhile.

I was talking to someone in the UK earlier this week and the advice from some big companies there is that staff should not expect to be back in their main city offices before the end of the year and even then, only about 30% of people would be in the office at any one time. The main driver for that is the crowding on public transport that is the key method that most people use to get to their work in a city. That will also drive companies to probably try to sell buildings they own and get out of leased space, so images of “for lease” on office buildings or images that illustrate some level of control on how many people can be on public transport would be useful. The complexity there (and I haven’t got my mind round this concept yet) is that if the transport hub is trademarked and hence would be editorial, you can’t go around adding new signs to that saying that the entrance is closed. That could be a tricky one unless you can actually take real editorial images of such controls.

That seems to have ended this post on a bit of a downer, and I’m sorry for that! I hope that vaccines and treatments will be coming along faster than we expect, and so some images showing people getting their freedom at last would be good. As for me, I have a case of wine being delivered this afternoon, so images of me struggling in through the front door may be part of my plan for the rest of the day!

These sell as editorial because of the logos on the bottle caps, but it cost very little time to take the photo and they do sell. So once again, look for the ordinary things that are happening (delivery of take-out food and disinfecting the packaging perhaps?) and take the image. Practice with food images as well – using take-out food might be a good concept and if the restaurant is reasonably well known, then including their logo in an editorial shot could also work. Five minutes of effort could give you a best seller! Good luck and stay safe!