What can you do at home?

I’ve been a proponent of taking photos wherever you can, even though there may not be an immediate market for them. As an example, when I was booked on a early flight from Dulles airport in Washington, DC (remember those days…) I spent my waiting time taking a few shots around the terminal and the gate area. As it was early, there were very few people around and I think I uploaded the shots as editorial and they have probably sold a few times:

Of course, it is hard to take those images now, but I have them squirreled away in my Lightroom catalog. Now that we are at home most of the time, I’ve been using my photoshop skills to try to create new images that might sell once things start to open up a bit. Masks are being insisted on in many places (OK with some exceptions in the White House…) and so I set up my green screen and put on my suit and tie (first time for many years) and became a business traveler. Incidentally, West Virginia opened up hairdressers this week and I decided it was better to go early before he had a chance to catch anything!

My studio isn’t very big (and really it is just an area in the roof space) but to show how messy things can get, this is how I have it set up for these sorts of shots:

The green screen is a great product from Elgato Gaming, but you don’t need anything as fancy as this. A white cloth is all you need for photographs, and perhaps a green cloth for video extraction and you could easily do this by a large window to provide the lighting. Extracting in Photoshop was reasonably easy although it doesn’t have a one click green screen removal option. I generally used the quick selection tool and then improved the selection in Select and Mask and that gave me a good start. I found a nice trick to get rid of those green edges around hair, for instance. You create a clipping layer (new layer and then right click to choose clipping mask) which means that it only impacts things that have some pixels in the layer below. Transparent pixels are not affected. Change the blend mode to Color and then select a color from the hair close to the edge. Then paint on the new layer in that color along the edge of the image and the slightly green hairs will change to their right color. You can use it around the edges of clothes as well to remove any green cast there.

From there, it is a matter of popping it into a new image with a blurred background to produce this new image which I hope tells the story of travel in the Covid-19 days:

Even at 100% magnification, it is hard to see any faults with the edges and, of course, I downsize it to around 5500 pixels for upload. I do get rid of any identifying marks (on those screens for instance) before blurring. I did a range of these including casual clothing, without the passport and so on, so that the buyers have some choices.

So, while you are at home, have a look at your old images and see what you can create using yourself as a model (or your family) and an interesting and relevant background.

You might have noticed the image that is the thumbnail for this post – a Bitcoin in flames on a stack of golden coins. Bitcoins have been in the new recently because the price is rising from their recent lows and so I decided to create something new from two images that were already in my database. A bit of compositing of the bitcoin, a flame effect and outer glow in Photoshop and I have a new image that might illustrate what is happening right now. I guess the flames could illustrate it dropping in price again if I am lucky!

One final bit of news – after months of zero sales from Fine Art America, I was pleased to finally see one this morning. My last sale was in November 2019, but this new one is one of my favorites. In fact, I have this very image (at the same size) on my wall at home:

This sold to a buyer from Formby in North western England and my profit was $130 – a nice start to the month.