Stock Photo Ideas

I’ve been talking about taking photos and sometimes probbably also mentioned something about vectors. Vectors are quite specific to microstock agencies, as they are accepted here. If you look at any other serious photo stock agency, you won’t find any vectors there. It’s a completely different market. If we return to microstock websites, sometimes drawing vectors is quite easy. One of the easiest and seasonal things to draw are snowflakes. I draw a set of snowflakes for the previous Christmas and the downloads were comming in for the whole year. So it’s a good way to spend your time. Here’s my snowflake set:

Ok, enough talking. Today I’ll show you how to use a free vector drawing software called Inkscape to draw easy and very random snowflakes. I bet you won’t be able to draw two identical ones. At least I didn’t manage to. Here’s the video how I did it:

Here’s the scenario:

1. create two rectangles, one bigger than the other one. Rotate the bigger one by 60 degrees so that it overlaps most of the first square and leaves visible only a triangle. (To rotate the rectangle, click on it to change the arrows at the corners of the rectangle, then press Ctrl key and rotate the rectangle by two steps. each step is 30 degrees.)
2. combine the objects using Path -> Difference. The bigger rectangle should be on the top for this function to work.
3. then cut out some random parts of the triangle to make the pattern of the snowflake.
4. duplicate what’s left from the triangle and flip it horizontally. Align the similar sides after flipping.
5. group the object, duplicate again and flip vertical
6. one of the parts to the bottom so that they don’t overlap. Group the objects again
7. duplicate them once more and rotate by 60 degrees (remember how you rotated the rectangles in the beginning)
8. duplicate the rotated element and rotate by 60 more degrees.

That’s it! You should have a pretty snowflake now! To be honest, I don’t think there area differences if you’re using Adobe products. I just wanted to show that you don’t need Photoshop to create simple and pretty things.

If we return to microstock agencies, the downloads of these vectors are not so high, probably because of easy creation of them, however the set I’ve uploaded to dreamstime has earned me nearly $10.

In the previous posts I’ve only shared my experience about microstock photography and my success with the agencies. Now it’s time to share ideas about shooting. A couple of posts ago I mentioned that whenever you have no ideas on what to shoot you can shoot backgrounds. Shooting backgrounds is quite easy and actually does not require any big investments, it’s also a great training subject, as you can experiment with light - direct light, reflected light, etc. A couple of weeks ago I joined a photography course and one of the first homeworks was shooting backgrounds. Here’s a picture how I did it:

The picture was taken with my cell phone, so the quality is quite poor, but you still can get the idea. Here’s the way to do it. Take a table where to put the background you want to take picture of. I set up my tripod and use a mirror to reflect part of the light. The mirror is needed to distribute the light evenly and hilight the shadows as the light comes from one side and the other side of the objects is dark. As about the light - this time I didn’t use any special light source other than daylight coming from window. In order to be successful, you have to set a correct white ballance. As it was couldy on the day I shot the backgrounds I chose “cloudy” white balance on my camera and it worked fine. If you use other light source it would be wise to set custom white ballance (I’ll explain this in one of the next posts) or just choose a more appropriate automatic setting. As about the things you can shoot as backgrounds I used a bunch of half-dried roses and various teas I had in kitchen. And here are the results:

As about the results - the course teacher chose the last one as the best background, I like the first one the most. The most important thing is to practice and see what happens with the results by manipulating the light. If you don’t have a big mirror like I do, you can use let’s say aluminum foil that’s glued on top of A4 sized sheet of paper or any other reflective surface. Actually the more reflective surfaces you try the better results you might get. Be creative!

Being a web developer takes you to a point where you have to get some images for the website you are creating. When I was just starting to create web pages for some clients, I was just taking images from Google image search and putting them in my designs.

Nobody ever told me that the images are stolen and nobody actually cared. Since I’m doing micro-stock photography, I’ve also changed my attitude to images. If I want somebody to buy my images for let’s say a travel agency website, then I should buy images in micro-stock when I design a site for my client.

Despite the fact that designing sites for individual clients is not my daily work, I would like you to show the images that I’ve bought for these purposes from Dreamstime. Why Dreamstime? Because they have an excellent option to buy as much credits as I need without spending over $100 for a subscription that lasts for whole month. You can buy let’s say 20 credits for $20 (I don’t remember the exact prices and thus might be wrong) and spend the credits whenever you want. At the moment I’ve downloaded a total of 18 images for 2 designed websites. In this post I will show you the first 10 images I used for a forestry website.

The website is for a company specializing in forestry, planting forests, lumbering, buying and selling forests. One of their main ideas was to have nice looking wildlife and forest pictures on their website to show that they care about nature. The interesting thing was that I was too lazy and busy to do the searching for them and I have bad experience with customers who think that the pictures I have chosen are not as good as they should be. I just gave the Dreamstime link to my client and let them search the images. At the evening of the same day they sent me back a list of links to images they would like to see on the web page. Excellent! After paying for the credits via PayPal I immediately downloaded the images and put them in page design. The best part was that while talking with client about the page design, there was no discussion about images at all and the client quite soon accepted the final version of the page design. Maybe that’s some kind of psychology - the client felt like he has participated in the design process.

After this great experience I’ve decided to continue this way of working whenever I will need some images for some design jobs. Besides that - client also sees that the images are bought and there can be no copyright problems.

Ok, enough talking, here are the 10 images used for this website:

And finally here’s the screen shot of the website.:

Probably some of you might think - hey, but you are a hobbyist photographer! Why didn’t you go outside and shoot some great landscape pictures yourself? You would have saved a couple of bucks! The answer is simple - it’s easier to work with clients this way - they can choose the pictures they like from a huge database. The odds that you will shoot the images the way they like are quite minimal. Besides that - they see your expenses and you can easily include the price of images in the final bill.

The rest 8 used images are still to come in one of the next posts, otherwise including around 20 images in a single post would be too much.

Most of the serious photographers are laughing at people doing stock photography just because of the low prices of the photos. Despite the fact that the prices are actually very low and you need at least some 50 downloads for each image to make a reasonable amount of money, there is one interesting thing about licenses - the low price of image still makes some limitations on the usage. If the buyer is serious and needs the image for some project that does not fit in the low price limits, he has to buy the image with a more expensive licence. The price of enhanced licenes varies in the agencies. In this post I’ll show you my first three (at the moment the only three) enhanced licence sales that I got on ShutterStock.com.

Drained football field

The first one is a picture taken in a country school stadium during summer vacation - the football field was completely dry and burnt in the sun. I thought of this as an image that could be used as an illustration for government cutting the budget to some national football team after a bad start in world championships. The interesting part is that this image has only seven downloads to date, one of which is enhanced license sale for $20. So it does not matter how many downloads an image has - the next download could be an enhanced license sale!

Jungle waterfall in Thailand

The second image I took in my vacation in Thailand it was a very beautiful waterfall in some national park (I don’t remember the name) and I took the photo after swimming in this waterfall. The image is a little bit improved with Photoshop to get a bit more green water and a bit darker trees. The image is being downloaded almost daily and since February when I posted it on shutterstock, it has been downloaded more than 100 times one of which was an enhanced license sale, making a total of $46. Not bad for a simple vacation image!

Leonardo bay, Thailand

The third image is also from my vacation in Thailand and also taken after swimming in this bay. The hard part of taking this image was to get a decent composition and avoid getting any people in the image. This is the bay where “The Beach” movie was filmed and a lot of people are coming here to see it, get some sunbath, do snorkeling and other things. Finally after a couple shots I managed to get an image free from people. After getting home from vacation and looking at this image I thought - if some image gets an enhanced license sale, then it should be this one. The fact is that this image got the last of the three enhanced license sales. Now this image has already made me $66 on ShutterStock alone - also not bad for a vacation image.

If we are looking at the ratio of enhanced license sales vs regular sales, the ratio is different for every photographer. For me it’s 3/820 or around 0.36% of all sales. For some people it’s higher, for some - lower. I hope to continue this topic with more enhanced license sales when I get some.

Some of the pictures in my gallery are just “quick and crazy” ideas. This is one of them. I was visiting my brother at his apartment and then I saw a syringe on his table. He was using it for some computer related things like blowing away dust from places where he could not get inside with his fingers. The idea was simple - to take a picture of a drug addict. I got into his kitchen, got some cranberry juice in the syringe and we did the picture.

This image is definitely not a bestseller, however it has already made $8 which is quite ok.

If something interesting comes to your mind, just shoot it and you will get the results.

Whenever you are running out of ideas on subjects to shoot, you can shoot backgrounds. If you take this into account you can easily get a decent portfolio of various backgrounds that could sell quite well. I tried to collect a couple of background images as the very beginning when I started to work with micro stock agencies. The first shots were quite simple - just a brick wall, water background, sand background, etc. The interesting thing is that these images are selling quite well.

My favorite background image is the desert sand background image:

To be honest, it’s not a desert. I live near a forest with this type of sand and some day I just went outside to take some photos and this was one of the series. In fact this image is my backgrounds bestseller. It does not sell so well on ShutterStock (only 11 downloads and $2.75 made), but it does sell quite good on Dreamstime.com (total made $24.50).

If you do a search on the micro stock agencies then you will see that many people are doing backgrounds. No matter how many backgrounds there are on agencies, there will always be space for some more. If I look at my stats, I must say that a decent part of my earnings are coming from background sales. Be a bit creative on this and you can get a good niche.

Despite the fact that I’ve created this blog about specific stock photo ideas, I haven’t managed to post any reasonable posts on this topic. It’s time to change that. Today I’ll give you some very simple ideas on what to shoot at home.

The idea is simple - everybody of us have their home plans, appartment plans or whatever other projects printed. Just try to find an interesting angle, be creative with DOF and shoot a couple of images. Afterwards upload them to stock photo agencies and watch the downloads. Maybe that’s not the most popular subject in stock photo agencies, but why not add some fresh images to your portfolio?

To better understand what I mean, here’s my sample, that I submitted to ShutterStock:

I did another image with shallow DOF, but it was accepted only on DreamsTime.

How much have I made with these images? Nothing special - a total of $18.50. However, you should notice how simple it is to shoot images like this one.