Backyard Silver

How can I sell my photos and make some money???

admin — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:15:18 +0000

Getting Started in Stock

This is a question we all ask ourselves, having spent hundreds (thousands) of dollars on our hobby! I asked myself that question over 4 years ago, and decided the answer was to sell my images. After a slow start, I have increased my income to a run rate of more than $15,000 a year and I share the steps, the trials and tribulations in the newly revised second edition of my eBook – Getting Started in Stock. You are facing a simple choice – do you want to learn as you go, following the forums and their inconsistent information from people who may or may not know what they are talking about, or do you want to save hours of frustration and learn it all on one easy to follow guidebook?

Buy this new eBook directly from my site through a simple and secure shopping cart and get immediate access to the information you need to make money from your photographs!

Home made photo isolation table

admin — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:32:53 +0000

Isolating an object against a pure white background is one of the challenges of stock photography, especially for light colored objects. If you place it on a white card and boost the lighting to get the card burnt out, the object suffers as well. I set about building a simple approach to the problem using things I have around the house.

The project starts with a glass topped table, placed close to a white surface. Under the table you place one flash gun, and have a second one bouncing down from the white surface onto the table top:

Glass topped table

On top of the table, lay some sort of thin white translucent fabric. I use a folding reflector that I got from Lastolite – a triangular TriGrip reflector that is just the right size for my table.

Lastolite reflector on table

On top of that you put two similarly sized books (about 2-3 inches thick) and lay a sheet of clear acrylic or glass on top of the books. This is to support your subject and keep it some way away from the white reflector.

Glass/Acrylic sheet on books

Finally, you can add a second flash and reflector (or flash and umbrella) to provide lighting for the shadows or to give more even light on the subject.

Full setup

I find that with the flashguns set to half power (for faster recycling), I can normally have an aperture of around f14 with ISO200. The shutterspeed doesn’t matter, so set it around 1/160. Take a shot of the table and see if the background is fully over-exposed (it flashes black on my Canon). Then focus on your subject and increase the power of the main flashes to get the right exposure on subject. Again, I find that about half power is fine. In Lightroom 4, I then hold down Alt and slide the “White” slider until all the background goes pure white. This adjustment doesn’t affect the subject too much. Then set black point and adjust exposure to get a nice brightness level. Here is an example of a pottery pig with a low amount of top light to show how the light is coming from below:

Example of pottery pig

That’s it really – the white background blows out any detail in the reflector and you get a smooth even light from under the object. Here is an example with a sweetcorn in a glass dish.

Sweetcorn in glass dish

Update: A question was raised as to whether this approach would provide too much harsh lighting onto the underside and edges of an object, and would the alternative method of having a well lit white background some feet away from the glass layer provide a more controllable approach. My half forgotten physics suggested that if the exposure was correct, both methods would produce similar results, although the illuminated white background would provide more diffuse light. As an experiment, I lit some cat5 cables using both methods and tried to get the exposure of the white background correct – just going to black on my LCD screen. I then adjusted in LR4 to make the white completely white using the “white” slider. Here are the two images – I think the results are pretty similar, although the transparent plug on the right is better delineated when I used the white paper lit from above. Overall, I think I prefer the white paper look as there is less light spread onto the subject.

Translucent fabric lit from below

Illuminated white background paper

Stock Photo examples for May 7, 2012

admin — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:22:54 +0000

Another in the weekly cycle of stock photos taken and uploaded this week. I decided to try some more isolated product type shots this week, and knocked up a small isolation table to get a good white background. In a nutshell, I took a small glass topped table and put it close to the white painted front door. On the top I laid my Lastolite TriGrip Reflector (which is a triangular piece of translucent material with a hand grip). Two thick books rest on opposite corners and I lay a sheet of clear acrylic plastic on top of the books (glass would do here). A flashgun stands on the floor under the table firing up at the translucent reflector. You can adjust the power of the flash (or change aperture on the camera) to get a completely white background, and the subject is simply placed on the glass sheet. A flash reflected off the front door is an easy way to get some reflection free lighting and I can bounce other lights onto the subject as well. The glass sheet being about 3 inches above the white fabric makes sure you don’t see any pattern in the reflector. Easy cheap solution!

Anyway, onto the images. First up were some red wine and red fruit with a red background images. I thought these would set a mood, and would be nice if someone wanted that red warm feeling to the shot. Next up, an isolated (with clipping path) image of a bag of ice with the focus on the ice cubes in the bag. A bit tricky to get the lighting showing the definition in the ice cubes, but I used a bare flash from the side to try to get some shadows to show the shapes of the cubes. Then on to some images of pressing a car remote, then a garlic press, and finally a strawberry shaped like a heart.

Red wine and red fruit

Ice cubes

Car remote

Garlic Press

Heart shaped strawberry

Earnings from sales of photos in April 2012

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 02:14:06 +0000

A great month – April doesn’t normally outsell other months of the year, but this month I romped home with total sales of just over $1450 – a personal best. The month was helped by three sales on Alamy, for a total of $214, three video downloads on Pond5 for $75 and another great month on Shutterstock of $513. iStock recovered from a poor March to end with $271 compared to $235, and the other sites were OK if not at their best. That makes three sites with a best month ever earning total for April – Shutterstock, iStock and Alamy. I’ll post some of the better selling images in the next few days, but here are the normal graphs I publish each month:

Earnings History

Earnings per site

Online files per site

Growth in online files

2012 Earnings per site

As you can see, I have continued to upload files regularly and consistently, and now have 2559 images online on Shutterstock. I will work out the earnings per image per month for Q1 of 2012 now that all the results are in and post that in the coming days.

Time to open the bottle of champagne…

Stock Photo Examples April 28 2012

admin — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:23:08 +0000

This weeks examples of stock photos uploaded to the main microstock sites are a mix of old and new. The new ones first – just a couple of new images for this week – obviously my creative juices must have been low! The first shot is one of a series of teeth shots with metallic fillings, taken with my ring flash adaptor:

Metal fillings

I followed this with a shot (created from multiple images with the flash gun in different places to light the petals differently) in a cut glass vase:

Peonies in cut glass vase

I then spent some time looking at old shots that sell reasonably well, but have cluttered backgrounds. I often see cut out images in magazines and thought I could gain some extra sales by using the pen tool in Photoshop with my wacom tablet to extract the main subject and isolate it against white (or black). When you create a path in Photoshop, and then save the file to a JPEG, the path gets saved as well, and so you can let the buyers know in keywords and the description that the path is present in the file. They can very easily convert the path to a selection and immediately extract the subject. No problems with semi selected white pixels around the edge of the object. I’m told that buyers much prefer a path and will choose an image with a path over a similar one without. Here are some of the images I worked on and uploaded this week. The gasoline pumps have already sold a few times on Shutterstock:

Bird of Paradise

Old Gasoline Pump

Finally, while I was in extraction mode, I decided to replace the face of a gold watch with an image of a gold coin to really get across a wealth story. This also removes any trademark issues from the watch. The face was white and so it was relatively easy to remove that and replace it with the gold coin image:

Gold watch

Another round up of new Stock Photos

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:59:08 +0000

Keeping up with my weekly postings of images submitted to the main microstock agencies! I obviously had the Space Shuttle Discovery imagesposted earlier in the week, but while down in DC, I took this shot of the Iwo Jima memorial with the Washington Monument and Capitol in the background. I was looking to contrast the hard working marines with the people who work in the Capitol….

Iwo Jima overlooks the Capitol

I also took some more images with my ring flash reviewed earlier. This one is of a bagworm which seem to be very popular in the pine/fir trees in my yard. I have never seen one actually being constructed, but they are cleverly made from the needles of the tree itself and I think hold a collection of worms or bugs that later come out as something else!

Bagworm

Here I had the flash overwhelming the daylight a bit to give a strong foreground light with a much darker sky behind. I thought that added drama to what could have been a relatively flat image.
Next up was a bit of mowing. As I was going around the meadow through the buttercups I thought it would be a nice shot to have “senior man on mower” type shot. We are always being told that there is a need for a broader range of people shots on stock libraries and so here is one to add to the collection:

Senior man on mower

I tried to leave a reasonable amount of space at the side of the image for any text in the final presentation.
A neighbor is having some ground leveled for horses and so I took a few images of the heavy earth moving equipment that was digging and flattening the space. These needed a bit of Photoshop work to remove the maker’s name and marks.

Earth Moving

Finally, we have a pair of Killdeer birds that nest in the gravel by the side of the road each year. They are fascinating little birds – they are constantly watching for anyone coming near the nest and then they run, squawk and spread their wings to give them more bulk and size as they distract you from the location of the nest. They have four spotted eggs and the birds hatched this weekend. The chicks are almost ready to go when they hatch – already feathered and able to walk a little. Within a day or two they will be flying (at least I think so!). I set up my camera with the 70-200 plus 1.4x extender and flash on a tripod close to the nest and used the Promote Remote Controlto trigger one shot every 10 seconds for a couple of hours. I then deleted most of them, but ended up with some interesting shots of the mother and chicks and then the chicks on their own as they start to move about. Fascinating.

Killdeer doing defensive dance

Killdeer on nest with chick

A Stock Photographers Camera Bag

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:39:55 +0000

I’m occasionally asked what equipment I use for stock photography, so here is a summary of what I have, what I use, and why.

My main camera is the Canon 5D Mk ii – the full frame 21M DSLR. Why? Because I like the low noise from the large sensor, I can crop well into the image and still get a usable stock photo, and when I am using most of the frame, I can downsize to around 4600 pixels on the long edge to minimize and image problems and still have an image that is in the XXL scale on iStock. Many buyers seem to buy the larger image sizes (perhaps to do their own crops. Although the Mk 3 is now out, I don’t see any benefits for my type of imagery and so I will stick with the Mk 2.

I invested in the L series of Canon lenses, and have the 24-105mm, 70-200mm F4, and 17-40mm F4 – these go everywhere in my camera bag together with the 1.4x extender for the telephoto zoom. I don’t tend to use the wide angle as much as the others, but it is not a redundant lens – it is useful for interiors and sometimes wide angle landscapes. I thought about the 70-200 F2.8, but the weight and size put me off, and it is not that often I want to use the lens wide open. I tend to carry my tripod (a Gitzo GT2541) and so long exposures are not much of an issue. Also in my bag is a Canon 50mm F1.4 – a nice lightweight lens that I sometimes just stick on the camera to look less like a professional photographer! It is interesting to see what images you take when your feet are the zoom ring! I have the Canon 100mm F2.8 macro, which is normally at home – a great macro and portrait lens that I have reviewed before.

Completing my bag is the X-Rite Color Checker Passport. I don’t use it every shoot, but when I am somewhere new or in some unusual light I will take a shot of the color panel. In my pack of smaller items, I have a cheap wireless remote shutter control, a polarizing filter and the Singh-Ray variable neutral density filter – great for waterfall and water shots in general to get a silky smooth effect. That completes my bag, which is a Crumpler Whickey and Cox – great build, not too camera-y and with opening on the side against your back, you can lay it down in wet grass to get your camera and then just put it back on your back.

Back at the home studio, I use Canon flash guns for interior lighting. I bought the 550 EX. A powerful and flexible flash, but now obsolete and replaced by the 580ex. I bought those deliberately as they are about half the price of the 580EX on eBay, and I managed to get three bought for around $200 each. I bought a fourth, but the seller sent a 580 in its place, which was more than acceptable! I use the Canon ST-E2 infra-red controller to trigger them, having experimented with various cheaper optical devices. It always works fine indoors, and if it is visible to the flash gun, it works well outdoors as well. For flash modifiers, I use two white umbrellas (one which has a black outer cover to be used as a reflector as well as a shoot through). The Rogue Flashbender flash bounce cards are a great help as well for closer work – these were a good buy – well made and flexible. Recently I bought the RayFlash ring flash unit that attaches to the Canon 580 EX. I reviewed this one recently as well, and it is great for shadowless lighting close to, and to certain types of portrait shot.

What else – some flash stands, sand bags to weight them down, a white cloth and frame to provide a white background to large isolation shots. I’ve been experimenting with a white translucent reflector (the Lastolite Professional) laying on a glass table and lit by flash from underneath, with a plexiglass sheet about 6 inches above it. I put the product on the glass sheet and I can get the background nicely turned to white without any detail from the surface of the background. I tried to get translucent plexiglass but no luck so far. I do have the Velbon Macro bracket that allows you to smoothly move the camera backwards and forwards, which is great for focus stacking of macro images.

Well, I think that is all. I dread to think how much it all cost, but when the money is rolling in from stock sales, it is just a cost of business!!

Space Shuttle Discovery on Zazzle Products

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:11:01 +0000

In my endless quest to monetize digital photos, I created some new products on Zazzle this morning featuring the Space Shuttle Discovery final flight images. Too early to say how well they will sell, but if you need a coffee mug, hat, poster or simply an iPad case with a Space Shuttle photograph, please check out my Zazzle store.

Space Shuttle Discovery over Washington DC

admin — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:20:03 +0000

I rushed down to Washington DC yesterday morning to join a cast of thousands waiting for the Space Shuttle Discovery, mounted on its Boeing 747, to fly over the city. I got to my chosen spot about 15 minutes before the time the plane was due to arrive, but, thanks to some poor planning on someone’s part, the shuttle arrived 10 minutes early and flew low over our viewing location. Luckily, I had my camera, 70-200mm and 1.4x extender all ready and caught a great shot of the plane from the rear:

First fly past of Space Shuttle

My location by the Netherland Carillon was great for images showing all the monuments in DC in alignment and the shuttle’s first loop brought it reasonably close to the monument. The air was a bit misty though, and the plane was much further away than I think we all expected. However, I still got a nice location shot:

Space Shuttle over Washington

The plane was doing large loops around the city and luckily flew quite close to our spot each time. I was able to catch this side view through the trees over Arlington Cemetery:

Side view of Shuttle

Finally, I decided to create the image we were all expecting! I’m sure that with a really long lens and a bit clearer air, this could have been a real shot, as it did fly in this approximate location, but as you can see from my earlier shot, it was further than my lens could reach. However, here is an image of what we would have like to have taken!

Artist's impression!

OK, now for the stock talk. I quickly created an article on Demotix – the online news gathering site, and that was online a few hours after I took the pictures. I also used Alamy’s “urgent news” upload feature. If you haven’t used this, the upload bypasses their normal QC group and moves immediately into the “Manage your images” section. Here you can add the important keywords, complete the release section and get it ready for sale. So far so good – it was around 4pm by the time I had my three images ready for sale. What happens then confused me somewhat. It appears that images uploaded via news go into a special section of the database for images taken in the previous 48 hours – my images are there. After 48 hours they go into the main database as general RM images.

Also, one thing that I did wrong – if you use something like Lightroom for keywording and describing, the default categories for the image include Title and Description. If you look at the IPTC fields, there is also one called Headline. Alamy expect you to put the same phrase in Headline for all the batch of related images so that they show together on the site. A new lesson learned!

I’ve put the larger images of the space shuttle flyover on my Fine Art site if you want to see the details in close up. You can also purchase prints of the event for display on your wall by clicking buy this print on the site!

Stock photo examples April 15, 2012

admin — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 23:29:11 +0000

My recent trips around the world (Belgium, New York, England) have given me a lot of images to post, but I’ve also been a bit slow at posting examples of my latest stock photos on my blog. I had an objective of posting new images each week and I am probably a couple of weeks behind! This post tries to catch up with the latest images uploaded to the stock agencies.

First off was my trip to Brussels. I had an afternoon to stroll the streets of the old part of Brussels on a pleasant warm sunny day. I generally avoid images with people, but increasingly I am shooting editorial stock where model and property releases are not required, and so I am always on the lookout for those types of image. Shutterstock seems to be more picky and require “newsworthy” captions, but the other sites have a broader idea of what editorial shots are.

Train from the airport

Detail in Grand Place of Brussels

In Brussels, I started with the train journey from the airport to the city. Although it felt like 2am, my camera is always ready for those shots that may prove useful in future! Then, after a snooze, I walked the streets looking for distinctive images of the city and used my 200mm lens to get close ups of the ornate decoration on many of the old buildings. Finally, I found this old lady begging in the streets and took a picture for editorial use. I did give her a Euro….

Old lady begging in Brussels

Belgian Chocolates

On my walk round the streets, I kept an eye open for shop displays – a close up of Belgian chocolates could be useful in my portfolio!

Next up was a trip to Boston, and I took the opportunity to shoot an image of the city over empty interstate roads. It was early afternoon and I just happened to get lucky with the traffic.

Boston Skyline

East Coast Memorial

The following week I was in New York city for a meeting and so I went up the afternoon before to walk the streets in Lower Manhattan. The first image from Battery Park of the East Coast Memorial to servicemen and women lost at sea in the second world war:
I then walked along Wall Street and saw this combination of signs that I thought was a nice illustration of the Occupy Wall Street protests:

Occupy Wall Street

Later that afternoon I walked over Brooklyn bridge (in a strong wind) to set myself up for some sunset shots over Lower Manhattan. Unfortunately I arrived under the bridge about 90 minutes before the sun really set, it was blowing a gale over the water, and the temperature in March was dropping rapidly. By the time I took my images with the lights starting to show in the buildings in Manhattan, I was absolutely freezing and could hardly feel the buttons on the camera. The big lesson – dress for the time of year and take gloves!

Freezing in Brooklyn

Next up was a trip to England, and I took several hundred shots as we moved about the country. The weather was generally OK, although some clouds and rain became the norm later in the trip, but I got some nice images (processed using HDR) to show the contrast between the sunlit barn and the dark storm clouds:

Storm clouds over barn

The weather improved for a series of images of the unusual high tide in Southport:

Telescope by Southport pier

Then it was off to Shropshire to Stokesay Castle – a 1400′s home built with fortifications along the Welsh border. It really was raining here, but I got some good shots from under my umbrella!

In nearby Ludlow, I spotted this rain drenched tomatoes in the market and snapped yet another image:

Rain drenched tomatoes

All told, I have worked on about 120 images that are now processed, keyworded and uploaded to the main sites. Time will tell how many get accepted and then sold, but it is all about building as broad a portfolio as possible!