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 3 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 $12,000 a year and I share the steps, the trials and tribulations in my new eBook – Getting Started in Stock. If you want to read more of my writing style and get a feel for the information in the book, here is an earlier post on how to how to make money from your photographs. Just keep in mind that the book contains a lot more information (and it is obviously much more up to date.)

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!

Weekly examples of microstock images February 20th

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:51:44 +0000

Keeping up with the New Year’s Resolution by posting yet another set of images taken in the past week. I’ve focused on macro and still life type images this week:
The first one is a simple image of nail trimmers or cutters and the finger nails themselves on the edge of a sink. I had kept the nail clippings for a while until I had time to take the image!

Finger nails

Shot 2 is one of a series of macro shots of a small syringe filled with blood (actually red wine), and this one is matched with a close up of a finger with a real drop of blood on the tip. Those needles are sharp!

Painful blood injection

Image number 3 is one where I am a bit late for this years Valentine’s Day, but maybe in a good position for next February. This is heavily manipulated in Photoshop to change the keypad around and put some layer styles on the keys to highlight them:

Valentine Day Love keypad

Then I moved on to a couple of macro images of some linen handkerchiefs I found in a drawer – one of the three colorful folded napkins and then a second one in the top pocket of a blue blazer for a nice color contrast:

Three colorful handkerchiefs

Red handkerchief in blazer pocket

Isolating a subject against white background

admin — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:38:07 +0000

This short article covers a photographic isolation – setting your subject against a pure white background to make it easy to change the background or add the subject to a different composition. It is similar to blue (or green) screening but is sometimes easier to achieve without any specially colored backgrounds or cloths. A typical picture isolated against white would look like this:

Isolated cat against white

And after a little bit of Photoshop work, the background can be removed and replaced by a more pleasing design:

White background replaced

Perhaps a bit of a strange choice of an example, but it shows that with a bit of work, the light background can be replaced by something with very different tones!

So, how is it done? Generally speaking, you need at least two flash guns, preferably three, and some means of triggering them off the camera. I’ve bought my Canon 550 flashguns off eBay – they are not the latest model (that is the 580), but they are powerful, controllable, and much less expensive than the current version. As a Canon person, I use the ST-E2 flash controller – an infra-red device that sits in the hot shoe and can automatically control the flash exposure of two separate groups of flash guns.

All you then need is a plain wall, white cloth, or board. The wall doesn’t actually need to be white as you are going to light it with sufficient power that it appears to be over-exposed to the camera, but the closer to white it is, the less power you will need. The schematic:

Isolation against white

If you can dedicate two flash guns to the background to get a flatter wider area of light, place them behind and to either side of the subject. Make sure that the flash tube is not visible to the camera – they should be facing inwards towards the center of the backdrop, but no light should be falling on your subject. You may have to use a card to block any extraneous light if necessary. Your subject is then placed in front of this arrangement with the main flash (in an umbrella perhaps) and a reflector to fill in the shadows.

Although the Canon flash guns can be automatically controlled by the camera to give the correct light, I’ve found it easier to use them on manual. I normally set the camera to about f11 (shutterspeed around 1/125 although that doesn’t really matter). I then have my rear flashguns set to ¼ or ½ power and I take a few shots to see if the background is really being blown out (lots of blinkies in the LCD will show the area that is being over-exposed. Once the right combination of aperture and flash power is achieved, I bring the subject in, and adjust the main flash power to properly light the person (or cat). The advantage of using less than full power on portable flashes is that they recycle very quickly which helps if your subject is not very controllable!

For head and shoulders shots, you can easily get away with one flash gun behind the body of the subject – you will get a circular area of white behind their head, but remember that you don’t have to make the whole background white – as long as the area around the head and shoulders is blown out, that is all that is required.

When the pictures have been completed, move along to Photoshop and start to extract the subject from the background. You can use a “Levels” layer to brighten the background if it is not pure white, as you can easily remove that later once you have extracted the subject. The latest version of Photoshop has greatly improved the extraction process as you can roughly select the subject with the “Quick Selection” tool and then refine the edge to get all the hair selected properly. I normally create a mask from this selection so that I can paint on the mask if necessary to get a better edge. A composite is easier if the background is close in shade to the original background – ie replacing a white background with an image of a dark book lined study does call for a lot more time in getting a perfect mask, but as the example above shows, a reasonable mask can be produced without a lot of effort.

Ideas for Stock Photos – 15 Feb 2012

admin — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:10:48 +0000

I have around 200 images from my Kauai trip that are now online (although a lot of them without the critical keyword “Kauai” as a result of the Lightroom keyword export bug explored in this post!), and so rather than keep posting ones from that trip, here are some new images taken this week.

The first is an image of our poor bengal cat, who had an operation to remove a cyst last week. As a result, she had to wear a collar and looks positively unhappy in this image:

Unhappy kitty

Then I thought I would do a bit of macro work and produced a couple of images of vitamin pills pouring out of a prescription bottle with its warnings. Not sure how saleable this is, but I enjoyed the process of taking it:

Vitamins and RX bottle

The weather was nice this week here in Virginia, and so a trip to Washington DC resulted in a few images suitable for stock. This first of the cannons behind the White House with the Washington Monument behind is a bit of an unusual take on a traditional image:

Guns at the White House

And, finally, the new Martin Luther King Monument has been in the news because of a poor choice of editing in one of the quotations carved into the base. It has been decided that the full quotation will somehow be carved into the granite – which will be interesting to see! This one is editorial, because it is not clear what the copyright status of the statue actually is.

MLK monument

Lightroom Keywords not exporting to JPEG

admin — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:51:53 +0000

Alamy is one of the sites I upload to, and I’ve been bemused for a time when I’m adding some main keywords that major keywords seem to be missing. My recent trip to Kauai brought this home as the keyword “kauai” was missing on the uploaded files. At first I thought I had forgotten to add it, but it was there in Lightroom, as “Kauai”. At first, I thought this was the reason, but no, there is a deeper reason. This post has developed into two distinct activities as my understanding deepened. The first is how you change a keyword, say from capitalized to lower case, and the second is how you identify a deeper issue if your keywords are not showing up in the exported files. The bottom line for me (and I hope not for you) is that most of my online stock files have some missing keywords – all my Kauai shots and, even worse, I noticed that the keyword “washington” was similarly missing, and I have a lot of pictures of Washington DC! So, how to fix the problem? I haven’t come up with a way to add a new keyword to all my online files on all the stock agencies so I’ll have to check a few of them manually, but I wanted a way to stop the problem from occurring in the first place. Here is the low down on Lightroom’s treatment of keywords:

The first thing to know is that Lightroom can only hold one copy of a keyword in its database however it is capitalized. So if you have entered Kauai in the past, then all different capitalizations of that word revert to the one stored. So if I type the word in lower case, it makes no difference – it gets added to the database and file in the way it was originally entered, as “Kauai”

So, you need a way to rename all your capitalized keywords to remove the capital letter and stop the problem from re-occuring. Open Lightroom and in the Keyword List type in the word you are trying to retype – in this case Moon.

Step 1 - old capitalized keyword

Right-click on the incorrect keyword in the list and choose “Edit Keyword Tag” in the list of options. This opens up a new window and you can change the word “Moon” to “Moontag”. This new word needs to be unique and not one that exists in the database. Click Edit. All files with “Moon” as a keyword are now renamed in the database with “Moontag”.

Rename incorrect keyword

Now right click this new keyword tag and repeat the process, but this time renaming the file to “Moon”. To add my latest understanding of the problem, this page is also where you check each of the boxes in the pop-up screen to enable export of that particular keyword. This is an example of a keyword that is going to be exported to your JPEG – if these check boxes are blank, you need to check them to make sure the appropriate keywords are exported.

Rename to the correct keyword

When you have finished, all files with the old keyword will now have the new one – in the database.

Keyword is renamed

Now, on to the deeper issue. I found that many of the early keywords I added (probably in Lightroom 1.0) were not set to export in the screens that we looked at above. But I had no way of finding which keywords were set like that. My manual experiments convinced me that it was my earliest keywords that were at fault, which makes the problem even worse, because those early keywords are likely to be the common ones – in my case like flower, plant, tree, cloud, virginia – you get the picture!! After more research, I found that there was a bug in the updating process from Lightroom 1 to Lightroom 2 that caused all keywords to be set to “Do not export.” Adobe issued a script to fix the issue at the time (which I obviously missed), but now that we are at LR3, I don’t think I trust the script to work.

I found two ways to find the keywords in LR that have this setting – the first is the easiest one, the second has a lot more capabilities and could be used to automatically change the settings in the database if you are good with SQL!

The first approach is to export all your keywords from LR into a text file. Go to Metadata>Export Keywords and create a text file of your keywords on the Desktop. Open this in Notepad. As you scan down through the list of keywords, you will see ones that are in square brackets:

binoculars
biological
biometrics
birch
[Bird]
birdfeed
birdfeeder
bird-feeder

This keyword [Bird] is one that is set to “Do Not Export.” If you have Lightroom open at the same time, you can search for this keyword in the Keyword List and manually check the boxes to make it export as explained above. Continue to the end of the text file, and you will have found them all. I found about 100 keywords in this state, which was not too bad to do manually.

The second method is more interesting, and has the capability to write a script to automatically update the fields – although there is a chance that you may screw up the system if you change something that is linked elsewhere in the database! Lightroom uses an SQLite database, and so I needed a SQLite Reader. I found an easy to use open source SQLite editor at Softpedia Download this from one of the Mirror file locations shown (I’m reasonably sure this is a reliable site, but proceed at your own risk!). The download is a zip file so unzip the program to your desktop. It runs directly when opened, so there is no need to install.

Then locate your Lightroom database. This is in the location specified in Edit:Catalog Settings:General and has the extension .lrcat. Next, make a copy of this by copying to your desktop. We are going to look at this copy. You need to close Lightroom to copy it, and when you have, open Lightroom again.

Double-click on SQLite Database Browser icon and it will open

Initial screen

In File Open, look for the Lightroom database on the desktop. Open it, and you will see a screen like this:

Opened Lightroom database

Click on the second tab to browse the contents of the database. You need to select the table we are interested in. In the top row, click in the “Table” box in the top left of the tab and select “AgLibraryKeyword.” This is the table that contains keyword attributes. The screen will now look like this:

Table AgLibraryKeyword

The column we are interested in is the one called “Include on Export” and any keywords where this is “0″ will NOT be exported. In my case, these were all at the start of the table, which coincides with my assumption that these were early keywords, but you can also search for them by clicking the magnifying glass in the top left to open the search box. Select the field called “IncludeOnExport” and set Value to 0 – this will show you all the rows where this field is set to zero. I had 98 keywords set not to export.

Search function for 0

One last quirk – if you have JPEGs in your database, the keywords in the file have not been changed, so you need to find those images, select them all, and do a “Save Metadata to File” to update the information in the JPEG itself. I didn’t bother to do this and all my files are already on the various websites and so there is no need to change the files on my computer – I simply wanted a way to stop this problem from occurring again.

So the learning lesson – this “keywords not exporting” problem impacts people who started with Lightroom 1.0 and upgraded through the various releases. The initial keywords were set to “Not Export” during the upgrade path between LR1 and LR2. The unfortunate result for me are a lot of online stock photos that don’t have the most obvious keywords included…

Stock Photo Examples 7 February 2012

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:47:57 +0000

Much of the past week has been occupied with processing my images from Hawaii. All told, I have around 1500, but 250 of those were the timelapse movie images that I discussed a few days ago. Amazing how long it takes to review and then process all those images as I always work in Raw and so some amount of exposure/clarity is required on all the images. At the end of the day, I ended up with about 220 keepers, of which 180 have been keyworded and uploaded to the main stock sites. I ran into an issue with Lightburner as I saw a post that it was not performing properly, however, it did start working this last weekend and so finally my images are on the sites and ready for acceptance. Canstock accepted about 165 of the 180 – it will be interesting to see what Shutterstock makes of them!

Maha'ulepu Beach

Footsteps in rippled sand

Sunrise Panorama at Hanalei

Timelapse movie of Hanelei Valley in Kauai

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:25:06 +0000

As mentioned in a previous post, I’m still working through my 1400 images from a recent trip to Oahu and Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. One of my experiments this time was a timelapse movie that I will upload to a few stock video sites. The steps are not that complex if you haven’t done this before:

Set your camera up on a tripod and carefully frame and level the shot
Set the quality to Jpeg and, if you can, set a smaller frame size to keep the images to a reasonable size. There is no need to have an image much bigger than HD video size (1920 x 1080) unless you plan to crop the image before creating your movie
If your camera lets you set shots to be taken at a specific time interval, do that – for my Canon, I had to use the Promote Remote control that has a flexible intervalometer.
Calculate the interval between shots. If you are planning an HD movie at 24 frames per second, then first decide on the length of your finished movie (mine was 10 seconds). For that length, I needed 240 shots. Then decide how long you want to film – 90 minutes for my sunrise, which is 5400 seconds, divide this by the number of shots (240) to get your interval (22 seconds). In the end, I set it for 15 seconds, which gave me a little less time at the location.
Set your exposure. In the case of the sunrise, it is quite dark at the start and it is going to get brighter, so I set up Aperture Priority. This will modify the shutterspeed as the light changes. The first shots were several seconds each, but it doesn’t matter as they will only be individual frames in the movie. Set your white balance to a fixed setting (daylight in my case) to avoid the camera making everything neutral.
Sit back and watch the show!
Back at your computer, I took the final shot and cropped it a bit using a ratio of 1.92:1.08 to get a better frame. I also lightened the shadows a bit. Then I copied the settings across all the other images in Lightroom. Then I exported all the images to JPEGs in a new folder with the maximum length set to 1920 pixels. I renamed them all with the title and a file number which puts them all in order. This creates a new folder full of images that are all cropped and corrected and have dimensions of 1920 x 1080.
Buy Quicktime Pro. This costs $30, but is a really easy system to use.
Open Quicktime, choose File: Open Image Sequence and search for your first frame of the sequence. Set Frame rate to 24. When you click Open, the program creates a movie based on all your images. Just Play to see the new movie.
Finally, to create the movie file, choose File: Export and select “Movie to Quicktime Movie” and select (in settings) the codec you normally use for stock video. I normally use Photo-JPEG, but that is probably a whole other discusssion. Click OK. This creates a HD .mov movie file that is suitable for uploading to the stock video sites.

I created a smaller version for web streaming (which Quicktime Pro allows you to do as well) so you can see the finished product:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Earnings from stock photography January 2012

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:55:20 +0000

A new year starts in a pretty reasonable fashion with total earnings of around $1150. It isn’t just good enough to keep me on track for my 2012 target of $18000, but there are still plenty of months and plenty of images to upload between now and the end of the year! I added around 100 images this month to most of the stock agencies, although I am still going through the hundreds of photos taken on my recent trip to Kauai. The best agencies this month were Shutterstock (although not as good as recent months), with iStock giving a strong performance to come in with at least $260 (the real number won’t be known until mid February as the partner sites report earnings. December’s partners earnings were much better than normal, with over $75 in earnings from that source. Alamy had a couple of sales, which is always good to see, and also Zoonar came back with a couple of images that gave me $31. Otherwise, it was pretty much business as usual. One site that really dropped this month was CanStock – I hope this is not a sign of continuing issues there. Here are the normal graphs:

Earnings per site Jan 2012

Earnings Growth

Files online January 2012

Stock photo examples – January 28, 2012

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:17:18 +0000

Well, my new year resolution to post every week got forgotten last week! But I did have an excuse – I had to go to a conference in Hawaii and tacked a week’s working vacation (taking photographs) in Kauai onto the trip. Over 1400 images later, I am struggling to go through and edit the ones that I think have potential as stock images. I also had my first attempt at a time lapse movie during the week, taking a sunrise over the Hanalei Valley in Kauai with one shot every 15 seconds. I’ll post a link to it once it is finished (and post an article about how to make a time lapse movie.)

Images for this week’s post are pretty easy – I got up before dawn each morning to try to get some good sunrise shots, and kept my eyes open for images that illustrated the beach without showing people or identifiable articles. Some of the shots I decided to upload as editorial – it is just too hard to remove identifiable marks from buildings and get rid of people in a panorama of Waikiki, and so if a buyer wants to use in a commercial way, they can take the risk of any problems.

Hawaii Panorama

Hawaii beach surf boards

hawaii canoe at dawn

Sunrise in Kauai

Ideas for Stock Photos – Jan 15 2012

admin — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:59:53 +0000

I’m keeping up with my resolution to take and post new images every week!

Good shot

This first one was a real joy to produce. I saw a video on PhotographyTalk forum which showed how to get a shot of wine flowing from a bottle. His example was one where the wine appeared to shoot straight up out of the bottle, but I thought I would try something a bit harder – make the wine go into a glass! The idea is that you string the bottle of wine up on a frame in front of a white background. You light the background with flash guns so that it is completely washed out and that provides illumination for the wine. Place a large plastic box under the bottle and stand the wine glass on a frame on the top of the box. I then carefully focused on the bottle and glass and set up my remote control. The next step is tricky – remove the stopper and put your thumb in place. Let the bottle hang vertically upside down. Hold the remote control and then remove your thumb. The wine pours out and hopefully goes into the glass while you set off as many shots as you can before the bottle empties. You can then pour the wine back in the bottle and start again! I then took three images that I was happy with – one of the wine in the glass with a flow going straight down. One with a good flow of wine, and a third of the bottle with some nice patterns in the neck. I blended in Photoshop and used Puppet warp to bend the flow a bit to get the final result. This has sold a few times already.

New use for chocolates

The next two are more routine shots – the first being a new use for a chocolate box. I saw something like this in Good Housekeeping and thought it would be a good shot to have online. I wish I had washed out the inner tray – in the original you can still see the specks of chocolate! Image three for this week is a macro shot of the inside of a flash drive. I happened to see it when I was setting up one of the earlier shots and decided to give it the macro treatment.

USB Flash Drive