This Week’s Portfolio Update

The heat in St. Louis has finally broken.  We were up near 100 degrees last week!   I spent a few days with my son at summer camp, and boy, was that ever tropical.  Even the pool was warm.

In the meantime, two new occupational/everyday series are mostly online at iStockphoto.com .

The first is a revisiting of a topic from a few years ago: The Delivery Person.  Last time, we just did packages, but this time, I added flowers and balloons as well.  To really set the mood, I rented a delivery van and created some signage for the side of it.  I hope it adds some authenticity.

For more of the shipping series, see: http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&userID=351711&text=delivery&order=4

The next series is also a revisit.  “At the Veterinarian”.  However, my earlier set was all isolated.  These are in a more realistic setting, with a variety of housepets: a rabbit, cat and two dogs – golden retriever and a peke-a-poo .

More new stuff appearing in the upcoming days and weeks, so please stop by and check out my portfolio if you have a chance.  As always, feel free to contact me if you have any stock subjects you need covered.

Vetta Collection Unveiled

iStockphoto.com has had a “Premiere” collection in the works for a while.  This morning they announced the Vetta collection of iStockphoto exclusive artists’ content.

It’s not enough to want success. You have to take risks, develop ruthless standards and never, ever settle. Images in the Vetta Collection, Italian for peak, seized their own artistic destiny and created a whole new calibre of art.

Vetta images are hand-picked by a team of high-performance iStockphoto editors for:

Exquisite art direction
Intelligently executed concepts
Rarity

As an FYI to buyers, there is a higher price point, from $20 for a small to $70 for an XXL.  The benefit appears to be saved time, as the collection is tightly edited.

Note, that in the “Advanced Search” options pull down, there is the option for “include Vetta, exclude Vetta, Vetta only”, which allow you to keep this in or out as you wish.  When Vetta images appear in your results, you’ll know, because they have a small gold camera next to them, as opposed to the plain grey one for the regular collection.

You can see the Vetta collection here: http://www.istockphoto.com/vetta.php If you are interested, I have had some images moved to the Vetta collection, which you can see here.

Public and Private Lightboxes

Todays iStockphoto.com topic should be handy to both buyers and contributors.  The “lightbox“.

Definition

First of all, what is a “lightbox”?  In traditional film terms, and where the “digital” term comes from, a lightbox is a box with a light underneath a translucent top.  A photographer would lay negatives or slides on the top to be able to study them while illuminated.  Kind of like an x-ray viewbox you see at the doctor’s office.  They would use a magnifying “loupe” to get down and peer at the tiny images to make their design decisions.  This is why the larger image that pops up when you mouseover a search result at iStockphoto is called a “loupe”.

In todays “digital” world, a lightbox is simply a collection of images, that someone has put together, which is stored in the web site’s database.  A lightbox is normally used in conjunction with a photography (stock or otherwise) web site.  You don’t make a lightbox on your computer at home.

iStockphoto – Creating

Under every piece of regular content on iStockphoto is an icon of a lightbulb with a tiny “+” sign.  When you click on this, it will pop up the lightbox addition dialog.

So, now you can add it to an existing lightbox (collection) from ones you have already created, or you may create a new one.  You may give a new lightbox any name you like, but it should be descriptive, like “Summer Camp Brochure Project” or “Smiling People on White”.  This will come into play later.  Keep in mind just calling it “My Lightbox” isn’t a great choice.

Ok, so now you’ve created a new lightbox.   Go crazy and add all the images you need to the lightbox.  It’s a great way to keep together images you are interested in for a project.  After you have created a lightbox or added to one, it will stay as the default in the drop down, so all you have to do is click and then “add”.

Lightbox Manager

A list of your lightboxes will appear on your Lightbox Manager page.

Most of this is self explanatory, but check out that column titled “Public”.  What is that about?

There are two “types” of lightboxes, “Public” and “Private”.     As you can see at the top of the manager page:

A public lightbox should serve the community and is available in the iStockphoto lightbox search after it contains at least 20 files. A private lightbox is used for personal and project related collections, and is accessible to anyone to whom a link has been sent.

Lightboxes that are notated as Public will be searchable from the Lightbox Main Page.  The description above states it pretty clearly that a Public Lightbox should serve the community.  Collecting all of your own images of the Golden Gate Bridge in a lightbox called “My Golden Gate Bridge Images” and making it public does NOT serve the community.  Serving the community would be a lightbox called “iStock’s Best Golden Gate Bridges”, filled with content from a bunch of different contributors.  That’s not to say, that if you specialize in bridge shots, you can’t have a good number of images in there, but it doesn’t help buyers find what they need by pimping your personal collection in the public lightbox search.

iStock lightly attempts to enforce this with the rule that there must be at least one piece of content from another artist in the box besides the owner before it can be made public.  You will see contributors with 100 images of their own, and 1 from someone random, just so they can make the box publicly searchable.  This is obviously not the intent of the rule, and it always bothers me that contributors ignore that.

Now, if you think you have a lightbox that serves the community of buyers, to make a lightbox public, click on the “edit description” link.  There, once you have a variety of contributors’ content in your lightbox and at least 20 images, you will see the option to make it public.  Once clicked, it will take about 24 hours to become public.

Again, as mentioned above, a Private Lightbox can be seen by anyone who has the link.  You can email it to someone, put it in an image description, on your webpage, whereever.  You don’t need a password or anything to see the contents.  So, if you are a designer collecting images for a project, keep the box private, and email the link to your co-worker.

Also, if you are the owner of the lightbox, you can click on the link under the “Admin” column on the manager page to add other people who are allowed to add to your lightbox.  That’s useful if you have several people with accounts on a project and you want them all to be able to add images to show to your boss.

Lightbox Page

When you search the public lightbox collection from the main lightbox page, you will get two sets of results to browse through.  There is a return where your search matched the description, and one where it matched the keywords.  This keyword search is just a text match.  There is no fancy controlled vocabulary here.  Some people tend to be more “descriptive” then “keywordy”, so it makes sense to browse both returns.  There aren’t really any good ways of sorting the return (creation date, files in collection, etc.), and there’s a bug where the creation date still doesn’t display (still, after 3 years or so), but there are some great lightboxed collections of things that may be hard to find by regular searches.  People holding blank business cards, isolated people, blue skies, etc.

Lightbox Tool

You may want to print out the contents of your lightbox to show to someone at a meeting, or take to your editor.  There is no easy way to do this from iStock, so I have created a utility at my website to make a simple page to print out.  It’s pretty self explanatory.

http://digitalplanetdesign.com/index.php?page=lightbox

Are Lighboxes Good For You

Occasionally, a new contributor will ask something along the lines of “My image was added to a lightbox – is that a good thing?”.  They’ll know this, because in the contributor content page, it will list the number of public and private lightboxes an image is in.

The lower image is in two public lightboxes (the linked, bolder ones) and 2 unnamed private boxes.

To answer the question, why wouldn’t it be good that someone has shown interest in your image, either in a public, searchable box, or a private collection?

In fact, you may actively try to get your images into other people’s public lightboxes to gain exposure.  If you find a public lightbox that your content would be a suitable part of, just sitemail the owner a nice request to look at your work.  Do not say “Dig through my portfolio – you’ll find it”.  Include links to specific images or to a targeted search of just those images, to make it easy for the lightbox owner to consider.  If people mail me a request for one of my few public lightboxes, I will not spend too much energy on them if there are no links.

An owner is not obligated to add your content.  If they ignore you or turn you down, just move on.  No big deal.

Linking Your Images

If you’ve noticed other contributors have neat little images on their profiles or image pages, and you’re trying to figure out how to do that, see #17 here.  Personally, I prefer a linked portfolio search to the lightbox search, but you may not.

Conclusion

Lightboxes are a great tool to organize your collections of images.  They can also be useful to find collections of related imagery in the public lightbox search.

Some iStock Humor

Occasionally, in the forums on iStock, a contributor will post something along the lines of “What should I shoot?”, or “What is the collection missing?”.  Normally, my response is something along the lines of “Keep your best ideas to yourself”.  However, in a recent thread, contributor redmonkey8 came up with this great list (   <- note the wink) of subject niches that need to be filled…

1. More shots of business people doing business things like shaking hands, pointing to graphs and charts, drawing diagrams on glass, standing in lines or groups with one person in focus and the rest out of focus, etc, etc.
2. Flowers. Man, there just aren’t enough flowers on this site. Get out in your gardens and start shooting!
3. Customer service people. You know what we really need? Photos of smiling customer service reps wearing telephone headsets. We don’t have enough of those.
4. Goldfish. How come nobody’s shooting goldfish? Get on it people! Make them jump around, from bowl to bowl, or just sit there in the water. We need more goldfish.
5. Pets. Pets are incredibly unrepresented here on iStock. Let’s get some pet pictures already. I’d start with cats and dogs, and then work my way through the list.
6. Feet. Why aren’t more of you taking pictures of your own feet? Those are sure to be best sellers.
7. Brick walls. If there is one thing we really need around here it’s pictures of brick walls. If I wanted to sell a lot of stuff here on iStock, I’d start by photographing a lot of brick walls.
8. Going on vacation? For god’s sake, photograph everything! There is a serious lack of vacation-style snapshots around here, and we’d all be better off if there were more.
9. More architectural elements. Surely there are some interesting buildings in your home town with intersting corners, windows, cornices, doorways and the like. Get out there and start snapping! We especially need spiral staircases, escalators, elevators, etc etc.
10. Less than attractive people that are labled as “beautiful”. This may be the most glaring omission of all in the iStock collection. Get your camera, take a photo of a less than attractive person doing something, then when you upload it make sure to describe the person as “beautiful”, “sexy”, “gorgeous” etc. Keyword it that way too. Fun for all.
11. Macro shots of microchips and computer components on blue backgrounds, or lit with high-tech looking blue light.
12. Hands in many different positions. Isolated on white would be nice.
13. Sunsets, skies, and clouds. Definitely a shortage of these.
14. Little kids, running though grassy or flower-filled meadows. Ditto for women in the same setting with arms spread wide and satisfied and contented looks on their faces as if they’ve just been set free. If they’re pulling the petals off of flowers, or blowing on dandelions, then that’s a plus.
15. Lone trees on wide open landscapes. Ditto for wooden piers or walkways extending out into placid looking lakes or bodies of water.
16. People making frames with their hands.
17. Teens, in groups, hanging out and laughing as if being a teen is the best thing ever. Make sure they’re as multi-ethnic as possible, and at least one of them is in the background texting.
18. Fire. We need everything from regular campfire/fireplace type of stuff, all the way up to backgrounds filled with flame.

In the interest of disclosure, I do have something in my portfolio that would fit into about half of these.

Portfolio Update

Ok, I know I said I was going to post another portfolio update last week, but I’ve been very busy processing files, taking time out to rant a bit about Good Morning America.  Anyways, let me point out some new collections of royalty free stock imagery I’ve been adding to my portfolio at iStockphoto.com .

I did a session with a school bus and some elementary school students two years ago, but I had trouble with scheduling and got them online a little too close to back to school time.   Planning worked out a little better this year, so I’m happy to present (with enough lead time) this new series with a great, photogenic group of teenagers for “Back to School” session.  Now, you’ve got all summer to work these into your designs!

Up next, the news is always discussing childhood obesity and the need to get out and excercise.  Also, youth sports are always big spring and fall activities.  Available now is this “Girls Soccer Team with Coach” series, for anyone working on article about youth soccer, or even advertisements.  It’s also about self esteem and success.

I’ve got two more series to fill you in on, but I will wait a day (or more )  just to spread it out a bit.  Thanks!

Note to ABC GMA Fans

Making the rounds today through various forums, is this nugget of an editorial piece from ABC’s Good Morning America show:  Make Money in May- Selling Stock Photos .  Apparently, by snapping random things about your office, as detailed in the piece, you can make thousands of dollars to put your kids through school.

Advisory to anyone who has viewed this piece and has stars in their eyes:  it is not as easy as turning your logo’d coffee cup away from your point and shoot camera.

Please note, I am a top contributor to the mentioned site, iStockphoto.com .  So, I know what I am talking about, when I say to take this editorial news piece with a few grains of salt.

You are not going to make $10,000 from an image of your grandparents from yesterday’s BBQ in the next month.  Both of the images detailed in the piece were uploaded in 2006, and since then there are many photographers uploading people shots – the kind of thing that was a bit scarce in the “microstock” world just a few years ago.  What is “microstock”?  See here .  These are both fine images with a variety of uses, however, their popularity (and sales) has (have) built over time.  So, while there is a chance your capture might prove popular, the chances it is going to explode in popularity (sales) is relatively low.

In addition, one successful image does not the mortgage pay.  Top contributors know it takes a wide variety of subject matter to attract buyers to a portfolio, and this happens over time, with lots of hard work, and (these days) expensive equipment.  Sorry, but that’s how it is.  A Canon Powershot is not going to allow you to create images that pay the bills, or buy the coffee.  However, you don’t necessarily have to deal with people (models) – there are plenty of successful conceptual contributors as well.

To be honest, we contributors get a little miffed when articles and reports like this show up.  It engenders visions of easy money in people, who then flood the forums with questions that should be answered by their own research, if they were really serious about getting started.  It takes a lot of hard work and effort, as well as a good amount of time, to build a successful portfolio.  You need to understand composition, lighting, technique, model releases, property releases, and more.   You need to be able to think like a designer.  “What could this image be used for?”  “Is there space for copy?”  “Is this just a snapshot of my foot by a brick wall?”

This is not the path to riches that a :45 second news story would have you believe.  I just want to throw that out to you, so you aren’t surprised when things don’t happen the way you expect after you photograph a rubber band, glasses and coffee cup on your desk.  Feel free to read my back posts in this blog.  Hidden amongst the tips for buyers, are lots of tips for contributors, if you take the time to understand what I’ve written.  We welcome newcomers who have taken the time to do some research, have experimented and are willing to learn and take critique.  Just don’t expect the world by the end of the summer.

Portfolio Update

Some new work from a new model on iStockphoto.com .  I’ve teamed up with a new attractive model in her mid-30’s with a great smile and attitude.  Most of our first session is available now in my portfolio at iStockphoto.com .  The first session includes a reshoot of an earlier theme, packing boxes, and some doctor/nurse related white card images.  I just find the “white card” image so useful.  Maybe it’s just me, but I can just see so many newspaper and web uses for it.  For the uninitiated, the “white card” image is a person peering over or around a “white card” – see below.

Also, I’ve got a new series with a young male dressed in a space suit costume being imaginative and playful.  Good for science articles or things about imagination…

Guess what?  Another portfolio update tomorrow!  Sorry to pimp, but I’ve got some great new stuff online and available .

Twitter Discount Codes for iStockphoto

If you’re on twitter (for whatever reason you may be on twitter), you may want to add iStockhelp to your follow list.  They seem to be throwing out iStockphoto.com discount codes fairly frequently.  For example:

Get 15% off 600 credits or more on iStockphoto: enter TWEET15 on check out. Valid until May 18

And of course, feel free to add me as well.  I promise I’m not annoying and tweet once or twice a day, max.

Swine Flu Trend

I don’t normally post about my stats or the performance of my portfolio on iStockphoto.com, but I thought this was kind of interesting.

When the swine flu news started ramping up, I did a set of images and got them into my portfolio, as I mentioned back here.  One of them started selling immediately.

It sold 11 image licenses the first day it was searchable.  “Great!”, I thought.  I’ve got a rocket here.  Alas, it was not meant to be.  After a few days of hot sales, as the news died down, so did the interest.  And it wasn’t due to the similars from other people that popped up on iStockphoto.  Below, I put the download chart from April 29 through today over the chart for “swine flu” from Google Trends, showing searching interest.  It’s pretty clear that worldwide interest in swine flu has disappeared.  Luckily, I seem to have nailed the peak on April 30th.  Blue is Google Trends, and green is my iStockphoto downloads.

I just found it interesting how closely they match up.  Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Hot Shoe Cover

I don’t know about you, but when I spend $8000 on a camera, you’d think it would come with something to cover the exposed contacts in the flash hot shoe.  I mean, you don’t want to run about getting dust and grime on the contacts, causing problems triggering the flash or remote, right.  For some reason, Canon doesn’t seem to want to include a little piece of plastic for that purpose.

When I was making a B&H Photo order recently, I thought I’d look for something to fill that need.  Lo and behold, Nikon sells a plastic hot shoe protector.  I assume it’s just a spare version of the ones they include with their cameras.  However, they fit into Canon hot shoes just fine.

Anyways, it’s only about $2, and you might just want to add a couple onto your next order to help keep your camera in top shape.  Here’s the B&H link:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/207371-USA/Nikon_4731_BS_1_Hot_Shoe_Cover.html