Rasmus Rasmussen dot com

Even small (brain)storms count

Published January 31st, 2008 in Photography | 1 Comment »

Do you brainstorm before going on a photoshoot? Do you mind-map and plan your sessions? If you’re going to sell your photos, doing these things is a must.

I freely admit it; sometimes I go the easy route. I improvise and wing it, and even like to think that doing so makes me smarter. That it somehow trains my brain, that I am forced to think on my feet. What it does is stimulate my imagination, and when I shoot pictures with no map, it almost becomes a game to me, a fight to be as creative as possible, using what I have. Most of the time, however, it is not necessarily the best way to get good photos. So after having learned this lesson (many times over), I now tend to do at least some preparation before attempting any kind of photography.

At the very least, I have the results of a simple brainstorm in the back of my mind. A simple creative exercise, where you make a list of free flowing ideas on a piece of paper, during which you will doubtlessly make new associations, form more ideas and discover new possibilities. Technically, you could probably do it on a computer, but I recommend using the old school method. The fact that it takes a little longer to write in hand, gives you an extra pause to let the thoughtprocess work its magic.

You may say this is beyond basic, and wonder why I am even wasting your time with this. If so, good for you and I do apologize. All I mean for, is to encourage all kinds of mental exercises to improve your work. From mind-maps to coaching. And I do so, because of what I see every day. In my work as an image inspector, I look at probably a thousand photographs every week, and especially among people who are just starting new microstock portfolios, there is a tendency to upload snapshots; photos that were shot without any pre-existing plan. A spur of the moment shot of a bee on a flower, a photo of that dinner that looked particularly delicious, the sunset, a tree-top, a dog or a toddler. I will see at least see ten or so of these on any given day, when I inspect photos for iStockphoto.

There is nothing wrong with good snapshots. If the result is as beautiful or cool, as you imagined it would be in the moment, when you clicked the button, that’s fantastic. But if you want to create a selling microstock portfolio, you have to go beyond this point. That’s why I suggest brainstorming and mind-mapping from day one, because only when you start to nurture your ideas, can you begin to establish your own style and brand. And when you have that, then you’ll begin to attract more attention from designers, looking for that particular style of photography.

Building a Microstock Portfolio

Published September 23rd, 2007 in Photography | 11 Comments »

Getting started as a microstock photographer can be an intimidating task. In this introduction to portfolio building, I will attempt to touch on all the most important basics and give you a good start. Some of the aspects of this topic have already been covered in previous posts and others will be in the posts to come. So, think of the following, as sort of a checklist or recap to help you get started.

One thing you must do, no matter if you’re beginner or a seasoned stock photogrpaher, is to keep those pictures coming. Stagnated portfolios will experience dropping sales, which can eat away your motivation and even kill your microstock career completely. Aim for uploading new images every single week, even if it’s just a couple. Here is why: Search results are often sorted by age, listing the latest images first. If all your images are old, they will get buried. If you’ve got just one image on the first page, there’s a chance that a designer will click on that and from there to the rest of your portfolio. A continuous stream of fresh imagery will get you noticed and generate more sales for your entire collection.

Measuring the success of a microstock portfolio can be hard to do. In the end, it depends on your own expectations, but a good, achievable goal to aim for is one monthly download per photo in your portfolio. It probably won’t spread out evenly across your all your active photos, but you will have big sellers that will make up for the non-movers and even things out in the end. There are quite a few photographers who sell much more than 1-to-1, but don’t expect to achieve this ratio right off the bat. In all likelihood, your sales won’t truly stabilize until you find a niche. Once you’ve successfully held up this ratio for a few months months straight, you can start setting your goals higher.

Finding Your Niche

There is no doubt about it: Specialized photographers sell more images. When designers get to know your work and your niche, chances are they will come to you first, when looking for a photo in your particular genre, and when that happens, you’ve successfully established yourself as a stock photographer, beating out the competition by building a brand name of your own. But don’t try to figure out which genre will sell better. There really is a market for all sorts of images, as long as they are well executed. Instead, shoot what you love shooting and turn your passion into what you’re known for. Not only will it make you a happier photographer, but the passion will come across in your work as well.

But let’s take a step back for a second and ask, how you find out what you love to shoot. Most photographers only have a vague idea of this at first and need to dabble a bit, before finding their niche. When you’re first starting out, dabbling is exactly what I recommend: Actively seeking out variation and experimenting with different genres and styles. Do different series from senior portraits to landscapes, macros to architecture, animals to abstracts. Soon you will discover that ideas come more easily to you with some subjects than others, and don’t be surprised, if you discover that you really love something, you’d never even tried shooting before.

Personally, I love shooting portraits and working with models, because each session is a new challenge, and I enjoy the interaction and how my direction is interpreted by the person, I am working with. Others enjoy the total control and perfection they can get from still life photography. It’s all about what suits your personality.

Whether you like one or the other, I would definitely recommend working with models at an early stage. If you need practice to build up the courage to ask strangers to model (not to mention signing a model release), start by shooting your friends and family. They may not look like the models in your favorite magazine, but the truth is that most stock models don’t and that there is a huge market for normal looking people out there.

Why work with models? Because it is one of the major hurdles new photographers have to get over. Many new shooters have apprehensions when it comes to shooting people, and simply by crossing that threshold, you have taken another step in finding confidence. And having confidence in your work will help you grow.

Crunching Numbers

Never be picky when you’re shooting. Try everything that pops into your head and shoot it in as many ways, you can think of. Sometimes, you will end up with a lucky shot or get that whole learning-by-doing experience. Being picky about what you upload however, is extremely important when building a portfolio. If your series have a lot of images that look very similar, you might actually hurt your portfolio. By all means, you should provide a varied selection, so designers have something to choose from, but be careful you don’t overdo it. You don’t want to confuse the designer by making it hard for them to pick (which will likely lead to them going elsewhere).

So, to get you started, try the following rule: Don’t upload more than one in ten images from the same shoot. Even if you changed things up a lot, switched outfits, locations and props. One in ten is your limit. Later on, you’ll most likely get even pickier, but since you’re still learning, allowing yourself a little leeway is a good thing.

Expect that half of everything you upload will get rejected at first. Half is pretty common for new photographers, who are still learning what makes good stock and lives up to the technical standards.

In other words: You shoot 200 pictures in a short session, upload 20 and have 10 accepted. It may not sound like much, but you can easily shoot 200 shots in an hour, and if just one of your shots is a hit, it could end up earning you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Remember that these numbers are based on an average beginner’s uploads and approval rate. As you improve and the quality of your work gets higher, so will the number of accepted files and the sales per image.

Process Your Images

Too many new photographers do not process their images beyond transferring them from their memory card to their computers, but no post processing means a duller image, because all cameras have a tendency to lack contrast and color intensity, both of which would help make your images pop out on search result pages. It will look more like just another snapshot and less like a professional photograph, if you don’t do any post processing, and even if it should pass image inspection, it will very likely go unnoticed and drown among the thousands of other (and better) images available. So write this on a piece of paper and tack it to your wall: Never upload unprocessed photos as stock.

Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) is the way to go, and yes, if you’ve never worked with these tools before, they can be confusing or even downright scary. Don’t let that hold you back. Instead, take comfort in the fact, that you really only need to do a bare minimum of processing. Adjusting contrast and colors is all you really need, though taking it a step further and touching up things like skin certainly won’t hurt your sales.

Later on, I will cover the basics in greater detail, but I strongly recommend going beyond what I offer here. Post processing requires practice like any other skill, and the best thing you can do is to take classes or get some tutoring. When I finally got around to taking actual classes, I had been using Photoshop for years, yet I still learned something new every single time. If you have no access to a personal mentor, get yourself a book or two, subscribe to relevant podcasts and check out a few magazines. But most importantly: Practice and play around.

One tip I can give you right now is to process similar images at the same time. If you shot a still life and have a bunch of pictures with basically the same lighting and setup, processing them simultaneously will give them a more unified look and feel, and equally important, it will speed up the overall process and help you get your images ready for upload faster.

Get Organized

If you don’t already have a system in place, getting your archives organized is a very good idea. It seems there are as many ways of doing this, as there are photographers, but the basic things you will want your archive to do is: Help you keep track of what you’ve got and when you got it, what you’ve already processed and uploaded, and what has yet to be worked on. As your shoots get larger, you might not finish processing everything before you have a new session going, and you will end up with unprocessed material from the previous shoot. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be itching to get some of this new stuff up. The only downside to that is, that without proper archiving, you might lose track of those older shots, you were going to upload or confuse them with images that have already been uploaded.

I have a folder for every year and within that, a folder for every photosession. I name these folders with a shoot number and a keyword or two, to help me remember what’s inside the folder, without having to open it to take a look. I keep all my RAW files inside these folders.

When I finish a new session, I immediately do a rough sort using Adobe Bridge (you could use things like Adobe Lightroom, Aperture or any other image organizer). At this point, I pick images from the thumbnail alone, looking only at composition and lighting. Bridge allows me to color label my images, so I apply a yellow label to all the potential images I see, and then set it to show me only those images. If there are too many that look the same, I will sort through those, removing the yellow label from the less interesting or otherwise inferior ones.

Once I have a nice, varied selection of yellow-label photos, I check them all out at 100% and discard any that don’t have good enough focus or suffer from other technical problems. At this point, all I am left with is the cream of the crop, based on composition, lighting, variation and detail quality. Now, I can start processing.

As I finish and upload images, I change the color label to green for images that were accepted and red for ones that didn’t make it. If I need to save an image half-way through processing, I will label it blue, to show that it’s a work in progress.

I keep the finished jpg-files in a seperate archive, also organized by year, but with no sub-folders beyond that. Only photos that actually made it into my stock portfolio live here, rejected images are put in a seperate Folder of Shame. Even if images are later deactivated from my portfolio, I keep them in my jpg-archives as a testament to how my skills have improved, since I originally uploaded the image.

Occasionally culling your online portfolio is, as I have mentioned before, a good idea. There will come a time, when your early work suddenly seems embarrassingly bad, compared to your current skill level, or you’ll have older images that never got any sales. Getting rid of these will give your portfolio an overall facelift, making it more streamlined and appealing to those who browse it. But by all means, keep a copy of everything for yourself.

This post is part 11 in a series about my experiences with stock photography, tips and pointers, meant to offer a little inspiration to those interested in such things. Next up: Five photo sessions to get you started. For a complete and chronological list of articles, check out the Microstock Photographer’s Guide.

What is Good Stock Photography?

Published August 3rd, 2007 in Photography | 4 Comments »

A good stock image is one that many designers will buy to use in their projects. It has versatility and longevity, and it features a subject that supports many different messages. That’s the simplest way to put it, but making photos that fall into this category is not simple at all.

First of all, it is important to distinguish between a good photography and a good stock image. You’ve captured a pretty sunset that will always remind you of that trip to Hawaii, or a shot of your baby daughter eating her very first slice of melon, and those pictures have a personal significance for you and your family. That’s great, but it’s not necessarily good stock.

One could argue that all commercial photography is about storytelling, but with stock there is another factor that plays in as well: usefulness. You will want images that are useful for illustrating many different stories, rather than just one. As a rule of thumb, snapshots are not very useful for this, though they may help jog your own memory down the line. There will be the occasional exception of course, but I see a lot of new stock photographers, who start out by uploading snapshots they’ve taken without having had buyers in mind when they clicked the button.

So, how do you avoid falling into this trap? Instead of uploading whatever is on your memory card, take the time to set up actual stock-shooting photosessions, like the excercise mentioned in the post about props. Focus on trying to come up with useful imagery that can support a designer’s message.

In order to do this, you will need to train your mind to think in terms of looking for stories. The best thing you can do, is to take a look at a photo and ask yourself what stories this picture could tell. If it’s one of your own shots, you may want to show it to someone else and ask them that same question. If you know any designers personally, sit down with them and go through some of your images together. You might find that your images are already more useful than you thought. Different people see different things in the same images.

Analyzing your work in this way, also helps when keywording your photos, which in turn will help more designers find the image thus generating more sales for you. Be careful though, that you don’t try to squeeze meaning into an image that isn’t really there. When you think you see a story in your photo, but you still have to explain it to others, chances are you’re overanalyzing. You don’t have to find every little hint of a message in your shots for them to be good or to sell well. It is better to focus on a single theme and build on that, than to try and cover everything, every time you shoot.

You as an Art Director

Commercial photographers often work with art directors, who basically lay down the requirements of the shoot. The art director is in charge of the planning and overall feel of the final result, leaving the photographer free to focus on the actual execution. When it comes to shooting stock, you are doing both of these jobs. You cannot become a succesful stock photographer, if you ignore the planning and preparation and just want to do the shooting. Simple as that.

First step is to seek out inspiration. Sit down with your favorite magazines and look at the ads there, looking for themes and stories in the photos you see. Buy some books with examples of commercial photography and study those. Oftentimes they will come with notes about the images and the shoots during which they were taken. Once you feel inspired, it’s time to come up with a theme of your own.

I find it helpful to sit down with a notebook and do a little brainstorming. Even if the shoot I am going to do is a small one that doesn’t require a lot of physical preparation, having a mental image of the result I want is a tremendous help. You can make your stock images more useful by keeping the themes a little on the general side, so I try not to be too specific at this point. At the top of my page, I will put down the theme I want to brainstorm. Let us say: Eveningtime at home

What are the first images that come to mind? A happy couple snuggling on the couch, watching a movie togehter? A family dinner? Perhaps a father and son playing a board game? There are too many possibilities for just one shoot. Time to narrow it down a bit.

Looking for something that would be fairly simple to set up, I decide that I am going to go with just one model – a young woman. So, what would a single, young woman be doing at home in the evening? She could be reading a book, calling a friend on the phone or enjoying a glass of red wine while chatting with some guy online. Maybe she has a cat or enjoys knitting. I think about the stereotypes and what other things that share this theme (time to watch Bridget Jones and take notes). All of the shots mentioned here are easy enough to do and can all be fit into a single session. Add to that a couple of headshots of her smiling at the camera, looking out the window or lighting a candle and you’ll have at least 10-15 good, different and useful photos for your portfolio.

I actually haven’t done this particular shoot, but just used it as an example. So feel free to kick your iStock portfolio off with it, and you can buy me a beer some day, if the shots take off and make you rich.

Examples from my Own Work

Three themes I have shot in the past are ”Relationship Trouble”, ”The Detective” and ”Cozy Winter”. The first of those involved two of my friends, who agreed to act the part of the troubled partners. The shoot was very small and impromptu and took only about half an hour to do. We did not add any costumes or special props but did everything based on the emotional theme. I tried to compose the shots in a way, so that the angles and depth would help the models along.

I have already mentioned the Detective shoot, and this was very much a theme that all came down to the props and location. It was the props that helped the model get into character and bleak parkinglots, dirty alleys and crowded streets added the ambience. We moved around from place to place and spent most of the day shooting.

Finally, for the Cozy Winter theme, I shot my better half against a plain white background, dressing her up in pink and white winter clothing already in her wardrobe and making her look all cozy and happy. Goofing around helped lighten the mood and brought out the genuine smiles I wanted.

Big or small sessions alike, the fact that there is at least some amount of planning makes all the difference. You certainly don’t have to script everything out in advance, although I know some photographers who do and have long lists of specific poses and lighting setups down before ever picking up the camera, but at the very least, you need to have some general idea of what you want. From there, it’s easy enough to do variations over the chosen theme whether through the use of props, locations, alternative angles (try standing on a chair and shoot from above) or whatever else you can think of.

If you look at my three themes presented here, you will see that each one has images that fall a little outside the original idea. The whole point of this post is to make you think about what you’re shooting and encourage you to plan ahead. If you happen to shoot something that works during a session, though it may not fall into your original plan, go ahead an upload it anyway. The fact that you were in a stock frame of mind, will most likely take your picture out of the snapshot category anyway. When it all comes down to it, only your own imagination sets the limit.

This post is part 6 in a series about my experiences with stock photography, tips and pointers, meant to offer a little inspiration to those interested in such things. The next episode will be a talk about the two main types of stock imagery. For a complete and chronological list of articles, check out the Microstock Photographer’s Guide.