StockPhotographer.info

OK. You have made the change to digital – you sold off your film SLR, emptied out your supply of old chemicals, you tested your brand new DSLR resulting in a memory card full of NEF files (I am assuming you purchased a Nikon) – and now you need to take the next step. So what is the next step? 

Stock photography provides a number of challenges in each of technical, workflow and business areas. Digital stock photography provides an even greater number of challenges. Without wanting to sound trite, I think challenges represent opportunities. And I am going to take this opportunity (now that is a segue) of working through some of the next steps.

When you move out of the darkroom – or away from the E6/C41 processing lab – to digital imaging, you move into the computer world. At the very least you need basic computer literacy. In the next three or four articles, I will introduce you to an important aspect of digital imaging. Not composition, not lighting, not camera angles, but digital imaging workflow. You can bring your talents and expertise from the film world to the digital world; however, digital imaging workflow is something you will need to learn.

I was starting to think I should hire myself out to drought-stricken regions as some form of alien rainmaker – but – Venice was sunny! What a relief.

 

This was the first time I had visited Venice, so everything was new to me. Noisy vaporettos, full of tourists, threaded their way from stop to stop along the canals and across the lagoon, small workboats carted freight, and black and silver dancing gondolas, almost funereal, added to the atmosphere of this classical city. 

 

  

Why not, I hear you ask? Well, it rained with gale force winds – I think I have a weather curse.

Portugal is an interesting country with a mix of old and modern, with Moorish castles and glamorous golf courses, with storks in chimneys and cork trees missing half their bark – lots of material for travel stock images.

Obviously, if you want to go somewhere to take photographs in bright sunshine with blue skies – don’t follow me – go somewhere else! Paris was wet, too. Paris in the Spring is supposed to be warm and welcoming, and instead it was wet, wet, wet. Gray clouds and scarce blue skies provided the ongoing challenge of how to identify, photograph and produce images that would have that necessary zing for stock. And Paris has been photographed so many times, by so many photographers, that there is a major challenge just to find ways of producing refreshing, saleable stock images.

At times, we all think or say – ‘The weather is just no good for taking photographs, so we might as well leave the camera behind’ - at home/the hotel/the B & B or whatever. Sometimes I fall victim to this self-delusion as well. And it is important to not succumb – there is no such thing as bad weather for photography!
Well, I might have to temper that claim slightly, time will tell. But let me give some examples.

I travel a lot. And I take photographs a lot, too. This last December [2005], I was in California just in time for record rain and floods – something like 12 inches of rain in the month and floods that covered most of the Napa Valley wine country. And my immediate reaction was to jump up and down and curse the elements – not that I expected to do any good, but it may have relieved some feelings of frustration.