Tips to succeed
Here we come to the tips and techniques part of the article. Now bear in mind I’ve only been submitting to stock agencies for about 6 months and even that time could be best described as ‘part time’. So I’m no expert, in fact I could well be talking through my ass. Nevertheless I have put some time into it and discovered a few things that just may make your life a little easier if you are planning on going down this path:
#1 Keyword, title and describe your shots in PS
Please don’t tell me you are thinking of going exclusive with Istock - I almost did and I dodged the biggest bullet of my life next to my bride-to-be leaving me for another guy at 19! Non-exclusive is where it is at. If you need convincing then just head back to part one (can’t be arsed linking it) and look at the breakdown table. Even if you worked your way to the highest exclusive rate at Istock you’d still earn more money JUST submitting to Shutterstock - and it’s a damn sight easier. Anyways, assuming you are submitting to multiple agencies, you don’t want to type all those descriptions and keywords out for every site do you? (I hear a big ” HELL NO”) so do it in PS. You can do it via file-file info.
#2 Shhhh, keep it down in there!
Microstock sites seem obsessed with silence. To reduce noise in your images you should shoot at the lowest ISO you can manage (although I’ve gotten away with 800 at times, that’s on a 5D and only on selective images, with good exposure and little editing). The more you push or pull (over or under expose) an image in photoshop the more noise you introduce into the image. The general rule is that you should expose so that the bulk of the bulge in the histogram is as close as possible to the right hand side of the graph without clipping highlights in the ‘area of concern’. That means clipping highlights that are in the background of an image isolated on a white background is fine but not if that clipping occurs within the subject. Even if the image looks a bit bright in the lcd preview that’s ok, so long as all the detail is there you can pull it back in your raw conversion and make a good image. It all comes down to digital sensors and how they work, to go into detail would be an article in and of itself but suffice it to say that exponentially more detail & color information is recorded in the areas of highest exposure (aside from clipping). If light is at all an issue (such as when you don’t have studio flash) then use a tripod and keep it to iso 100/200 and exposed correctly.
Also Photoshop’s reduce noise filter can be surprisingly good, especially when combined with some judicious masking. A quick description of what I mean by masking is to duplicate your layer, apply the filter to the top layer, then apply a layer mask to it and mask out (paint in with black) the parts you don’t want filtered, eg eyes, hair, lips, detils etc. Make sure you go over your images at atleast 100% and pay particular attention to any large areas of semi-solid colour (eg skies) and the darker parts of the image. Smaller areas of noise can either be taken care of with funky masking or the blur brush.
# 3 He who shoots in the raw gets more exposure
For some of the reasons I went into in the last point and some I didn’t, raw is the king of image formats. Firstly it has a higher native dynamic range than JPG. Meaning it can capture more highlight/shadow detail than an equivalent JPG capture. This means that you can potentially save a (somewhat) over/under exposed image more readily if it was shot in RAW than in jpg. It also means that if you want to mess with your shot in PS (eg. contrast enhancement or pushing, pulling etc) that you have a much wider ‘buffer’ to work with. It also has an advantage colour wise. Personally I have my white balance set to ‘overcast’ 99% of the time and it usually returns good results. If on occasion it is a little out then I can compromise easily with ACR (adobe camera raw). White balance is one of those things that is somewhat destructive and if you save an 8bit jpg (and every jpg must be 8 bit) with a certain white balance then there is only a certain amount of colour shift you can perform with the image without degrading quality. With a raw image however you can shift the white balance from one end of the spectrum to the other without any degradation in quality. The reason is that RAW format saves the image data directly as perceived by the sensor, before any involvement with the camera or it’s settings has taken place (ergo the name RAW) where as JPG mode applies certain preset calculations to that raw data that are then unable to be undone. JPG is a format in which certain losses in image data occur, this enables it to be much smaller than a raw file but also less flexible. Raw to jpg conversion though is very quick on today’s computers with today’s software, and with storage prices being as cheap as they are there’s no real reason as far as I see for anyone to shoot in JPG aside from sheer laziness. Sure 9 out of 10 times you might not need that flexibility but on that 10th time it can be a life saver (or more to the point - picture saver).
#4 If you work alone you do everything yourself.
Outsourcing is not a dirty word. Personally I have two people who are both happy to submit my stock shots for a fraction of what I can earn per hour shooting/submitting new work. Sure for this to work you have to be disciplined and make sure you do new work instead of the work you’d otherwise be doing submitting to the time consuming sites. But if you do then your $/per hr spent working on stock will definitely go up. Of the two people I have doing my stock submissions both were models (ergo I didn’t’ need to advertise anywhere to find them). One is/was travelling the world and was happy for the extra dollars (I pay US12$ per hour) the other lives in Asia and earns twice as much from me as she does doing her normal office job (she works in advertising). However you have to be reasonably content that your employees are trustworthy, after all they will have access to your stock account user names and passwords. A good idea might be to set up unique passwords for each person and watch your stock sales on the sites they manage for you closely. If you do then the most they can ‘rob’ you of is one minimal payment to one stock site. A small risk really for the potential productivity results. The sites I have my girls manage for me are the ones that piss me off, ie Istock & Fotolia, I also have them do bigstock not so much because it annoys me as because it’s a damn low priority.
#5 A picture is worth a thousand (key)words.
Be smart with your keywords. This means trying to find the balance between a/ not spamming and b/ using every APPLICABLE keyword. Sure you can keyword spam and end up in more searches, but you will only piss folks off…and I don’t know about others but I tend to remember companies that have pissed me off and aren’t too likely to buy from them in the future. I also have no interest whatsoever in a picture of a girl that happens to be underexposed in a studio wearing white shoes when I get it as a result for searching for “white studio fashion silhouettes”. Keep the keywords relevant but DO have a good think about concepts. First off with your keywords you should describe the main elements of the photo, but then you should think about messages it conveys & feelings inspired by it (or if you are a REALLY dedicated stock shooter these are actually the first things you’ll think about, before even picking up your camera!). Make sure if your image is of a model outdoors on a surfboard with a big smile on her face you don’t just use the keywords: model, girl, woman, surf, surfboard, ocean, water etc. You also should use: fun, summer, holiday, recreation etc. Also keep an eye on Shutterstock, in their members area they have a very useful function to tell you the top 100 searched for keywords, this will give you not only a good idea on which keywords to use but also a very good idea on what to shoot in general.
#6 Thou shalt not copy (but only if you want to have a hard time getting anywhere)
This is going to be a little bit controversial but hell, I say copy to your heart’s content. Copying may not be art, it may not be creative, but we are talking about stock photography here, a product, not an art. If nobody ever copied McDonalds then we’d have no Hungry Jacks (or as you in the states call it, Burger King)…and that would be a damn shame. Imagine having to have a Big Mcshit every time you felt like an Aussie Burger? *shudders* (ok you probably don’t have Aussie burgers either over there but you get my point). Creativity is all well and good (and it honestly is very good). But it’s a VERY rare photo or concept that hasn’t been tried before, so rare in fact that were it a beef patty it might still be moo-ing. Copying might not be original but it is a VERY good learning experience. One of my favourite ways to learn is to find a shot that I like. I work out what it is about it that I like and then I try to replicate that in another setting. If it doesn’t work (and often it doesn’t) then I compare the differences and try to ascertain where it is that mine fails, what exactly I need to do differently. Also as I just implied copying doesn’t have to mean trying to make a shot as similar to another as physically possible. It might be as simple as copying a lighting setup, a concept, a photoshop technique or an overall aesthetical look that you like. There are always ways to bring your own individual ideas and personality into every image and to my mind it is actually the highest and most ironic form of conformity to be different just for the sake of being different. Shoot what is in your heart and soul, shoot whatever takes your interest and learn what you can from it - regardless of whether it has been shot before a million times or never. That is the only true path to individuality I believe…
This part of this article is very much a work in progress and if you have any suggestions, comments or questions please feel free to pose them and not only will I try my best to answer them but I may also add sections to this post where appropriate. In the next section (which I will have posted before a week is up as then I leave for Asia) I’ll be tackling FAQs and some of the debate about whether microstock is a positive or negative force for the photographic industry.