Photo by bridgepix
I have been reading a lot lately - books, magazines, online articles and blog entries (always been a voracious reader really). I have been noticing a trend in all the materials I have been reading - composite images are ok.

When I say composite, I mean images that are created using pieces of other images. For example, there is an article(PDF) in this months AfterCapture about a well respected (and well paid) photographer who is creating wonderful compositions (the theme in the article is Halloween related).

A book I have been reading recently, Shooting & Selling Your Photographs, also has a couple of examples where the author has sold composite images for respectable sums of money.

I am sure this has purists screaming, and artists gleaming. It’s the perfect hybrid for this medium though, in my eyes. You can still deliver an image that people want. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is really what it is all about - deliver what the customer wants. And that is why the purists scream. But I am not making images just for myself, to remember something exactly as it was. And if I do, then I don’t really modify it that much.

I see a lot of potential here. I think real estate photographers have already been doing this for some time, and clearly advertising does it. So if it will help me to make more marketable images, who am I to argue. I have a Photoshop class coming up soon. I hope it will give me the skills needed to make these images look natural. Can’t wait to try it.

A few months ago I took some photos of a very corporate restroom, thinking (for some crazy reason) that they might make good stock photos. I put them up on iStockphoto and pretty much forgot about them. In fact , over the last several weeks, I pretty much forgot about stock photography altogether. I have been travelling for work, trying to figure out how I want to do the real estate photography thing, taking senior pictures of my daughter, taking pictures of the Lakewood High School cheerleaders, and still trying to have a family life. Yep, pretty busy, just like you.

Then I came across a blog post about fotoLibra. I checked it out. I liked what I saw. I made some uploads and then wrote about it briefly yesterday. And in that writing, I made a mistake.

I said I hadn’t made any money off of my stock photo endeavors so far. After I wrote that, I checked in at iStockphoto (haven’t done that for a very long time). Sure enough, I have had some sales. 3 to be exact, garnering me total commissions of $3.92. For the bathroom photos. That’s right - the bathroom photos. Not the pretty picture of golf carts all lined up in the morning, not the pretty cactus or the corporate biz jet. The bathrooms.

It’s kind of funny really. Some friends of mine thought I was crazy taking a photo of a bathroom, much less a few of them. But you never really know what people want (which is why I like fotoLibra), but apparently I must have at least a little bit of an eye for it. To the tune of almost $4 right now. Woohoo. I might go buy a Chai at Starbucks. That’s only enough to pay for a small though.

Hopefully this is the start of something wonderful. Hopefully fotoLibra is more successful. I really want them to succeed. But as long as my photos are selling somewhere, I guess I am happy.

I came across a different sort of stock photography site the other day. fotoLibra takes a different approach to stock photos - they don’t presume to know what people are going to want to buy. Instead, they accept most everything, as long as the photos match their technical standards (which are easily interpreted by the upload routines). No human intervention really. Once you upload your pictures, they are available immediately for people to see, assuming they search for keywords that you have tagged your photos with.

Since their model is a little different, you do need to pay to have your photos hosted on their service. But here is the cool thing - you only pay if you are hosting more than 12 photos. That’s right, the first 12 are free, so you can try out the service and see if it is going to work for you.

That brings us to the subject of this post. I have approximately 6,000 images in my Lightroom Library. Probably half of them could have potential as stock photos. So how do I choose which 12 to narrow it down to? I started with the fotoLibra Submission Guidelines. This helped me to sort out which ones were clearly not good candidates. I narrowed my choices down to about 27 that I thought had REAL potential, based on the guidelines and what I would be looking for if I were buying stock photos (a few friends of mine have said I have a good eye for this). From there I narrowed it down to 9 that have a vertical orientation (marketers like verticals more, since pages in magazines and flyers are vertical) and 3 that are compelling enough they could work as horizontal. I went for a few different subjects - skiing, beaches, sports, scientific, religious - just to see what is going to work (this is a test after all). You can see the resulting choices in my first fotoLibra collection. Some of these images have been placed on other stock sites, but none have sold. We’ll see what happens here.

I have been reading more than a few books on the subject of photography lately. Also been hanging around some interesting conversations that have made me think (never a bad thing). Some of what I am seeing and hearing is this: specialize so that you will be known in that area. Presumably this would be true also because it would allow you to hone your skills in that area.

But I like to be different. And the last thing I like is to be pigeon-holed.

My photographic interests have evolved over the years. My current “collection” of interests is as eclectic as my taste in music. For me it is more a matter of inspiration than anything else. If I feel inspired, I’ll take a picture of whatever it is that made me feel that way. Could be a padlock, a surfer walking on a beach, a solitary cactus, or my family. There is no rhyme or reason to it. It just happens, and I hope I was smart enough to bring my camera.

Sure, it could be that I don’t make the absolute best image for that “category”, but if it is pleasing to me, isn’t that enough? Some people I know are too kind and tell me that I have “the eye” for certain types of photography, and ask why I don’t do it full time. The answers are fairly simple.

1. I have a day job that I really enjoy
2. I make a good living at said day job
3. I have turned a hobby into a profession before, and I started to burn out

So instead I choose to keep this low-key, taking pictures at events I am part of, doing our family portrait or pics of the kids, and basically keep this fun. Does this mean that I can’t try to sell my photos? Of course not.

I can make this fun, and maybe make some side money from it too. More importantly, I have the freedom to expand my horizons. I love landscapes and flower macros and think I do well with them. I don’t do well with people (I am a computer geek after all), so that is what I want to work on next. But I can also take a time out and have fun making a stock photo when conditions warrant. I can be whoever I want, because I don’t have responsibilities around it, nor the trappings that come with that responsibility. If some images sell along the way, that’s great. But if I enjoy the pictures I take, then that is all I need. Just don’t tell me who I should be. My portfolio will tell you who I am.