With the economy as slow as it is right now, many photographers are looking for new sources of income. Many photographers are diversifying the types of photographs they shoot for clients, expanding their client bases and looking for new ways to sell their photographs. One of the ways that I have been looking to expand my income stream is to use a company on the web called iStockPhoto.com.
I know a lot of photographers look at websites like iStockPhoto as taking away, or reducing their client base for the photography. But, as I have found out from a friend of mine, who only had 276 images on iStockPhoto and made over $10,000 last year, that this could become a very profitable income producer. I have nearly 70,000 images in my image library, many of which would work well on sites like iStockPhoto.com.
I have images that I will not place on iStockPhoto, they are my artwork and limited edition prints that I sell on my fine art photography website: VanDuinenPhotography.com. I hear the argument from other photographers that you don’t make a lot of money on any particular image on websites like iStockPhoto, but it’s not about one particular image or one sale, it’s about the number of sales and the number of people looking for photography in one place.
As I start sorting through my 70,000 images, I realize what a daunting task this will be, but during economic times that we are going through right now, another $10,000 this year would help me or any other photographer I know. You have three types of buyers on iStockPhoto: advertising agencies, nonprofits and people looking for art for their homes, so keep that in mind as you search through your libraries.
Here are a couple images that I am putting up on iStockPhoto.com
Well here I go again. My hard drive, with all my images on it decided not to work. Again! The hard drive did not die, it just got corrupted and could only see half of the 4 TB on the drive. Now this happened to me about eight months ago, with the same drive, and I said I was going to get another hard drive and back it up separately. I didn’t! So, after a half a day talking to the hard drive manufacturer and trying to run recovery software, the manufacturer had me send the unit back to be fixed because something’s not working right.
Something’s not working right!!! This is the second time, you can bet something’s not working right. When I get this unit back it does not get a third chance, I will be selling it on eBay. I’ve since bought another 4 TB drive by another manufacturer and I will be buying a second 4 TB hard drive from this manufacturer as soon as I sell the other hard drive. Thank goodness I back up all my images onto DVDs, one for my studio and the other to be sent off-site. It took me 2 ½ days to load up all the images back on one hard drive so I could use them, and luckily I did not lose a single image.
I have now come up with a system that should keep all my images safe, from the time I download them from the camera, to working on my desktop, placing them in my Working Library hard drive and backing them up on Archival hard drive and DVDs.
- When I download my images from my camera I use a card reader and use my computer operating system to transfer the images onto my Desktop computer. I don’t use third party programs to transfer my images most of the time, as I trust the operating system to do a better job with less of a chance of a files becoming corrupted than by using third-party programs. Although, I have been using Lightroom lately to transfer images and put them into the image management system.
- Once they are transferred to my working computer I make a copy on a backup hard drive that is used just for this purpose. Once I’m done editing the images and ready to put them on my Working Library hard drive I will delete them from this hard drive. This is just to make sure that I have images in two places while I am working on them at all times.
- When all the images have been edited and worked on in and the job handed off to the client, I then back up all raw and Photoshop files on my Working Library hard drive. This drive gives me access to all my images at a time I need to get to them and is linked to my light room database.
- Once they’re on the Working Library hard drive I will create DVDs of all the images. I made two sets of DVDs, one that stays here in the studio and one that is shipped off-site and away from hurricanes.
- The last step will be to copy over all files to a Archival hard drive that is labeled and placed in a safe place and unplugged from electricity. I live in Florida where we have a lot of lightning and storms like you’ve not seen, and I want to make sure my Archival hard drive is disconnected from electricity to keep it safe. Just to let you know, you should take your hard drive out every two weeks and run it to keep it working correctly. I know of a few photographers that have not run their archival hard drives and when they need to use them they find out that it’s not working, or is frozen up.
This may sound a little redundant and time-consuming, but I think it’s probably the best system that I have heard of, and like I said earlier, I have not lost an image during two hard drive failures.
This past weekend in downtown St. Petersburg they opened up some new galleries, and I’m happy to say that I had a few of my photographs in the ArtOn Central Gallery. It was very exciting and there where probably over 3000 people to see this revitalization of the block that was supposed to be torn down.
For this event, they had closed down the street, had some bands playing, giveaways and a fashion show. As a photographer I thought this was a great time to try some street photography with the fashion models. But as I watched what was going on I saw that a photographer had set up three hot lights on the street to shoot the models before they went on stage. I’m used to seeing fashion done with strobes, but rarely hot lights, so I stood around and started taking a few photographs myself, to the chagrin of the photographer trying to do his job.
It was a very simple setup, three Smith Victor’s lights with regular 200 W bulbs in them on three stands. Two of the lights were placed a little over at 90° angles from each other, and one light was set in the middle and placed low. This was a fairly simple setup that seemed to work really well as the models moved around. He did not have to adjust the lights that much and was able to shoot quite quickly.
This just goes to show you that you don’t need to have a lot of strobe equipment to get some really good photographs, that all you need is a little creativity and some beautiful woman. Here are a few of the shots that I took while the other photographer worked. I did no Photoshop work on any of them, just adjusted the RAW files in Lightroom
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There has been a lot of talk about Adobe’s Photoshop CS5 since it was announced a few weeks ago, but not much talk about Adobe’s Lightroom. I don’t believe that there will ever be a lot of big changes in Lightroom any time they upgrade the program. When they started out designing Lightroom, they talked to photographers asking them what they wanted, and with that designed a great image workflow program. Each upgrade they’ve done so far has made great improvements to the program and a better experience for photographers using it. With Lightroom Beta three one of the things I really like about it is what they’ve done is with noise reduction.
Here are some photographs I took at Photoshop World’s keynote. If you’ve never been to a Photoshop World keynote experience, and that’s the only way to explain, it’s an experience, they always come up with a theme for the whole convention. As you can see from the photograph this year was KISS, but they renamed the group NAPP. In this photograph of creative director Felix Nelson, shot at ISO of 1600 and hand held, you can see that there is some noise in the photograph. Using Lightroom’s noise adjustment sliders you can see that it really reduces the amount of noise so that you don’t even need to use a third-party program. I did add a little Sharpening to the photo in Lightroom just to take care of normal camera softness.
There are two ways that Lightroom works to get rid of noise, color and luminance. Both of these corrections have another slider, which adds back detail to the image, since when you use noise reduction it tends to soften the photograph. Simple adjustments in Lightroom will save you a lot of time in Photoshop cleaning up your images and trying to get rid of noise through other means. I think a lot of third-party vendors are going to lose some business with how well this works with both Lightroom and Camera RAW.
 Felix Nelson  With Noise  After Noise Reduction  The Settings
If you’ve been on my website at all, you know that I do a lot of HDR photography. As an architectural photographer it has become an indispensable way of photographing interiors and exteriors of buildings. As a fine art photographer, the surreal images that I have created using HDR have expanded the way I photograph the world. To create HDR images we have had to use the program PhotoMatix Pro, but not anymore. Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 has added HDR Pro to Photoshop and now PhotoMatix Pro has some competition.
For photorealistic images using HDR, Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 beats photo PhotoMatix hands-down. The Remove Ghosting feature in Photoshop is just incredible. In the example below you can see that PhotoMatix has very heavy red and blue lines and ghosting in the images, where HDR Pro with the Remove Ghosting feature turned on it eliminates both the red and blue lines and the ghosting images. In PhotoMatix Pro it would have taken me hours to clone out and use a color layer to fix that image, but with this new feature in Photoshop I will be spending a lot less time retouching images.
The one thing I wish Adobe would put in HDR Pro is a histogram that changes as you adjust the image. They give you of histogram of how the image started but it does not change and you can’t really see if your blowing highlights or shadows as you adjust the sliders. The presets that I’ve been using the beta version, in one word, sucks! I don’t know what the developers were thinking and I bet a lot of people will be making their own presets and getting them out to the rest of the PhotoshopWorld, I have already started trying to make my own and once they release Photoshop I’ll put them on my site.
I think that PhotoMatix will have to take a really good look at how their product works and doesn’t work, if it wants to compete with Adobe. I like PhotoMatix, but it does tend to have a lot of noise where HDR Pro has really eliminated that. With everything that I’ve seen in CS5 this is really a major upgrade for photographers. More to come.
 Photoshop HDR Pro  PhotoMatix Pro
I am now allowed to show you some photos I have created with Photoshop CS5. Yes I am one of the beta testers for CS5 and I am now allowed to show you some of the images I have been working on. Because of nondisclosure agreements I cannot tell you how or what new features I used, but I can tell you this is a significant upgrade. Here is a before and after photo using CS5.
 Before  After
There’s a lot of talk about whether HDR is really good photography, or bad photography made to look good. I find this argument, or question somewhat comical as whatever we do to photograph, specially in the digital world, weather using a plug-in, filter or different effects in Photoshop we are still creating a photograph, good or bad. Some people say that because we use HDR to create this photograph that we are cheating, or using a crutch to create a good image, but I say if I’m looking at an image and I visualize it using HDR, that I’m taking my abilities to another level by pre-visualizing it.
I have heard people say that if you look at the normal image before the HDR effect was added, that the photograph is really usually meager or not that great. But I say if you don’t have a good photograph to start with, no matter what effect you add to it it’s still a bad photograph. You have to have all the elements of a good photograph, even with HDR, to create a good photograph. If you have junk and add the HDR effect to it, you still have junk that is amplified with the HDR effect; you need a good images to start with no matter what.
I have to admit that sometimes people can take the HDR effect a little too far, but if HDR is used correctly you can create some spectacular images that even the purest will admire.
Here are a few more of the images from my trip back from Tallahassee.
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Randy is an architectural and fine art photographer, located in Florida. He is an instructor of photography, Photoshop and Lightroom at the Morean Art Center. Randy has lectured at the state Florida Professional Photographer convention, as well as around the state.
by randy
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