FiveStarPhoto was created from scratch with sales in mind- Stock sales.  This is higher dollar and you can make a decent amount of money with it once you’ve established yourself and a decent amount of stock to choose from.    So far, I’ve uploaded a little more that 100 of my >20k pictures (or more).  Of course only a small percentage are “Stock worthy”- high enough quality and clarity for use in advertisements, book, and company glossies (my usual customers).

In setting up a stock gallery (or even using Flickr as your online repository), keywording is essential to finding your pictures.  The picture I sold last night:

Sliced Apple

To make the picture as discoverable as possible, I added these keywords to the metadata in Photoshop so they are always with the picture from now on (you can add keywords manually when uploading a picture to various galleries or Flickr as well) yellow, fruit, delicious, apple, food, tasty, seeds, backlit, slice, edible, core, stem, vegetarian, sliced, white, background, braeburn.  I should have added “delicious” as well.  It’s important to capture the essence of the photo- main colors, shapes, elements, emotions (in this case, associated with tastiness).  Also important- “White Background” which is very popular for many types of subjects.

If you work in a corporate environment, you’ve probably seen motivational posters- ones with spectacular scenery and messages to help you aspire to perfection.  Take a photo like this one, recently taken in Yosemite:

Half Dome, Yosemite

For this one, I used these keywords initially: beautiful, classic, sunset, blue, scale, beauty, cliff, golden sky, yosemite, gear, california, mountains, dreams, carved, shadows, vertical, goal, majestic, impossible, glacial, goals, grandeur, half dome, expectations, glacier point, yosemite national park, mountain, climbing, insurmountable, attainable.  I probably could have added “granite” as well.  Here, not only did I try to capture the scene itself in words, but the rock climbing that is associated with it, and aspirational emotions like goal setting, attaining an impossible goal (it was once said to be impossible to climb), and so forth.  This is frequently used by marketers trying to sell product ideas as opposed to someone literally looking for pictures of Yosemite.  By capturing emotions in the keywords, you make it easier for them to discover your picture- they can type in an emotion and find pictures that match, rather than having to manually come up with the ideas first (Yosemite, Grand Canyon) and having to do it that way.

And finally, I put this one up there recently for fun:

Nosferatu

The title came from my wife- I wasn’t trying to emulate Nosferatu when I took the picture, I was just trying to take a scary picture in my den after seeing my shadow cast on the ceiling during a stretch.  The keywords for this one were:  shadow, hand, security, grabbing, fingers, cast, scary, warning, fear, dangerous, evil, dark, worry, demon, danger, grab, alert, thief, intruder, shadowy, adrenaline, alertness, concern, sinister, dastardly, shifty, murderer, heightened, bad, guy, fight or flight.  Probably I should add “Nosferatu” as well.  Here I went for dark and sinister feelings, insecurity, and so forth.  You sort of have to guess who might be shopping for this kind of picture (alarm or personal safety company).

If you need help with keywords, I would suggest this excellent site provided by Stock Photography Yuri Arcurs: http://www.arcurs.com/keywording/ To start, you type in some main keywords, like Sliced Apple or Hand Shadow.  You will get a selection of images from the Top 5 stock photography sites to pick from.  Select several that are the closest match to your photo in question, and the keywording tool will generate a ranked list of keywords.  This helps you get a feel for how other stock photographers think.  I don’t go there as much now as I used to, but it is a very useful tool to get started.

More in the future on the Stock Photography site as I develop and get it marketed.  I’ll let you know now it’s going.

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So, I thought I’d start by blogging about it, using a new feature on it I just discovered- generating slide shows from galleries for display on other sites.

This gallery was auto-generated from my Abstract gallery (if you read this blog often, you’ll know I love abstracts).  It’s in Flash and randomly cycles through the gallery, displaying all the photos I have there, which currently numbers 26 in the Abstract category.  From that, I created a smart sub-gallery that auto-extracts only shots that are textural in nature, from the keywords.

I’ll blog more in the future as I flesh out my SmugMug site (www.fivestarphoto.net) with more stock photos and begin to socialize it more, in a series on making a business out of photography.

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These days, everyone seems to have a smartphone, so I’d suggest getting an app that allows you to capture your ideas.  Really, it can be quite simple- a note pad app or even a ToDo list.  I use two apps presently on my iPod Touch- Awesome Note by Brid Software and 2Do by Guided Ways.  I used Awesome Note much earlier, so I have better methods and structure for my idea capture, whilst I use 2Do for my daily home and work lists, and I’m evaluating it for photography idea capture. Here, I will show some examples of Awesome Note:

Awesome Note

As you can see here, I have many folders for different categories.  Trip Notes was a daily diary capture of notes from our recent trip to Yosemite.  Photo Techniques is to remind me what techniques I want to develop in the future (such as Water Droplet photography).  Photo Ideas is where I capture any silly thought of something I want to photograph- a subject, or simple technique.

SirSnapALot is, you guessed it- where I jot down my ideas for blog entries.  And Photo Gear is for my wish list of things to buy or ask for at birthday or Christmas time.  There are other folders, but this is a good sample.

Looking into the folder Photo Gear, you see:

Awesome Note

There are different formats- check lists, individual notes.  Here I have chosen the grid view for notes.  You can see the items I want to purchase sometime in the next year, from direct camera equipment to studio gear to additional storage for my computer for all those images (plus a backup drive).

Whatever you use (I used to use Notepad on my Nokia phone), it’s good to have some place to capture your ideas, if you’re a photo junkie like I am.  Another good thing about Awesome Note is that it syncs with Evernote, which is another good, capture it once app and is useful to have as an online backup for this app.

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Merced River, Yosemite- Final HDR

The difficulty was having a very bright sky, looking slightly south of west in the late afternoon, and the sun was behind the trees on my right, casting them in deep shadows.  Letting the camera pick the “optimal” settings for me generated this picture:

Merced River, Yosemite- Camera's Pick

As you can see, though there is some detail in the dark trees, much of the scene is washed out.  I did look at the RAW file as well, but although RAW is great to have, in this case, even with 14-bit color depth per color channel, it was not enough to capture this picture:

Merced River, Yosemite- RAW Edit

As you can see, I was able to extract details from the dark trees on the right, and tone down the bright pines on the left, but I could not recover much blue in the sky.  The only way to really get what I wanted to was bracket the shot by several EV (Exposure Values) each direction, or +/- 2EV.  And, since the center of the picture was leaning towards dark, I had to bias the entire series downwards by 2/3 of an EV, or -2/3 EV.  My Canon EOS50D will let me set both the bracketing spread + the bracketing offset.  You may have to do this manually if you don’t have a camera equipped for this.

In this particular shot, 0EV was the automatic exposure at ISO 100, which was 2s at f22 (to capture water motion).  Biasing the exposure down by -2/3EV and bracketing from there +/-2EV meant my three pictures’ exposures were:

The resulting three images ranged from dark (but with blue sky visible) to very bright (but with the details in the trees). The middle picture, which is what I call the “Camera’s Pick” contains most of the picture, but the shadow details come from the brightest picture, and the highlights (sky in this case) come from the darkest picture.

Merced River, Yosemite- Bracketed Shots for HDR

So, from these three I would up with the lead-in picture for this article. Now, I am still new to HDR and I used the rather powerful (in my opinion) HDR PhotoStudio by Unified Color. I think I can improve my technique, but this is one of my earliest HDR’s, and I was fairly pleased with how it turned out. BTW, if you like the software and what it can do, you can download a 30-day uncrippled trial from www.unifiedcolor.com, and if you wish to purchase the software, use this link and get a 20% discount.

HDR and RAW pictures extend the range of your photography and will increase the number of “keepers” from a trip.  It is well worth learning how to extend your range of photography, but these are not for beginners- they take a little mastering, and I still have some ways to go for it to become second nature to me.  But that I will do, as I am intrigued enough from this past trip to keep at it, and I have a lot of photos yet to process from Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and San Francisco.  I’ll post some along the way.

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Take the picture below:

Half Dome at Yosemite

It is cropped from a larger image, but if I had taken it as the camera defaulted to for the JPG format, I would have been very disappointed.  Yosemite at sunset is a gorgeous place, and it is a very dynamic place light-wise.  Sunlight is still hitting Half Dome here, while Yosemite Valley below is deep in bluish shadows.  A straight-up JPG from the camera did not do it justice.

Here is a before and after:

Half Dome at Yosemite- Before & After

You can see from the original post at the top that the camera primarily exposed for Half Dome itself, bathed in a golden yellow light, while obscuring the valley below.  The saving grace for this image is that, while a JPEG image only uses 8-bits per color for RGB values, in RAW format (.cr2 for Canon), the full 14-bits per pixel per color is maintained, and you get a heckuva a lot more information stored.

The problem then with RAW is making something useful from it.  The images appear flat on your monitor when viewed directly.  You must “rescue” the dynamic image by crunching and compressing the shadows and highlights into viewable space, without giving it too fake a look (or that HDR look, by folks that abuse that methodology).  In face, converting a RAW image’s dynamic range into a standard JPEG is a light version of HDR.

RAW files contain so much information, that they are compared to negatives from the old film days.  In fact, to deal with the large number of proprietary RAW formats between manufacturers, Adobe has proposed the DNG format, for, you guessed it- Digital Negatives!  So far, though, few manufacturers have picked up on it.

For this image, I resorted literally to old darkroom techniques done digitally- dodging and burning, or lightening and darkening selective areas of the photo to bring out details in the shadows, and tone down the overly bright sky.

The end result is a photo that closely resembles what we saw from Glacier Point at sunset- not fake looking, and you can easily see the bluish cast to the valley and plenty of details in the shadows, just like our eyes saw it.

I used Photoshop CS5′s RAW converter to do the work- it’s quite easy to work with.

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SirSnapALot App

It was quite easy to do using Ovi’s app wizard- any RSS feed can be made into a widget and auto-submitted to the store.  All I needed to do was add just a little bit of artwork and select a color scheme.  It only shows the first picture, but the entire article is downloaded, and the presentation is pretty good.  Also, you can load the app on your homescreen, if you like.

You can find the app here: http://store.ovi.com/content/33012

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Practical Photography Magazine

This is the cover to the next issue, which I just plucked from their website.  The spring issue, which is apparently their “13th issue” was excellent, so I decided to subscribe for a year, for what amounts to $62 after converting Pounds to Dollars.  They seem to be having a special right now with 4 extra free issues, so my money gets me the subscription starting in July through November 2011.

What was great about the issue I bought was that I read every article- they literally were offering practical advice.  It was a step-by-step guide to improving your skills in this area or that, with different perspectives from multiple authors.  And they really stress creativity as well.  From one issue at least, it’s the best photo magazine I think I have seen, perhaps ever.  Once I start receiving it monthly, I might write some more about it.

I decided to fork out the money since I let my 2-year subscription to the Economist lapse (much as I hated to, but I can’t keep up with every issue).  That magazine was even more expensive.

So, cheers- here’s to some happy reading, coming soon to my mailbox!

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Yosemite Sunset

Here are the details for taking a shot like this:

ISO: 100 (forced to this setting for best color saturation)
Focal Length: 90mm (set for the composition and framing I wanted, so I would have maximum pixels on moon and still have a good composition)
Aperture: 5.6 (let in as much light as possible keeping the exposure as short as possible to not show movement of the moon, which is detectable after a few seconds)
Exposure: 2.6s
Mirror: Locked up to eliminate mirror flip-up vibration
Time Delay: 2s to allow any vibration to dampen out of camera after shutter press
Remote: Used remote as well to reduce possibility of finger-induced vibration, though probably not necessary if you use 10s delay.

The time of day was 9:16pm, or about 30min post-sunset.  The colors are most intense around this time.

Though it was not intentional, I like that the branch of the pine tree points to the moon- a friend pointed that out to me.  It also underscores how important composition really is, and that I failed to notice it at the time I was taking the photography.  Of course I knew the branch was there, but really would like to have been more cognizant of it at the time.  Elements like that can make (or break) a photograph.

More will be coming from this trip- I intended it to be a learning trip, and that it was.  Some lessons I have already learned just by taking the photos, and more will come as I evaluate and process the >2000 pictures I took on this trip.

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Dallas Sunset

I took this last winter when we had some particularly nice color, about 20 minutes after the sun set (the best time). The trees were barren, which I find more attractive anyways- they are fun to shoot through. This picture is unaltered from the camera, so this is close to true color. It was tripod mounted for stability in the lower light.  And sometimes, the part is greater than the whole- a portion of something can imply greater beauty without capturing it all.  And besides, when you live in a city, sometimes you don’t have much choice- there is a 2-story house just to the right of this tree.

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In 2008, I took this photo, posted it to Flickr, and then forgot about it:

Original Hibiscus Photograph

I liked it, but moved on- taking a picture a day for my ongoing 365 project. Nine months later, I was printing a picture of something else, and accidentally loaded the printer paper wrong side up. The resulting “mess” was actually rather surreal and cool- the picture looked like a painting. That gave me the idea to find a picture more suited to the effect, which led me back to the picture above.

So, I printed it out on the backside of another 4×6″ piece of Epson photo card stock, and started photographing it right away. At first, there were two stripes in it from where the pinch-rollers were pushing the paper through, so those pictures didn’t work, though the effect was quite nice. But with the ink not bonded strongly to the surface, it continued to “evolve” fairly quickly, and shortly, the stripes were no longer evident and this emerged:

Painting Effect- Hibiscus Photograph

I really liked this one- it looks like a cross between impressionism and pointillism. Today, i got the idea to blog about this, and while preparing the original to show you, I made another mistake- the wrong keypress turned the yellow background blue, which I really liked. I had been attempting to brighten the yellow a bit but accidentally inverted it- yellow & blue are opposites:

Original Hibiscus- Blue Background

So, several mistakes led to reinterpretations of an older picture. It pays to play around with things- you never know what might turn up.

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