Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I have been a contributing photographer with Stocksy United for four years now, so I thought I would reflect a little about my time with Stocksy.
Back when I was accepted to Stocksy in 2013 (there is a robust application process) my goal for stock photography was to earn a little extra cash to go towards gear and travel by selling photos that I would take anyway – mostly leftover images from commercial gigs and family photos.
The season 7 of Game of Thrones is out, and many of us are hyped about it. There are different theories, stories and of course – memes everywhere. But a group of photographers and designers from Depositphotos made something creative to pay a tribute to the popular TV series. They used only stock photos from the website’s library to create alternative posters for Game of Thrones. Not only they look fantastic, but they could easily be used as the official posters.
Sharing your photography to social media is a major hassle.
Every social media platform has different image resolution requirements, aspect ratios, title and key-wording conventions, tags, character restrictions, api rules…
While there is very little actual business value to participating in social media at all, there is some value to promoting your work online – the trick is to minimize the amount of time you spend doing it.
Photerloo promises to automate sharing your photos to your various social media networks, with the added bonus of an AI keywording tool.
Continue reading to learn more…
Hitting the news recently has been the story about the YouTube family “DaddyoFive” losing custody of two of their children due to an ongoing series of prank videos.
I haven’t watched any of the DaddyoFive videos, nor do I intend to, so I am not going to comment on that particular situation, but as a stock photographer I routinely sell images of my children, so this raises a serious bigger question: is it OK to use your kids for profit?
It feels a little odd to see that Autodesk are actually selling something for a change. Normally they seem to be acquiring companies and software like Monopoly property. And PIXLR isn’t really much of an exception to that. Autodesk acquired the popular photo editing app in 2011. Now, six years later, they’re selling it on to stock photography provider, 123RF.
It’s not surprising that a stock image company has started to take an interest in editing apps. After all, Adobe also runs a stock agency, and they’re kind of the king of editing apps. With Adobe Stock integrating itself into recent Adobe applications, the stock world’s competitors need to step up.
Stock photo search engine Everypixel is a tool that should make the quest for perfect stock photos easier. But what’s even more interesting is their tool called Everypixel Aesthetics. It uses neural networks to tell you how “awesome” your photo is.
According to the developers, this tool sees the beauty of stock photos in the same way as humans do. So before you buy a stock image or upload one of your own, you can run it through this quick test and see what neural network has to say about it. I tested it out, and the results were surprising, to say the least.
In the Women’s History Month, Adobe Stock Team has decided to conduct an interesting study. They wanted to find out how the image of women has changed in advertising and creativity. Thus, they have analyzed the data for over 450 million Adobe Stock searches in the last year, trying to find out whether the perception of women has changed over this period.
Searches for images of women are up 39% year-over-year, but they examined what types of images people looked for when they needed stock photos of women. It’s surprising and amazing how much you can find out from the stock image search.
Recently I got involved in the old debate on using stock images in personal art. The outrage of not taking the images in a composite yourself. This is a debate that will probably still be going until the end of time. My stance is that art is art. It’s not how you create it that matters, but the end product. This is why today I am featuring an artist who creates his art purely with stock images.
Pulkit Kamal, also known as Polka, is a self-taught artist from Mumbai, India. He makes surreal and ambient atmospheric images only from stock pictures available online under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. His visual art depicts dormant human emotions such as depression and anxiety, and are often accompanied with poetic excerpts from his unpublished fiction novel ‘The cold you, the cold me.’ Pulkit holds a master’s degree in business administration from UPES, Dehradun, and is currently managing advertising and branding for a brand in Mumbai.
I’ve been a big fan of Joe Penna (aka MysteryGuitarMan) on YouTube ever since I saw his stop motion rendition of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro about 7 years ago. With over 2.8 million subscribers, he doesn’t post as often these days as he once did, but when he does, you know it’s going to be entertaining. His latest video is no exception.
In the video, Joe inserts himself into a number of stock photos while he mimes along to the song Believer by Paper Lions. We’ve seen this done before with stills, but this is the first time I’ve seen anybody do it with video. As well as being well made, it’s as entertaining as we’ve come to expect from MysteryGuitarMan.
Another one to not hang about, 500px are also jumping onto iOS10’s new raw shooting capabilities. Not only do they want you to shoot and edit with raw on your iPhone, but they want you to sell from it, too.
It’s an interesting app, and one I’m curious to see how well it will take off. The new raw capabilities of iOS10 are great. Are enough people going to be shooting to sell with their iPhones, though? Even with the iPhone 7 Plus’s eventual new feature to simulate shallow depth of field, will people buy the images?
You can find out more about John on his website or follow him on Facebook and YouTube.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
Find my work on My website or follow me on Facebook or My page
