I think everybody is talking about photography as an art. But stock photography is more of a craft. Maybe with business and a little creativity mixed in. Like most folks here I've got a library of tens of thousands of images. Some I'm very happy with never get looked at, and some incredibly boring photos actually sell.
With stock photography, we're trying to tell somebody else's story. A story we haven't read. For some lucky photographers, it just so happens to be the same story for the writer and publisher too. But most of us spend a lot of time looking at keyword searches, Google analytics, Alamy stats, thumbing through trade magazines and trying to find the next niche market.
The result isn't usually some masterwork. Rather we end up shooting a technically good photo of a bio-diesel filling station, a company sign, a cupcake, food truck, a pretty girl holding a telephone, the front of a new museum, skyline of a peripheral city, etc. Not the kind of thing we'd go out of our way to shoot to put on our wall.
It's not our story we're telling or it wouldn't be stock.
--
Michael Halberstadt
Studio: 1070 Marina Village Pkwy
Suite 204, Alameda, CA
telephone 415.742.1201
siliconvalleystock.photoshelter.com
halberst.zenfolio.com
siliconvalleystock.com
halberst@gmail.com
--- In selling_stock_photography@yahoogroups.com, "Pete Jenkins" <petej@...> wrote:
>
> >Taking the picture is the easy part, and 80% of the job is in
> >the computer.
>
> The easy part?
> 80% of the job is in the computer?
>
> Are you serious?
>
> This is the kind of uninformed thinking that has helped put our industry on its back.
>
> Picture taking - the art of acquiring an image has changed very little from the days of Fox Talbot. A good photographer has to see the image before he/she can capture it.
>
> A good image can be enhanced on the computer maybe, but a poor image is still a poor image.
>
> Whilst I am always happy to tell people that I spend 80% of my time on the computer I would say that this is the easy part. The difficult bit is the recognition of the images in the first place and then the effort that goes into capturing that moment. After the image has been captured, the skill is not in manipulating it, or adjusting it, but recognising the good images from the bad and editing out the crap. If I take 100 images on a job it is unlikely in most cases that I will ever show more than 20.
>
> Editing after image acquisition is the true skill, just as it always has been.
>
> Good darkroom work has always been valued, and good abilities with the software packages such as Photoshop, are equally as important, but actually, I do very little with software other than adjust levels (and curves) and gentle cropping as required. That is not difficult, any more than developing your own prints was 'difficult'.
>
> Being good with a computer does not make one a good photographer.
>
> The difficult bit about being a photographer is knowing what a good photograph is. :-)
>
>
>
> Kind regards
>
>
>
> Pete Jenkins
> www.petejenkins.co.uk
> www.onlinepictureproof.com/petejenkins
> www.photographerspro.eu/pete_jenkins/
> www.petejenkinsphotothoughts.blogspot.com/
>
> Member of: The National Union of Journalists
>
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