Stock Photo Sales

by Jim Zuckerman

Stock photo agencies know that advertising sales are responsible for the largest dollars coming into the company. Three to five thousand dollars for a single transaction is not uncommon, and sometimes that figure can exceed $15,000 per sale. Therefore, stock agencies are very sensitive to trends in advertising: colors, styles, fashion, camera angles, and so on.

Today, the trend is away from literal images and more toward pictures that involve the imagination of the target audience to fill in the blanks. For example, n the past agencies wanted the attractive couple running on a beach to show the idea of a ‘vacation in paradise’. Today, they may show only their feet in the foamy water or tracks in the sand on a beautiful stretch of beach. Possibly two beach towels would be laid out on a beach with nice lighting – and nothing else.

I am always going through my files and revisiting images I took in the past with this in mind. I think about how I can put pictures together in Photoshop to appeal to the mind-set of the creative directors at advertising agencies. If I am successful, the photo editor at a stock agency will want the new images in their files. It’s harder and harder to get pictures accepted into an agency today, even for photographers who have been with the company for many years. So I continually challenge myself to appeal to current market trends.

The picture you see here consists of two components. Last week I photographed the model in a swimming pool, and when I was going through my pictures from the South Pacific I decided to combine her with a photo taken in 1989 in Bora Bora, one of the Tahitian islands. I used the cut and paste technique in Photoshop, which I explain in detail in my Photoshop I course at Betterphoto.com. The tight cropping where the individuality of the model is irrelevant is in vogue now. It’s the impression, the emotion, of the image that an advertiser wants to convey. The type of composition and the complete depth of field suggests I used a wide angle lens, where the foreground subject is disproportionately large relative to the background. This is also trendy today.

To make this look real, the lighting in both images had to match, and it does. Both photos were taken in direct afternoon light. It’s not always necessary to make a photo composite look photographically real, but in this case that was my goal.

Comments

[donna rae moratelli]

Thank's Jim! I have seen requests come in with this trend. Now I'll think more about it before I go out shooting.
Excellent image BTW. I knew that it was yours immediatly!