I put together this image in Photoshop using a background from the castle series I did for my December blog and a recent photo I grabbed of this model holding a candle.

Weekly pill container shot with Nikon D7000 and 60mm micro Nikkor at f/2.8 for shallow depth-of-field.

Continuing here with some more food items, only this time incorporating a model.  The top and bottom shots with the caviar and martini were done using a ring light.

This image was lit by a single Elinchrom strobe with a pancake reflector.  I find pancake reflectors provide a crisp beauty light with soft, but definite shadows. 

The box with the letterpress type I photographed for the blog last Monday was sitting on my desk.  I noticed there were a number of different fonts and sizes of the letter "i", and thought they could be used to make another photo with a different concept.  So here it is.  These fonts are really tiny, and, since I like to work with a wide open lens for a shallow depth of field, keeping the camera back parallel to the font faces was the most difficult part of the shot.  It took three tries.

Did some more food produce shots today.  This time I was in the studio where I had better control and our stylist to make it all look great. 

My studio has great window light, which I used here to backlight the scenes.  Shot with the Nikon D3x and 105mm macro lens.

I did some more food produce today.  They are simple subjects, but they will sell in stock, and the advantage here is that they are very inexpensive to produce. 

All of these images were done with window light at home with a 60mm Nikkor micro lens on the new Nikon D7000.

This image began as just a shot of sky and clouds.  I inverted the cloud scene, warped the shape to create the horizon, added a dark blue background layer, and rendered the lens flare for the rising sun.

Today I decided to do some produce photos.  Here are several different treatments of the same theme, red peppers.  This first photo I grabbed at the market while shopping for the produce.  It will be good as a background image.  Shooting variations such as these of the same object maximizes the sales possibilities from one shoot.

Next I covered the peppers simply as an object that could be cut out and put onto a page as part of an over all design layout.

I call this type of treatment "situational" because it shows the objects in use.  I think of situational still life as life-style images.

Finally, I shot the peppers with a lot of space around them on one side so the photo can be integrated with type, or used as the basis for a creative design.

Two close-up treatments of printers letterpress fonts.  Here the monochromatic coloring and low contrast renders the image for background usage, whereas the photo below conveys the concept of individuality and standing out from the crowd.

A Photoshop composite of a hand photo, background blur photo, and added type of binary digits.

I knew this model was going to be at the studio for a shoot so I picked up the grass at the farmers market on the way in, and ordered a pizza for lunch to do these two shots.

This is a new variation on a shot I have done several times in the past.  While the subject is the same, the technique varies.  From time to time,  I  update old themes that were successful.  Styles change, and I want to keep good images looking fresh.

Old technology, new technology -- same concept and treatment.

I find that stock images with a dominant, stylistic color theme have better sales.

Recycling concepts shot with the Profoto ring light and a Nikon D3x.

1st Quarter Update

Three months have gone by since I began this blog and I thought it might be time to pause and look at the results so far.  Despite the fact that I did some traveling in that time period, I did not miss a single day of posting to the blog.  I set out to take one shot a day for a year.  Taking photos is a lot like eating candy, one always leads to another.  On average I am finding that I take three or four images per day directly attributable to this blog.  So it looks like the blog project will increase my annual production by 1000-1400 images this year.  That is a substantial number, and more that I had thought I would do when I began this project.

Let's look at the results so far: Most of the blog images are still life or walk-around pick up shots.  This is very different from my normally scheduled shoots, which in the main include models.   I wanted to maintain this project as a low budget, opportunistic shooting event, and that is exactly what it is.  The first images from the project are just now entering the marketplace to be sold.  I would expect to see the first sales results around June, but the results will not be very meaningful because they only represent the return from a small number of images. 

The blog has had an ancillary benefit of keeping my mind constantly on stock production.  I find that my constant awareness of image concepts has increased and has resulted in a higher production rate in my normal workflow.  Typically in the past I produced around 50 images a day from a shoot.  Over the past few months my production has increased to a daily return of 60-80 images per day.  This is directly attributable to the mind set I am in as a result of having to come up with one blog shot each and every day.  The stock photography equivalent of writer's block is a serious impediment to a steady stream of image production.  A project such as this is a nice home-remedy for that.

Happy Valentine's Day!

My toolbox is a favorite place to look when I need to come up with a quick concept.

Today I worked on some antique maps.  This one began with an ink drawing of the world I made and scanned.  I then superimposed it over a photo of a piece of old, stained paper.

Here I started with a photograph of a 19th century map, desaturated it and added the vignette in Photoshop.  Softening these images and making them monochromatic enables them to be sold for background uses.

As long as I was at it, I decided to have a little fun and drew this pirate map onto a photo of worn paper.  The whole thing was done in Photoshop.

The pen and ink well suggest writing.  I left a lot of space on the left to entice a designer into using it for copy placement.  By the same token, that space allows for easy cropping so the image could also be adapted to multiple compositional formats.

Photo composite to convey the concept of world health.

I decided to work on some time-and-money concepts today.  This shot is of the interior of a pocket watch and letterpress dollar signs.

All images were shot with a 105mm micro Nikkor lens on the 24 megapixel Nikon D3x to provide a very high resolution

A lot of props like these come from eBay, where I pick up old technology objects to illustrate modern concepts.

This shot took a lot of Photoshop effort, but I think it will be worth it.

These are the rubber stamps I used to print in the journal to make yesterday's blog shot.

Variations on a theme.  This is the same empty journal I used in the January 20th blog post.  I picked up some rubber stamp letters to add written concepts.

Here is a different treatment of the same theme. Of course I also did another variation of the typewriter with the page empty.

New York City with the Voigtlander Ultra-wide Heliar 12mm lens on a Leica M9

This shot is similar but does not include the Empire State Building.  As a more universal treatment of towering, modern office buildings, it will do better in stock than the first image.

This little girl was drawing pictures while waiting for the shoot to begin in our studio.  She was very proud of her work.  I taped a few to the wall and asked her to hold one for this photo.

Yesterday, the NY Stock Market broke through a record pre-recession high.  This may bring new investors to the market place.

Time to invest in some stock photos that address the advertising concepts of investing.

I find that the square format is an easy way of achieving a simple, but strong and effective graphic composition.

When a square images appears in the search results of a stock agency, the images is noticeably larger than other formats and receives more visual attention as a result.

Once again, I started with a simple idea for one blog photo -- a close-up of a cork and corkscrew -- and wound up expanding it into quite a few variations. 

These wine glass shots were lit with two Nikon SB-900 flash units aimed at the white wall behind.  There is no other illumination on the foreground.  I used the SB-900's because they can actually keep up with the motor drive on my Nikon D3s and D3x.  As a result, I was able to obtain four or five consecutive bursts during the pour.  The SB-900 units also have a shorter flash duration than studio strobes.  This freezes the action better and yields a crisper image with no blurring.

The bubbles in the white wine glass were formed by the same method I used for the soap bubble photos from the January 26th blog entry.

The lighting here is exactly the same as above.  All I added was a small, black card behind the glass as a dark background.  The light from the strobe-lit wall wrapping around the black card was enough to highlight the bottle, the sides of the glass, and the wine.