Start Selling Your Photography: Getting Started with Stock Photography

1. Intro: Hey, guys, my name is DEA. I am my family and commercial photographer, and I'm here today to talk to you about stock photography. Stock photography is a type of commercial photography where you upload your photos to a website and they go and sell your photos to people from all around the world. The types of people that buy these photos are graphic designers, Westside bloggers. I've seen different photos used in ads and billboards. It could be used pretty much anywhere. Stock photography is a great way to make passive income. Most people nowadays want that side hustle or that area where you could just makes an extra income, even though it could be a little bit of time to take these photos, edit and upload them. It's totally worth it, because these photos could be sold and selling for years on end. Your project is going to be to sign up for one contributor account and to take three separate photos. These photos you're going to share with the class, but you're also gonna upload these three photos to start your portfolio on the contributor account. One of the hardest things with stock photography is just getting started, and this class is going to not only get you started but get you encouraged to start selling your photos today. 2. The basics of stock photography: Hey guys, let's look a little closer at the details of stock photography. I do want to take a minute to mention that, even though I'm focusing on photography for this class, if you're a graphic designer or video aga for you to consult with stock, all the things I'll be sharing about photos in this class will also go along with both illustrations, vectors and videos. The idea behind stock photography is to allow people, whether it's big business, small business or an individual toe, have access to a large database of photos for their advertising needs without having to hire personal photographer. It can get expensive to hire personal photographer for a few hours, and most companies don't have the money to do that. So stock websites create away for businesses and individuals to download one or two photos at a time for a cheaper rate. When becoming a stock contributor, you're giving the buyer the right to use your photos with a licensing agreement, but you is the photographer. Still maintain the copyright or the ownership of the photo. When the photo cells you make royalties off the use of your photo. These royalties can range from anywhere from 25 cents and $50 up for download. I haven't seen anything more than $50 for a download, but I have heard stories that people have made 100 or more dollars on a download for one image. The royalty from the download really just depends on a few factors. First, what kind of licensing released did the buyer purchase? And what kind of subscription does the buyer have on the stock photography site? Basically, the more money they spend on the download, the more money you get. The other factors. How many photos you've sold, the more photos you sell. There are tears where you move up and increase the amount of money that you make for download. Most of the time, I get on average of 36 cents to a dollar per image, but it's not uncommon to see downloads as much as $14 here in there. The more I upload, the more I sell. I found that consistent uploading on the stock sites also helps may make more money. I believe it has something to do with the search algorithms. Rather than uploading 10 images all at once, I will upload one or two every day. I noticed this helps pull in more downloads and money. The thing is, the stock photography. It is not a get rich quick scheme. A lot of people go into stock photography thinking they're going to make a big buck real quick. They have all these extra photos that they can now stay on load, and they're gonna make all this money. I think a lot of times when it comes into stock photography, you have to think of the long road. Ah, lot of times it takes a while to build a portfolio. When that portfolio gets built, you have more people seeing your items. You have more people seeing your photos, and you have more for them to even choose. I've had a few that seemed like a buyer went in two by my photo, and they ended up buying three or four out of a series of that same shoot. So I now made more money off of that shoot just because I had more photos available to them . So the more photos you have, the better income. You get even different types of photos I think could bring in better income than others. So building a portfolio is important, figuring out your style and also figuring out the types of photos that people want to buy the A lot of times online. If you look up a lot about micro or stock photography, there's a lot of negativity about it saying that you just can't make money. No one makes money anymore and stock photography. I could just tell you that's not true. I think if you put in the time the effort to build your portfolio, you can make money. I can pull in hundreds of dollars every month, just depending on the types of photos that I am able to upload. I think a lot of it's just figuring it out, figuring what's popular and really just going for it so you can make money with stock. It just takes some time, and I think people get the wrong ideas, thinking they're going to get rich real quick. 3. Editorial vs commercial: Hey, guys, I'm here to break down the differences between two different types of stock photography, commercial photos and editorial photos. Let's start with commercial photography. Commercial photography are images that can be used anywhere. A company can use them in an ad on a website or to promote a product or service. There are rules when it comes to commercial images. You can't have any recognizable logos or business names in the image. This could be tricky. If your image contains even a small name or logo, these logos have to be taken out in post processing or made sure that they're not visible when taking your photo. If there are people in your image, you need a model release from each recognizable person. This isn't hard to do, and most of the sites will walk you through the form they need to fill out. I always carry a model release with me when going to photo shoots of commercial images and just have the models fill the forms out right then and there. If you're on private property and it is recognizable, you will also need to have a property release. I took these photos at a golf course, and I was super excited because they were really cool pictures and I had a model released and I had everything going for the photo. But when I submitted them, they rejected the photos and said that they require release from the property owner of the golf course to be able submit these photos. I didn't know the owner, nor did I want to take the time to get a property release. So I decided to just not submit these photos. Another option would have been to submit them is editorial. But at the time, I didn't feel the photos would sell with an editorial marker on them. So now that I'm talking about editorial photos and images, let's go over some of the rules and information on editorials. These are images with restrictions on where they could be used. The end buyer can't just use them anywhere. Editorial images are usually found in newspapers, magazines and even some blogged articles. These images cannot be sold in a commercial setting. You will never see these in and add or trying to sell a product editorial images showing idea or concept of an event, person or object. This category is actually easier to take photos of because they don't require all the same things that the commercial images require. You can have logos or brands in the image. They just can't take it. The whole concept of the image you do not need a model release. There can be people who are recognizable in the image, and you don't need their approval to sell it. No granted, depending on who the person is. Sometimes I will ask there opinion on if I can set it up. And if it's a friend of mine or someone who doesn't want their image up there, I won't sell it. But it's not required when submitting your photos. There are some differences from commercial photography. First know that not all stocks sites will take editorial photos. I will go over more of this in a future lesson in review of the different stock companies. Second went uploading your photos on stock sites. The title in the fields on the website has a different format when submitting an image. The title Haas to be location, which is city, state or country, date and description. I took this photo at the Dallas Fair, and this was my title that I put on it. There is a need for editorial photography. At first, when I started with stock photography, I didn't understand the need for editorial and looked at it as a minor player in the stock world. I have changed my mind since then. After changing the focus to editorial, I have seen some of my images on blog's local newspapers and even some major websites like Newsweek. My husband and I went to Park City and enjoyed the Sundance Film Festival. This is a large film festival that brings famous and non famous people from all around the world. We go up for fun, but I figured it would be a good time to take out my camera. I snapped these photos, which are images of the buildings that are icons of the festival. I continually sell these when the festival comes around. Each year, when starting stock photography I fell. Editorial images had so many restrictions and they would not sell or there wouldn't be enough buyers interested. I felt there were more buyers for commercial imagery. What I've learned is this editorials are easier to take since you don't have model releases and logos to worry about. They also sell wealthy image conveys an idea that is common or consistent in the news. I would have to say 1/4 to 1/2 of the income I make on stock photos come from editorial photos, and many news companies and bloggers are in on the major sites buying photos for their articles. As a photographer, I'm always looking at finding new editorial photos. They're worth your time. My biggest advice in becoming an editorial stock photographer is what makes your city or town special. Are their fun events or traditions that occur that you can take photos of to document for editorial photography? Are you going on vacation or visiting an important event that could be documented? What is already in the news and how can you contribute imagery to help bring the articles alive? Visually, editorial is not overwhelming, and I would encourage anyone to go out and try. It is a great way to start selling stock photography. Knowing the difference of editorial versus commercial for stock photography is important. I think both have their place in the stock photo world. If you're taking an image, look closely at the details and see if their copyright elements visible. Take them out, post processing if needed, or make them editorial. If it tells a story, sometimes both work. I took these photos of medicine vials in one. I went in and took out the logos and sold. It is commercial. The other I sell is editorial. These images both sell interestingly out of the to the editorial photo sells better. The editorial photo tells a story, and I think it leads people toe. Want to buy it more? 4. The stock companies: Hey, guys, In this next lesson, I want to look at the specifics of the stock companies, but first I want to go over the submission process. What this looks like is, when you upload the photo, you then title and keyword the image. Then you submit it and wait for approval. Within a few days, a person from the team of reviewers will look at your photo and decide if it should be approved or denied. From here. I want to talk a little bit more about denials from a photo. When uploading to stock, you want to make sure you're submitting a good photo, make sure they're, well, it well cropped in the photos or conveying a message. Most injections come from blurry photos, bad lining and images that may not have any commercial or editorial use. I will say, Don't take denials personally. It's really hard. Is a photographer toe. Have your images tonight. Remember, you're getting your images reviewed by one person who makes an opinion within just a few minutes. If I get a denial, I genuinely look at the photo and asked myself, How can I make this better? Sometimes I'll re added the image and other times we'll just give up on it. There have been a few times, or it was super excited about a photo. For example, this is a photo I took of a Mason jar hanging in a tree with a candle in it. At this point in time, this was a really popular thing to do for weddings, and I knew it would be something that people would want to buy. It was a good quality photo. It wasn't blurry, and even though it was taken it dusk, the light generally was pretty good. So I knew it would sell well, and I didn't want to give up on the image When I submitted it, they gave me some denial. Probably it was blurry or bad lighting or noise in the photo. I looked into the photo a little further, and it really wasn't bad. So I decided just a resubmitted again because I do know that it was going to be something that people would want. When I uploaded it a second time, the reviewer, the time looked at it, accepted it. So then I started selling it on stock and guess what? It did sell it would sell quite a bit during that year. And even though I don't see it as much selling now, it did pretty well for the time it was worth resubmitting. Keep this in mind. You are going to get denials, but don't look at it as a failure. Even the best of photographers get denials. Keep trying and making sure you have a good quality photo you're submitting. I also want to go over some of the specs that the stock companies air looking for. One of them is going to be megapixels. Most will require at least a 3 to 4 megapixel photo to figure out megapixels. What you do is take the pixels on the height of the image and multiply it by the pixels of the whip of the image. Shutter stock actually has this on their website, for example, 2000 by 2400 pixels is 4.8 megapixels, and this is a file that's accepted by them. Now, four megapixels is their minimum size of requirements, so they gave the example. 1200 by 3000 pixels is 3.6, and this is too small for their size requirement, and it just won't even get uploaded. It will deny it right away. I always re size my photos before submitting them. My camera is a DSLR, and it takes really large photos. And what I found is that the larger photos get rejected. I recommend keeping. The megapixels is close to 4 to 6 megapixels as possible. Most of the time, the websites will say, We want your max resolution, but this just doesn't work. What happens is that the reviewers, looking at the image at 100% full size they can seem or mistakes or inconsistencies in the larger photos, and they'll reject it, even if it's a really good photo. So I have made a preset in photo shop that takes my images and re sizes them down to either 2000 by 3000 or 3000 by 2000. This give me that six megapixels where it's still a good size picture. But it's not massive and large that they can see every single mistake in the photo. Once I resize my all my images before submitting him, I found I wasn't getting the rejections for the noise in the image or for blurry images. Now, when I say resize your photo. Don't ever resize your photo larger. The problem is, is it makes the image really blurry, and it will probably just get tonight right away. So when I say resize, it is making the image smaller. All right, let's get down to the different stock companies and the specifics of each. So here, the main four star companies that I have chosen. I'm a contributor on all four of these sites, and I've actually picked these for very specific reasons. So we'll go through each of them and explain why I like each of them. There are links also in the class description and the notes so that you can be linked to each of these sites. First of all, here is a chart on some of the different information for each of, um, most of them. You have to be 18 years or older. Um, there's different megapixels, which we talked about, and, um, one differences. Adobe stock does need a adobe i d if you don't already have one, but they allow you to create one for free if you want to on their website. Adobe Stock and dreams Time do not have official approval processes. You really just our upload in your pictures, and if they accept them, they accept him and they're on your portfolio. Shutter stock, however, does it a little differently. There is an approval process to get started, but they've made it easier over the years. Um, currently, all you have to do is submit anywhere from 1 to 10 of your best photos, and then when your photos air approved, your account becomes active. Um, you have to have at least one photo approved, but they recommend they say, up to 10 just so that they can kind of see the work that you can do. So let's start looking a little deeper at each of these sites. First of all, we have shutter stock. Shutter stock is probably one of my favorite contributor sites. They are probably one of the biggest and larger databases out there, and I feel like it has a huge buyer pool. There's a lot of people on their They take editorial photos, so I actually see a lot of my photos used here by news and media stations, because I do a lot with editorial photos. Shudder stocks, really one of the best websites to be a contributor aunt. They just sell so much. Editorial is wealthy other commercial stuff and I get probably most of my downloads per month come from shutter stock, and it stays pretty consistent with them. Almost all my editorial photos get sold on their site. The buyers on this website tend to be more commercial images, but I actually see a lot of different types of photos here as well. A lot of landscapes and conceptual photos are also being sold. It has a really great range of buyers. I've seen stuff on here sell for individuals, on social media as well as different newspapers and as well. It's like small companies. Shutter stock really just is kind of an overall great range of fire database. Now the other great thing about shutter stock is they have a great contributor community and a great blawg. Their block comes out and they have different suggestions and different things that they're seeing cell or different recommendations from photographers on things that you can do. The Blawg is really need is, especially at the beginning of the year. They have blogged articles on like the most sold photos from last year. The top photos, the top keywords so they could have a lot of information, and it's kind of fun to read and follow. The next company I want to go into is Adobe Stock. Adobe Stock also is a pretty large database of images. They're still kind of getting up and going. They have quite a bit, but they're still growing and getting bigger. I believe shutter stocks probably a little bigger than they are. Their stock database actually integrates with the adobe applications and software. So if you're a graphic designer in your creating an add on photo shop and you can actually go to Adobe Stock through photo shop and get different photos and images and look at stuff and directly imported into the software, Adobe actually has kind of a leg up in this where you get a lot more graphic designers going through and buying their stuff. Because of this integration, they tend to focus more on the commercial end, and they do not take editorial images. This is the one downside to Adobe. I wish they did take editorial. That's kind of something that I really like to do, so it's kind of hard when they don't take half the images I'm creating. But the buyers tend to be more on the graphic design end and creatives because it's integrating with that software. Let's look a dreams time. The reason I chose dreams Time is really it's just easier to get approved. It's a great site for beginners. You can upload and actually get your photos approved and on and selling pretty quick. A lot of people find that when they get on to dreams time, they start seeing sales there sometimes before other websites they don't have as many buyers, though, for is adobe and shutter stock. But generally people do pretty well in this site. I really don't sell as much on dreams time as I do the other sites, but I hear a lot of photographers actually do pretty well with dreams time. Maybe it's the type of photos I take. It's just not for their database. I sell more on the adobe and shutter stock and then I do with dreams time. The great thing I do like with dreams time is there a fun contributor community where they do competitions every month and they have a lot of suggestions and logs and things like that that you can read and just seeing what people are needing, you could go take photos of what people actually want now dreams. Time does take editorial, and I do sell quite a bit of editorial on dreams time. I probably actually sometimes some or editorial than I do commercial. I again, it just doesn't have the same amount of downloads per month. It's still worth my time. And I still continue to do it because it's pretty easy to get through. Um, and the upload keywords really, really easy. So I really do like dreams time, even though I'm not making as much money on there, they really are good stock company. I do want to mention really quickly. I stock I stock is Getty images. Getty images actually has their own website, their own database. I stock his own by giddy, and it is separate. I'm not a part of Getty images, but I do contribute to Istock Now. I don't want to get into Istock too much. I stock is a great site. I actually make a lot of money for my stock, Justus, Much as I probably do from adobe and shutter stock. I started a great contributor site, but their website is really kind of hard to use, and their key wording is just not the best out of all the sites. I think they've tried to make some changes over the years, and it's not necessarily gotten better. It's gotten worse on trying to figure out what they're looking for when you're uploading photos, and I just don't think it's right to be doing that when you're first starting out. But once you get experience and once you want to get in there a little bit, you could probably start a portfolio and it's not that bad. It's just not something I would recommend for beginners. All right, so there you go. There's the different sites that I went over with you guys. My recommendation would be to start with dreams time. And if you want to continue in do shutter stock in Adobe stock, you should. I actually contribute to all four of these sites. I am not a fan of being exclusive to any one site. I'm a contributor, each of them when I download my photos, I have this way of setting up where I open all four tabs up. Start downloading the photos on each site, title on each site and keyword on each site and Adam to my portfolios on each of the sites . So my portfolios look very similar to one another on these sites. Unless it's for editorial, of course, that Adobe doesn't take, but overall, I think they're pretty good, and you could make some pretty good money with it. So it's totally we're checking out, um, started dreams time. But if you want to get into shutter stock in Adobe, go on ahead. It's really cool to see what sells at what website, so good luck and we'll see in the next lesson. 5. Editing and keywording: Hey, guys, let's start looking a little bit further into submitting your photos. This lesson I will be focusing on editing and key wording, and then in the next lesson, we're going to go into more how to submit your photos. The topic of adding your photos is such a large concept and would take up a class or two just in and of itself. I'm just going to focus right now on some of the basic editing that I do for photos. I personally work on photo shop CC, but I know many photographers who use light room or even gimp. Gimp is a free software you can download. And actually, as many of the same tools is Photoshopped. If you're gonna do phone photography, there are also a lot of APS out there, but I've played around with a lot of, um um, there's some pretty good ones that people like, but my favorite app is snap seed. I like snap seed because I found it's pretty user friendly. And it's the one app that I found that allows me to go in and make all the edits I need and control some of the basic edits on all of my photos, and this one app allows me to do all of it. Pretty simply, they even have a healing brush. It's not as good as Photoshopped, but it does work in a pinch. As a rule of thumb. Don't filter your photos like you would on social media. I would recommend not putting the filtering on there unless it's maybe a light filter process or something that just enhances the photo a little more. The filtering you see on social media has a place, but not all businesses or companies want filters on their photos. You'll better sell your photos or have a bigger clientele if you keep your photos true to itself. And if the final buyer wants filters and they can add it themselves, here's a list of the basic edits that I do before cementing them to stock photography. So I'm going to start a screenshot so you guys can follow kind of what I'm doing. As I'm talking to you about it. I'm gonna open up these photos of a friend of mine. We decided to go on a photo shoot. She was my model, and we're doing women in business or women and technology was the theme of the photo shoot . Now that I have these up, let's look at light now, like a make or break a photo. However, you're always wanting to make sure that you're taking a good photo with good light before editing. Edits are just there to tweak what you're already doing, not necessarily changing the entire photo. So always start with a really good photo. I first start with my brightness, my contrast and the highlights or shadows of the image. These could help with your lighting and help enhance what you do and don't want to be seen . The next thing I always go to is the coloring. What's the temperature? The 10 to the white balance of the photo, and this is just a personal preference. But I always play around with it just to see what looks best in each photo. One of my favorite tools is the healing brush and the patch tool thes Go through and take out some of the areas of the image that are a little distracting or things that you just don't want to be seen in the photo. This cleans up the photo tremendously now, sometimes you can't take out things or it's too harder will take too much time. So that's where I really just go in and start cropping things out. If I really need to. This photo right here I have a lot of stuff that I'm taking out. Then I realized I probably could just crop this because there's the screen on the computer and I don't want any of that scene. So rather than fixing the screen, it's easier just to crop it down. And like in one of the previous lessons we talked about re sizing, I always go through and resize my photo. So I'm going to go through and take out all of the different logos, and there's things that are just distracting. Make sure you go through sometimes with a fine tooth comb, because there is sometimes certain things that start popping out that have logos, and you just don't want them to be there. So here's the before and after of the first photo. Now this photo, you can see that I've cropped it just to kind of take out that electrical box in the corner there. So when I cropped it down, you don't see it as much. It also kind of focuses more on the individual or the model. I've also gone through and taking out some of the logo's on the cup as well as brightened up the photo credit bit, especially in the back corner. There knew that plants. There's quite a bit of shadow, and I just kind of wanted to even it out a little bit. Not a whole lot of changes, but it just kind of softens and brightens up the picture a little bit. So now in the next photo, you can see I've brightened it up quite a bit. In fact, you can see the crop down on it is a little closer where it just kind of focuses in more on this subject themselves. So now it's not just this big white photo focuses the hand on the phone and the technology , So the next thing I want to look at in submitting your photos is key wording. Your photos. Keyword is a tag on your photo that helps the buyer find your photo. The sites will allow you to keyword up to 50 words for each photo, but you don't need to always use that many words. In fact, you can get in trouble if you quote unquote spam your keywords. So you do want to make sure that your keywords are valid and they are actually descriptions of your image. Most of the sites, like shutter stock, have suggested keywords based on the images that you've downloaded and these can work. I've used them before. I have a special trick, however, that I learned. And it's the way that I keyword all of my images. There is a website called Mikey Werder. It is a search tool that allows you to get your keywords based on the description of your image. I'm gonna walk you through this website on how to use it. So the website is my key order dot com. And as you come up, you can see you can search Ah, the description of your photos. So I'm gonna put in the search bar woman on phone. Since that's the description of my photo. And then as I enter in, you can see all of these keywords now on the left. It automatically chooses 50 of them, but I go through these keywords one by one. I will go through each of them because some of them just don't make sense for my image. Somehow just some random words like Juan or isolated, which aren't really descriptions on my image. I'm also taken off Caucasian because my models not Caucasian as I take them off that will leave room for others. So if I want to go through some of these other words, I can see what else might actually make sense. So we're gonna export thes and as you see, it puts him in a box. And I can ADM, Or on the end of some of the other descriptions for my image that didn't make it into these boxes. So you're not just stuck on the keywords that they want to toe have you can add your own too. So as I put in some extra keywords, I'm gonna highlight this. Copy it. And now I'm ready to go and paste it in to the stock site. Now that you've looked at editing and key wording were ready to upload our photo 6. Submitting : Okay, so submitting your photos, we just looked at editing your photos and key wording your photos. And now you're ready to be submitting your photos. Most of the websites that I have encouraged you to sign up for are very, very similar to one another. I'm gonna walk through shutter stocks, upload process, so just to kind of get a feel for it. So I'm on the front page and I'm gonna find the upload images tab, select my files in late for them to upload. Now that these have uploaded, I could hit next. And this is where we're going to start doing descriptions and key wording. So I will go through each of these so you can actually click and batch at it multiple photos of the time. So if you have the same description on each photo, then it's probably a good thing, um, to batch. So you don't have all the work that you need, Teoh. So let's start with image type. It's gonna ask which it is photo or illustration, and also commercial or editorial. Well, these air commercial, I have a model release, so I'm not too worried about this one. We're gonna do a description. I was a woman on phone in coffee shop category. Well, this is the different categories that would select it. Now shutter stock allows you to have two categories. I believe most do. There's a lot of different types of categories. I think I'm going to choose business and finance because it would fall under that category . We could do food and drink, but really, the topic of I would say of the photo is not as much food and drink more about people or being around business and technology. So there is another category called technology, So I'm gonna put under business finance as well as technology. I think it will fit into both of those categories. More options. You could do notes for your reviewer, nudity or rated R now model releases. So I have to have a model release, and I have to download a model release, so I have a model release form. These are ones that I pre downloaded. I can attach the model release or at a new one. So here's our key words, and as we learned just in the last lesson, we go to my key worker and copy them. And now I'm ready to paste my keywords. And it does say that there's some spelling errors. As you see, I have 46 out of 50 now. It won't really matter. I can click on it. Just corrected. Or I could just get rid of it. So we're just gonna get rid of it. And now I can hit summit, and now we're ready to upload our photos and wait for the reviewer to get back with us. 7. Class Project: What do I take photos of?: Hey, guys, let's look a little closer at what kind of photos to take it. Such a big world out there with so many different opportunities. But as a photographer, you kind of have to start narrowing down what kind of focus you want. There's a lot of different trends, and the trends are always changing. It's good to keep up with the trends. I'm on the shutter stock blawg, which they always post a trends of the year, and it's always good to get ideas from that and just see what people are actually buying. The other thing I'm on is social media, and I'm kind of watching what the current culture is looking at. You can kind of get a feel for the different types of photos that people really like just based off of trending images on social media. The question A lot of the times is how do I start? What do I dio and really people sell? And if you want to take photos of people, you have model releases, go for it, just start doing that. It can help. But as a photographer, when I first started getting into stock photography, I was a little worried and nervous about taking photos of people. It was just a new realm. I had been doing family photography, but to do it for commercial purposes was a little bit overwhelming. So I just decided to start looking around my house. I had all these different holiday decorations I was grabbing and just made the still life images of holidays that still sell today. I actually still get quite a few downloads whenever the holiday comes around, so I would recommend just looking around your house. What can you start with? Are there still life images that you could make and just to get your stuff up and starting to sell? So let's look a little more at the different trends, as well as the different categories that really do well with stock photography. First business business is always a big thing. People sitting around a table or small business owner working. It's kind of the new up and coming thing toe have these individuals doing the business of the modern person. The next thing is technology, computers, gaming, people on the phone. There's a lot with technology you can dio Medical is a big one to prescription drugs, doctors, herbal products for alternative therapies. Even in this world, you can get into health and help food and healthy heart and all of that. There's a lot in that area you might be able to work with. Concepts like recycling or plastic free are still really big. Nowadays, it's kind of that whole idea of going green. What is going green look like to You can capture images of objects that are plastic free or made from recycled products. Other concepts. Adventure things like sports and vacations or even famous landmarks or events. And these landmarks and events don't necessarily have to be Paris or something, a huge that everyone knows. It may be something in your own small town that you can look at a lot of times. Stock photography is just trying different categories of photos to see what works. To me, it's like a game. What category? Sell the best. Where can I focus in more time on you'll take photos that air just never downloaded. I have some amazing photos that have never been sold. I don't look at it is a waste of time for those photo shoots. I look it is knowing what area not to focus on anymore. I've taken pictures of food. Food tends to do really well on instagram and social media, but I haven't had a whole lot of luck selling that was stock photography. I've had fun taking the photos, and the photos are really fun to post on social media. But I just don't sell these categories well in stock. It may just be me. Maybe it's the type of food and choosing, but I don't think these categories sell well for me, because if there's really an oversaturated market for food photographers, there's a lot of food photographers out there. It's kind of like flower photography. There's a lot of people taking pictures of flowers, a lot of people taking pictures of food. There's a lot more people taking these types of photos than maybe business or technology. So now it's time to start taking photos yourself. Your project is going to be to sign up for at least one stock company. You're gonna take three photos now you can use the photo recommendations that I have given in this class, or you can come up with some on your own. Just make sure their commercial or editorial worthy pulse these photos in the class project and let me know if you would like some critique. Then you're gonna use these photos to start your portfolio on the stock contributor account that you've signed up for. I would love to connect with you guys on social media. And if you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask. I'm always here to help you, and I can't wait to see what you guys create.