Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey, Chris. Yes? Do you mind if I take pictures of you? Not at all, man. Go ahead. All right, sounds good. Hi, my name is Blake Bronstad and I'm a lifestyle photographer out of Santa Barbara, California. Today, I'm going to teach you guys how to make candid lifestyle imagery that is commercially viable. I've invited a few friends over, a typical Sunday afternoon get together. What I'm going to do is I'm going to sort of walk through that event and show you how to pick various locales and subjects and turn them into ad lib, impromptu photo shoots, little mini photo shoots. A scene here, a scene there, and how eventually, through some light editing, we can turn these images into commodities. As you may know, there are a lot of websites out there that buy and sell photography. Snapwire is the one that caught my eye. It provided a platform for me to essentially take all this imagery I had created over the past few years. It opens the door to a whole and other world of income. Snapwire is a platform that we'll really go over a lot today that helps you in doing so. For your project in this class, I would like for you to create a sort of environment that we're going to have here today and create something that is viable. Let's grab our camera, and let's go see what kind of pictures we can take.
2. What is Lifestyle Photography?: The way I personally got started is I used to just bring my camera to any sort of get together, whether it was an evening party or a daytime thing like this, I would be shooting pictures left and right of my friends, of things that they were doing, getting to know the camera, learning the ins and outs of manual shooting, and accumulating skills that I hadn't had before, becoming a better photographer early. Eventually, you stop wanting to just post those to social media and maybe they end up sitting on your hard drive. This course is to teach you how to make the transition, how to take the images that if you're that person, if you are like how I am, and you're always shooting, you're going to have all these images on your hard drive, the point of this course is to figure out what to do next with those images. So, let's talk about lifestyle photography a little bit more. To me, it's sort of the ability to convey an emotion in an image. It's not so much about the product in the image unless of course you're shooting for a brand. But I think to begin, it's important to know that the images that generally sell well are those that do convey an emotion. It adds to the ambiguity of the picture itself, and that's what makes it so sellable. What helps them sell the most is the photo's ability to give you that vibe, that summer feeling, or that winter feeling, or that cozy by the fire feeling. Whatever it is that the buyer is looking for, if that image which is often aided by the lighting, in my opinion natural lighting, really lends itself well to stock lifestyle images. But it's just the ability for those images to give people that feeling. So, some specific images would be something like the top-down food shot. Maybe we have a bunch of kebabs or burgers or hot dogs on a barbecue, and there's fire and there's smoke, and there's hands in there and people are grabbing at the colorful peppers, and people are grabbing at the buns, and there's maybe a couple of drinks around. Getting a top-down shot of all that stuff in motion, but high quality good lighting with all these different kind of colors popping out, we can do a little light editing and show you how to make those things pop. That's the kind of image that might lend itself well to somebody writing a blog post, for instance. It's the kind of thing that people talk about, post about, and they use for marketing materials in their campaigns. It's the kind of thing a lot of people could potentially be interested in. Another example of an image that sells well is April. It's a month that if you go on the Internet and you go on to some of the websites I go on, you'd probably see a whole bunch of stuff about Coachella, or one of these music festivals, whether it's in California or somewhere else. You'd see a ton of the same photos. You'd see the Flamingo pool toy, the colorful cocktails, bathing suits, happy smiling faces. Basically, just anything that can happen whether it's Sunday in the backyard or it's at a music festival in the desert. It's just all of these elements coming together to create an emotion or a vibe that a lot of companies are really looking to employ. The emotion, it's exuberance, it's happiness, and it's the feeling that summer is coming. If you're a kid, it's the summer break. If you're an adult, maybe it's that trip to the river you're going to take with your friends or you're going to go to the lake and you're going to go boating or you're going to go to the beach and you're going to hang out, have a drink with your family or your friends. It's that kind of feeling, the sort of feeling that everyone has deep down inside that they get excited for something they're looking forward to, and that's what, in my opinion, is commercially viable. It's an image that brings that feeling from the inside out when you look at it. So, another thing to keep in mind would be to shoot things that have a certain level of ambiguity, but also lastability, something that will actually last into the future if you want to hold onto these shots and potentially sell them a year from now. Also, trendy things. I mean, things that are currently on trend are going to be popular for a short time, generally, whether it's fashion or that desert festival, and the flamingo floatie that everyone's got, or it's a particular food item if you're a foodie. The great thing about using an environment like this, a casual environment, is it's something that you're going to be constantly immersed in. Assuming you get out and you do these sorts of things in your life which I presume you do, you're always going to have more and more and more opportunities to create these type of images. You will be able to do this. Even if you don't think you're capable, you will be able to go out or go home or wherever it is you may go with your camera in hand, and you'll be able to create these sort of images that we create here in this class today.
3. Gear and Props: As I said before, you can use any camera from your smartphone to a Hasselblad medium format camera. But it doesn't necessarily matter what you're using if you're shooting the backyard environments with natural light. If you have just the technique and some of the right equipment, you can make images that could end up in a magazine. Today, I'll probably take some shots with my iPhone just to demonstrate an end product that is achievable for everybody who has a smartphone, not just people who have larger cameras. I will also use my Sony A7R II, it's a mirrorless camera that's my usual kit, or a Sony A6000 which is AM crop sensored version essentially, and a series of probably just prime lenses. My go-to lenses are wide Rokinon prime lens, Sony prime lenses, Sony Zeiss 55 1.8, and occasionally, the Sony 70-200 telephoto lens. But for this sort of environment, really, a wide to medium zoom prime lens or a mid range zoom, it could even be a kit lens that comes on my camera kit whether you bought it online or at a camera store. Any of these things are things that you can use to create the sort of images that we'll be doing. The beauty of this project, this course, is that you don't need a whole lot like I said. But to come prepared with a few items, anything that you might have lying around your house, or your friends might have lying around, it certainly helps to aid you in producing images that are useful. Some of the products or objects that I've brought here today are a hammock, a number of clothing items, some tote bags, backpacks, wallets, accessories that people can use that sort of enforce an activity that is related to the feeling, or the vibe, or the culture, or the setting, or whatever it is that you're trying to sell, your trying to commodify. So, these are products that somebody might use at a pool. Maybe it's a nice towel, maybe it's a pair of colorful sunglasses that represents summary fashion, or a food item that might be useful in selling food-related stock imagery. That could be a kebab, or some colorful peppers, or some dips, a platter, or an entire tablescape full of different colored things. Maybe it's a really rustic table, wood table. Maybe you have an Italian granite table with a beautiful design on it. Anything that kind of pops out, those are the things that I feel are generally the most popular among buyers. So today, we will be using a combination of our environment, what we have available to us here at this house, and some of the products that I brought with me as I mentioned before. These are just examples of things that you can grab from your house, from your friends to use on your project.
4. Shooting: Top Down Food Shots: So, this is looking like a pretty good tablescape or a preparation table save. A lot of unprepared, uncooked meats and vegetables here just waiting to turn into stock photos. Use a fairly wide lens, close down the aperture, 7.1. Make sure you get everything sharp. Sometimes, in a case like this, if the table was higher and I couldn't stand on it, I would get a monopod or a tripod and sort of connect it to the camera and kind of hold it up above here almost like a selfie stick but in this case, probably not necessary. I could just stand on it. Put on auto focus, of course. Always shoot raw if you intend to edit. Raw files have a lot more flexibility than jpeg, although they do take up a lot of space on your computer. Something to be aware of. Shooting on aperture priority but everyone has their preference. What I'm doing is I'm using a single point focus and then recomposing the frame to include as much of the table as possible. Straight down is my preference. I see a lot more photos sawing straight down in that angles. Not in every case, but it's kind of a kitschy look, especially when you have a lot of color popping off the table. I might change lenses in a little bit and get something with a bit more of a narrow frame. It's a blur at the background, but for now this wider lens is going to do pretty well. I'd even get some feet in there, some white Converse. A lot of times, what you can do, shots like this, even though I'm hanging off the table a little, I will just copy and paste essentially the table in Photoshop, so that the entire frame is filled with the slate table and it will emphasize the food and it will give it more of a symmetrical look, which I find that symmetry, generally, lends itself well to tablescapes or really anything stock. Make sure when shooting with products in the frame, to keep those labels out as much as possible. So fortunately, somebody took the time to turn all the labels away from me, the center of the table for me and I can just focus on the rest of the stuff here and if I need to later, if it's like a really tight shot, I can just Photoshop out the actual logo from the top of the bottle and I generally try to shoot at a lower ISO. That grants you more flexibility in post-production and better color reproduction, which was something like this. It's kind of ideal because everything is so colorful. You won't have to spend as much time pushing up the colors in Lightroom or Photoshop or whatever your software choice is. If you can just capture them all now. Maybe move the flowers out of here for a couple of shots. This is honestly a perfect combination of food items because everything is a different sort of color. A lot of it is very summery and with this nice flat lighting that we have because of the shade of this umbrella. We have the perfect tablescape. The most bang for your buck is just going to be to keep shooting, assuming the setup is to your liking, which is very much is and you definitely want to check the frame every once in a while and see if it's missing, maybe this area over here could use a cup and some garnish and we have the perfect summer layout here. But the detail shots, these are the kind of shots that are great on stock websites. Colorful, detail oriented, garnishes, the texture of the meat and the artichokes, and later, depending on what sort of photography you want to do, these are even good portfolio shots. All right. I think we have enough shots of the tablescape. I think I'm going to let my friends start to actually cook this stuff that they bought and I will get some shots of them cooking.
5. Shooting: People and Food: So Mr Chris here, throwing some meat on the grill. I'm just going to lean over his shoulder and take some photos. Just get him doing his thing, get some smoke. Hopefully, get the meat as it's changing colors, get some top-down shots with a wider lens, maybe some pictures of him if he'll let me. Hey Chris. Yeah. Mind if I take pictures of you? Not at all man. Go ahead. All right. Sounds good. Since it's all in the shade, I don't have to diffuse the light at all. Get some shots of him preparing that stuff, throwing it in. Sometimes blurred shots are nice. I think I'm going to switch to manual because the exposure is changing a lot as I'm taking these photos from above. Oftentimes, when you're shooting a scene that's dynamic, especially one with a lot of black in it, some cameras tend to overexpose, so I'm going to shoot manually so that it doesn't change exposure on me. That looks perfect. The shots I plan on getting depend on the situation at hand. If you would like to be very mechanical about it, methodical, you can arrange a get-together, with everybody understanding that the point of the get-together, at least for you, is to create a stockpile of imagery. However, in this case, it's just a friendly backyard barbecue and I'm just the resident photographer so to speak. So, I'm here to seize every opportunity as it arises. There's not really a right or wrong when it comes to shooting this sort of thing. You just run-and-gun, do the best that you can when you're doing it, and surely end up with some images that you can sell, or some images that you can use somewhere. But putting a little bit of effort into the staging of things is something that we generally keep in mind. The more that we do this, the more that we begin to know what to look for and know how to prepare things, hence the nice preparation of the tablescape beforehand, and now, the nice arrangement of food on the actual barbecue.
6. Shooting: People and Products: So now, we're going to take some shots of my girlfriend, who is kind and often available to me for product shooting in this hanging hammock chair. I'm going to switch lenses for this. I want to do more of a zoomy lens, I'm going to do a portrait lens so I can glow out the background a little bit more and give it more of that sort of editorial look. Looking good. Got a nice smile, got a cocktail in her hand. Focusing away from the camera generally looking for candid shots because, I don't know, they kind of exude life style and emotion a little bit more than a stage shot where somebody is looking at the camera. You don't want it to look like stark imagery. It's kind of the idea of lifestyle, I think. We want it to look like the opposite of stark imagery. But sell it on stark imagery websites. So, I typically just get people doing what they're going to do with little direction here and there where needed, like a nice toothy smile, there it is. Maybe we can switch the light position there and this is a cool shot as well for stark because it doesn't even show her face. So, if say she was a friend who didn't necessarily want pictures of her face ending up on some brands blog or website, I could just say hey, put on this hat, or you have a hat had already? Use a hat. I'll take shots from above, and suddenly you're just a body holding a glass of wine. So, I think now we'll move onto the pool. We'll get some different shots of maybe some pool toys and get some different type of summery sort of things, since after all that is what we have here, it's a summer environment. The cheersing is great. You want us to do that again? Yeah. If you guys could cheers, that would be cool. Hold it there actually. All right. I'm going get some really wide shots. I wish those things would huddle together so much. So, using these props because not only are they colorful, but they're summery, and the pool is a good frame because it's easily photoshopable, so we can expand it to be as big as we want. We can make them just a tiny portion of the photo, which makes it good for copy, IDing copy and that sort of thing. If your creative director wanted to have a massive grand scale sort of pool scene with the tiny people drinking cocktails in the corner, then I could easily just expand this Photoshop copy all these flamingos, leave room for some verbiage and they can kind of run with it. I think some different angles here, so I want 20 pictures of the same thing now. Get some jewelry in there because we have, again, more variety. It's a cool bracelet, kind of present stylish, Southern California vibe. A lot of these photos are not hyper staged and I'm not saying that that makes them better than stage photos. But considering the environment, considering that this is a casual backyard lifestyle photo shoot that anybody can do, that you guys are doing, I think that they'll turn out pretty well. Maybe you guys can smile and have a good time. There it is. Because you're letting loose a bunch of tiny flamingos floaties. So, that's clearly a good time. Cheersing again, some call it generic. It is. No, I don't think so. I love it. I love that we have the teal and the hot pink. Hot cold combination is always a good one. It's pleasing for the eye. It was easy today, and I think it'll be easy for you when you try this because the light-hearted, candid feeling of this and the summer vibe, that these are the type of shots that we generally want people to be happy, happy and excited and big smiles and that sort of thing. Normally it's easy to get pictures of people with these cheesy, super posed, fake looking smiles. But I think if you can put a little fun into it, and yeah, I can be a little awkward when you got a camera up against somebody's face and you're asking him to do things that maybe hold that pose or smile for me, and then you tell them what you want and then you make them laugh. That's what I always think. You just make them laugh. You say something funny, or hopefully it's funny, or you ask them to do something that's funny, and that's the kind of thing that I think sells us. Something that's so true to life that it actually evokes this emotion because you feel like you want to be there or you were there or it's an aspirational image, so to speak. That's what lifestyle really is to me as Willis. It's aspirational imagery. The kind of stuff I shoot is aspirational. At least that's what I hope for. A lot of people can do lifestyle imagery, your project can be lifestyle imagery that is not necessarily aspirational but evokes a different emotion or maybe it's a scenario that somebody wants to avoid. That's still commercially viable in a lot of cases.
7. The Legal Stuff: Know Your Rights: Now that we have our images, let's talk about licensing. This is really an important factor in selling your images and considering selling your images. This determines who can use your image, for how long they can use your image, how they can use it, who they can give it to, and whether or not you can sell that image to additional buyers. As a photographer, you are in charge. You do make the rules, so to speak. So you can sell an image as a buyout. There's the concept of copyright transfer. When you transfer copyright of one of your images to a buyer, it grants them exclusive usage perpetually. So, that image is no longer yours. You cannot sell it to anyone else. In some cases, they may even want you to get rid of that photo off of your hard drive. On the contrary, there is various other ways that you can grant usage of your image to buyers through limited exclusivity. You can do exclusive use for web use only, for print, for a TV commercial, whatever it is that they want, and then you make the price according to that usage and the copyright is still in your name and you can sell the image to other parties. In addition to exclusive use, there is, of course, nonexclusive or royalty-free. This is probably, for me at least, the most commonly purchased license. Somebody can purchase your image and they can use it on their blog posts, they could use on their Instagram, they can use it on their Facebook page, on their web page. They could turn around and have it in a print advertisement. So, you have to understand that your image can be used in many different places by the same person or company, and if you're all right with that and the price is right, then that is going to be probably the most commonly purchased type of license. The good thing about this type of license is that you can sell it to as many people as possible. Generally, a buyer will understand this and understand that at the price they're purchasing that particular image, they are not granted exclusivity, they are not granted a buyout, there's going to be no transfer of copyright of that image. So, the rights belong to you, they can use it for whatever they see fit, and you can sell it to as many different buyers as possible. With this royalty-free purchasing lies the most lucrative opportunity for most photographers. The same image can sell one, two, five,10 times and that image can be seen across a multitude of platforms and locations by different brands, people, anything. That's exciting. So, therein lies the nature, the spirit of stock photography. Essentially, it's volume-based. You might not make $2,000 on every photo. However, you will sell more photos. The more you put out there, the more you'll receive in return. Eventually, the quality of your work will naturally get better over time with practice, after practicing on this course. The goal is to create this archive of images or add to the archive of images you may already have that you can use in websites like iStock or Getty images, Snapwire, and you can just have this large shop where you are selling images to people all around the world. Now that we've gone over the importance of your own copyright and licensing, it's important to be aware of other brands and trademarks and make sure that when you're shooting and you're framing up these shots, that you're not inadvertently including other brands and things that you don't want to be in the final product. You probably don't want to inadvertently have a brand who is purchasing your photo endorsing another brand or vice versa. You might wonder why some photographers are seemingly giving away full res pictures on the Internet. This type of licensing is called creative commons. It essentially grants royalty-free non-exclusive use of your photo to anybody who wants it. They can use it for anything they want, as many times as they want, and without paying a dime. What that grants the photographer though is a means to lead generation. This might lead to somebody funding your website as creative commons does imply that you will be given credit where this photo was used. So, in addition to lead generation, you have getting your name out there which has its uses sometimes. It does lead to a lot of traffic that comes back to either you or to your stock image website page and this can be useful. Somebody likes your style and they found one of your creative common images, that might link them back to your Snapwire profile page where they can find a whole variety of images to purchase. There's essentially a risk reward balance when it comes to model releases and property releases. These are two very important things to be aware of when you're taking photos of this nature. As I mentioned before, taking picture of somebody's face isn't identifiable is a much more low-risk approach because that person is much less likely to approach you at some point when that photo has been sold or license has been granted to somebody, or a company, or somebody to use that photo. They're much less likely to approach you with an issue and say, "Hey, I didn't grant you the rights to use my body in this image where I'm the focal point." But if the person is not the focal point, if they are in the background maybe blurred out in the corner and the focal point is a tree or a car or something else, then that is almost entirely no risk. I don't want to say no risk but it is something that you generally don't need to worry about. This level of intricacy when it comes down to identifying property or models and the need for a release differs. It varies from stock website to stock website. Some websites like Snapwire are a little more relaxed when it comes to getting model releases and that's fine. It's a risk reward level based on what you're willing to do. It is good to be aware of the ins and outs of photography from a legal standpoint. My best practice would be to get model releases and a property release from not only this location owner but from my friends, everybody who is letting me take a photo of them today. Not necessarily everybody who I'm going to use but just everybody who's here. That way, I'm protected. In a case like this, I might have everybody sign a model release and the property owner sign a property release just in case. My best practice is to bring with me the Snapwire app that they provide. It's just the easiest way to maintain records of all the model and property releases that I obtain along the way. So, today, after I shoot everybody, I'll just have my friend's sign a model release with the date, location, a little summary of what's going on and I'll have the property owners sign one and I'll have it stored on my phone. I can print it later if I need to or not. I know that's a lot to remember. We just went through rights and your protection. Now, let's get to the fun part. Let's edit and upload these photos to a stock photo website.
8. Editing: Food Shots: Let's open Lightroom. Import those photos into our catalogs and begin editing. As you can see here, I have all the photos from today. I'm going to go to develop, and let's start with this picture. Some of the food prep shots on that slate table outside under the umbrella, the nice flat lighting will make it a little easier to get some satisfying, flat, colorful images. I'm going to use a preset. If you're not familiar with Photoshop Lightroom presets, they are criteria or saved adjustments that you can import from online, or create yourself, or import and then edit, whichever you wish. I'm going to go with this preset that I've created here called Brighten and Warm. Brighten up this image of steak and watermelon, and I'm going to bring in a little more warmth up here on the top right. Lower the highlights, that white plate kind of throwing us off, a little too bright. Keep exposure down just a smidge. Up the contrast, make it pop. A little clarity, make the details come out, and I'd like to have a clean image. I like to have the least amount of distracting elements in the photos I can. So, I'm going to crop and take out the stone ground from beneath the table, just here. Also getting in closer on food shots, especially when colorful like this, often does make it more marketable. There we have it. And there's a grease stain here, I'm going to use the spot removal tool to get rid of, and vuala, works quite well. Don't always have to take the picture into Photoshop, and we're good. I like this one. It's pretty simple. We got some reds, some detailed meat that has yet to be cooked, watermelon, and a knife. Pretty usable. Now, let's go on to the next image. This shot, a little more wider precooked food shot. I'll use a different preset here, one that brings out the contrast, a little moodier, really colorful vibrant preset, and a little too much. So, I'm going to bring up the exposure a bit. Bring out the shadows a little. Warm it up a little more, there's a lot of blue going on. Want to make it summary and warm as I can. Bring down the whites a little to compensate for those white plates. Up the clarity just a hair, and that looks pretty good. Now, what if I want to take these edits and copy them to another photo knowing that the photos have very similar content and similar writing? I can do that, no problem. I would right click on the thumbnail down here at the bottom. Go to Develop Settings, Copy Settings, choose what I would like, all good, and copy. Now, we can go to another photo. Here we have it. Just a hair wider. Even more food, more stuff on the table. Some drinks in there and I can right-click on that photo thumbnail, go to Develop Settings, and paste, and there we have it. The same settings apply to this photo. It's a little brighter but it looks very similar. Now, one thing I want to change about this photo. Again, I don't really like the distracting stone elements on the side. There's also some stains on the table. So, I'm going to actually take this one into Photoshop and make a few adjustments there. I would right-click on that thumbnail again, go Edit In, Photoshop CC 2015. Now, if you get the Photoshop CC package, it's called the photographer's package that includes both Lightroom and Photoshop and that's a pretty good deal for people who want all the editing power you generally need, all in one place. So, now that we're in here, I'm going to go up here. I'm going to do Polygonal Lasso Tool. Actually, I'm going to crop in a little first. I want to get this plate all the way at the edge of the frame. There we go. I'll go back to that Lasso Tool and highlight or select this area down here. Now, I'm going to use predictive content aware fill to fill that for me. It uses the information around the highlighted area to predict what it thinks you want there and it works pretty well most of the time. Press OK, and as you see there, it's worked quite well here. Now to the top. Work our way around this vase, delete, enter. That's not always perfect, as you can see here, it's copied some of the vase. So, I'm going to leave it selected. I'm going to go to the clone stamp tool. I'm going to hold down the option key to define the source to copy. Do it up here, give me plenty of space, and draw in using this information up here, down here. Fortunately, this slate table is consistent throughout, so it makes this really easy, and Command D for deselect, and there we have it. Now, maybe you want to get rid of a few of these stains. You can use this Content-aware to lasso these stains, delete, enter, works pretty well. I'm going to go ahead and file, save this image at this point, and it will take it right back to Lightroom where we started, right there with my collection. Perfect. Now, let's go on and edit some more. I think that's good on the food prep scene and maybe we'll move on to a barbecue shot. Let's see. This looks usable. How about this one? All right. We can do a bright and warm here again, it's looking really dark. Fortunately, I shot it at a lower SO of 200. You can shoot even lower if you'd like, which gives you lots of space and makes your files more malleable. Also, which helps is shooting in raw format. You can see down here the extension is.ARW which is Sony's raw format. I'm going to bring in a little bit more warmth. Bring down the highlights, so we have some overexposed highlight areas like those peppers. Bring up the contrast, a little bit of clarity, and the shadows, and the overall exposure, and that looks pretty good. Now, it looks quite thrown off here. It's a weird angle, so I'm going to go down and use this really handy tool, the Upright tool, which is fairly new in Lightroom. I'm going to press Auto and it will automatically use the lines in the photograph to predict where you would like it, and it's done a really good job here, I think this looks pretty good. I could leave it as it is, kind of like the garnish and the corner. I could crop it down, get a little closer, put a little more emphasis on the hand and the tool that he's using, and there we have it. A pretty good, I'll be a generic, barbecuing shot. Now, we'll go on to another type of photo or maybe we'll get one here. One of Chris holding this food that he's prepared for us. Looks pretty good as it is. You could really just brighten it, do some contrast and color. I'm going to, just for consistency's sake, use one of these two presets. I think that looks pretty good, pretty bright in summary, very cheerful, by warming up just a little more. Crop tool, and change the angle, and make it a little straighter. Get rid of some of these distracting elements down at the bottom, and there we go. It's a pretty good shot. Kind of shows summer fashion. It's got some bright colors, some good patterns on. It's very relevant to the fashion of today really, and of course the barbecue action. So, we have a little bit of multiple marketable qualities in this photo.
9. Editing: People Shots: Now, I'm going to go on and get a different type of shot. Here is shot of my friend Izabel. She has a pretty cool hair style. She's configured before coming over, and I'm going to apply that same filter to that, and then make the adjustments, warm it up quite a bit, and that looks pretty nice. You can get in, a little tighter, maybe reduce the clarity to give it a little less distraction in the background, a little more of a glow in there. It looks pretty good, shows a Southern California Coachella ask fashion, and a really cool summary hairstyle. So, now I will go on and do another shot, let's see, we have Lauren here in this hammock, got some good shots of Lauren. Let's do this one, and I'm want to actually use one of these full film presets, and I'm going to tweak it a bit. So, we have a lot of options here, sort of these KD Portrait Presets. I'm going to choose one, looks fairly natural I think. From there, I will raise the temperature again. Okay. We have a very warm summary glow. I'll lower the clarity a little bit, give it that sort of angelic blur. Lower the contrast a little, highlights just a little raised shadow, maybe a little bit, of a less contrasty approach to this image. Bring down the vibrancy, don't want it to be too colorful in this case. I think that's looking pretty good, I might bring down the crop to just cut off the top of her hat. Make it even more simple, do a local adjustment sharpness Clarity. Make that yellow, lemon peel pop out a bit, if we can. There we have it. That's looking pretty good to me. So, we will go on to the next shot. Let's do this one. Add a little bit of some jewelry in there, more of a close-up on the cocktail. There's really a number of things we could do to this. I'm just going to apply this bright and warm filter, and I'm going to turn it down, so it's a little extreme, but everyone has their own editing style, and crop up a little. Whatsoever, the emphasis on jewelry and the glass. Rule of thirds, we can get that ring right there on the third, and it's a pretty nice shot. Very summary, very warm, you can see somebody in the background smiling and they have a dress on. There's a lemon in the cocktail, and I think that that's a very marketable image, so I'm going to leave it at that. I'm going to go on to the next shot, shot of Michael and Lauren sitting at the pool, and they've got some cool bright little pool toys there. Got a little bit of some droppings here on this side, so I'm going to crop this one in. Now, I'm going to go with the orange contrast, see it darken, filter there, preset, I'm going to raise the Clarity I think. Raise Shadows quite a bit, and then bag up the exposure. I might go down here to Saturation, maybe I will use this tool and raise the saturation of the Flamingo pool toys. Luminance, maybe I'll darken that a little, just to give the color of them a little more pop. I think that looks pretty good. Yeah. There we have it. Really, that one doesn't take too much effort. I think it'll look cool. Maybe we get rid of some of these droppings with the Spot removal tool. If we really want, we can nitpick and use it all around the photo. But, I think we have a pretty usable image there to go off of. Here's another iteration of that. I thought this was pretty cool, maybe we flip this one, give it a neat look, some really, I don't know, different perspective. We could potentially bring this out in Photoshop, we could copy the stone all the way over, no problem, copy the pool. We could do it on both sides, we can rearrange, or add more, or take away some of the flamingos, we can make space for copy. All these adjustment, so things that you can make each and every one of your image a little more marketable depending on what you're going for, or if a buyer has a particular need. Now, let's go on and do one of these playful splashing pool shots. I'm going to apply the same bright and warm preset that I made here. I've gotten it down to how I always typically like it, so, I use it pretty often. Also refining, as you can imagine. Raise the Contrasts, I'm going to paint down the highlights and the overall exposure, it's a little bright, and maybe bring up the vibrance, it's just the hair, get those nice colors popping, and that's looking pretty good. I like that image a lot. I could crop it in, but I probably won't crop it so much right now. Leave room for any copy, get the maximum resolution. Resolution is very important. When you're exporting photos, you want to export in the largest resolution possible, so that if you do plan to upload it to a stock website, the potential buyer can buy the largest possible version of that image. That'll make sure that you get the most bang for your buck as they do tend to charge by resolution. All right. That's a good shot, very playful, very summary. We'll move on. Now, we have plenty of other opportunities for some shots here, I might do one more before I show you how to upload it to Snapwire. Here's a shot of Lauren I like, I'm going to start by cropping it down a little, center her face. I'm going to brighten and warm that up, on that even more, lower the highlights of the overall Exposure, Clarity and there we go. Pretty warm, pretty summary shot, can get in tighter if we'd like. The bottle is borderline, a little too distinguishable but in this case, we will run with it. There you have it. These are the edit, so I'm going to choose. I'm going to go through and select each one that I would like to export, all shots that I edited here. I'm going to go to File, Export, I'm going to go ahead and just send them out to the desktop there, and it'll be easy to find. To resize to fit, if you uncheck this, I'll export it in the full resolution, that's what I recommend. Make sure you're exporting it 300 DPI. That is the typically sought after print resolution for most buyers. I'm going to press Export. Now, you can see the files are exporting here, and in a few minutes we'll have them all ready to go.
10. Selling Your Images: All right guys. Now that we have all of our photos edited and exported to the desktop, let's go ahead and choose one to upload to Snapwire. Now, here we are at Snapwire's homepage, I'm going to go up here, click on my account, and go to my profile. Here is my main profile page, where you can see my websites, my name, my stats, and some of the other images I haven't uploaded prior to today. Let's go to upload photos, and go ahead and select the photo. We'll do this one, drag it to the upload module. Now that the photo is uploaded, let's go ahead and enter some descriptive keywords here. This'll make the photo more findable for buyers. It's already going to pop up in the feed and on your profile, but the more keywords you put in here, the more likely a photo will be found. Now, of course, Snapwire actually does have software that goes and does this for you, but it won't do it immediately. So, your photo will be hard to find and must you do this initially, yourself. So, poolside, pool, flamingos, floaties, cocktail, drink, wine, friends, summer, heat, water, California. That'll do for now. This is my photo and I have the rights to sell it. Make sure to check that box, assuming it is correct. And yes, there are recognizable people. And yes, I did remember to get model release forms filled by them. Submit photo. There we have it. You can see the photo is here, in your profile, ready to be purchased. That's it, guys. Now, go out, create your own imagery. If you don't already have a profile on Snapwire, or another stock image website, I urge you to go do so, and start making some extra money. Thanks for tuning in and I appreciate your time.
11. Wrap Up: Now that we have the tools and the know-how, pretty straightforward, right? I want you guys to go forth and create. Upload it to the project gallery and myself, along with other people on the Skillshare community, will happily look at your images, get feedback, and we can sort of communicate and start a dialogue, and figure out how together we can create really commercially viable stuff.
12. Explore Photo Classes on Skillshare:
Blake Bronstad, Photographer
