Turn Your Life into a Living : Better Stock Photography Series

1. Turn Your Life into a Living: Hi. Do you like taking photos and videos of the things you discover, your activities, food, and friends, and would you be interested in earning some extra money doing so? In this first class in the Better Stock Photography Series Turn Your Life into a Living, I will share my best practices to transform the simple images of your daily life into effective and successful stock imagery. And it really doesn't matter where you are, what you do, and with whom or what you don't do, practically, anything can be a topic. Even this. And what is stock imagery, you ask? In short, it is imagery, photos, videos, and illustrations that clients can license and use for their media or advertising. And the creator, that could be you, receives royalties for these purchases. I'm Lucy Lambriex, an all around creative, based in Amsterdam, living with my love and two cats. And I've been a stock photography and videography creator since 2009. My portfolio currently exceeds 8,000 assets, and I've been paying my models and mortgage from the royalties for years. The class is for you if you like capturing the activities and encounters of your daily life, and if you would like to start earning some extra income, doing so. And it is for existing stock contributors who would like to start selling more. And how much can you earn? Between zero and hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month. And it depends on many factors like client needs, the way you match those needs, the size of your portfolio, and sometimes sheer luck. And with this class, I want to help you increase your odds. A while ago, I created a class for professional and aspiring photographers who want to level up their portrait photography, The Authentic Portraiture Toolkit. With this new class and series, Turn Your Life into a Living, I help you start or improve creating and selling stock imagery. First, you'll identify your topics and style. Secondly, you'll capture some simple activities and things that happen in your daily life. Next, you'll add an idea that will create extra value for your clients. And if you want to capture the people in your daily life as naturally and lively as possible, hop back to the earlier class. Fun fact, you can use your smartphone! For the class and for real. No expensive gear necessary. At the end of this class, you will feel ready to take your daily image making more seriously. And you will know how to turn a simple moment into something more interesting and valuable. Ready to start earning some passive income? Let's get active first. By taking a shower, doing the dishes, or going to a concert. 2. Your Project: Put it into Practice: Like in all of my classes, the project is vital, as it helps you practice and you get an opportunity to get my feedback and that of fellow students, and looking at other students' work and sharing how they may improve will help you all learn even faster. Also, at the end of this video, I'll share an opportunity for you to win a portfolio review. Your class project consists of three exercises, and as soon as you've done the first, you can start uploading. You can download the instructions for future reference. Assignment one from the lesson, find your topics and style. Start your project and share the topics you seem to be capturing most and share what gives you joy in doing so. Also share anything you notice regarding your style. Is there anything in particular you would like to learn and discover? Please don't be afraid to give away your secrets because you are the only one that captures your life the way you do it. So there's no competition when you capture your life. Assignment two, from the lesson, create series, not similars. Create and share a series of three new images that capture an activity from your real life, and it can be anything from cutting vegetables to coding or dancing your head off in the living room. Share these in your project and reflect on how it was to do this. Assignment three from the lesson, let's shoot images with an idea. Shoot a few versions of a regular moment and try to turn it into a little story. Upload it to your project with a few words about this process. And if daily life is not your favorite topic, can you still participate? Certainly, do what you want to do, create your imagery. Try to follow the brief, though. And I will give my $0.02 on whether this could also work as stock. Comment on at least one project of a fellow student and give some constructive feedback. You don't have to upload a complete project all at once. During the class, I will guide you through the exercises that will help you complete the whole project. Please also download the cheat sheet under projects and resources for all the terminology. Win a portfolio review. The first 15 students to complete a project as I described, and to leave me a review for this class can win a portfolio review of ten photos, videos, or illustrations. I will provide feedback on the chosen images, and maybe if necessary, I could point you in another direction. In the next lesson, let's quickly have a look at what stock imagery is, what it is used for, and what it is not. 3. What is Stock Imagery?: In this lesson, I want to share with you what stock imagery is, what it is used for, and by whom. Like with physical goods that are available for sale or distribution in a store, stock imagery is also ready to be sold or rather licensed right away. And like tangible goods, imagery can turn stale, like this hands free pick of me with my good old Nokia. Commercial and free image banks have huge amounts of photos, videos, and illustrations in stock. And many of them also sell music and sound effects. Examples of commercial image banks are Shutterstock, iStock, Getty Images, Adobe Stock, Alamy, and Stocky United. But there are many more. Although there are subcategories, there are roughly two main categories of stock imagery, creative and editorial. If you look at the search results of editorial and creative work on Getty Images, for instance, you can immediately see the difference. Creative is showing ideas and concepts like togetherness, simple living, health issues, love, grief, creativity, cooperation to be used for practically any purpose, including advertising. Creative images don't necessarily look creative. They can be very normal looking like images from your daily life. And there is editorial, featuring imagery of news, current politics, finance, and sports. Only to be used by newspapers and magazines, paper or online to illustrate news items or stories. Most of these images are dated the moment they are posted. In general, creative assets have a longer shelf life and wider applicability than editorial, but the latter can be lucrative as well. You will understand that creative imagery of people and property requires official permission. More on that in the final video. And what is not stock, anything can be stock as long as it is ready and available for license now. At an image bank or perhaps on your own website if you have good SEO. Stock is in store, ready to be licensed, and in case of creative use, it has to be model and property released. A perfect business model for free spirits. One of the main reasons I love creating stock is that everyone in the chain is free, the artist, the image bank, and the customer. I, the artist, I'm free to shoot what I want. I sometimes see myself as a Trojan horse, where I insert a certain type of image into the database of older people, strong women and people of all ethnicities, for instance. That way, improving representation of those groups. Being free also means taking risks and spending money that doesn't always flow back or maybe takes a longer time. But compared to shooting in commission, it makes me a lot happier. And most of the time I earn more. An asset can be sold again and again, and as we say in Dutch, 'Massa is Kassa', or the masses are cash. Ka ching. The image bank is free to curate my work and choose which assets they want to have on offer. The customer is also free to buy what they want. And they can immediately see if an image works or doesn't work. Stock is there now. So who is that customer? Open any newspaper or magazine, paper or online, and items will be illustrated by stock imagery. Visit a website of someone offering services like coaching, and you will find stock photos and illustrations, showing people and expressing concepts. Watch a documentary or reportage and you are most likely to find stock video called B-roll video, used to illustrate a topic or create an atmosphere, but stills too end up on TV. My aunt once phoned me all worried if I knew that a photo of my parents was used in a TV show about intimacy and the elderly. I knew. Additionally, often companies use stock photography and videos and illustration in their communication and even in advertising. And then the assets are licensed exclusively, so no one else can use it for a certain period. Years back, a large Dutch insurance company licensed several of my images, and I made more than $14,000 in a few months. And this photo with my lovely model Hetty has made me more than $10,000, despite it being out of focus and showing the remote control. This bus, with my photo as the ad for a housing facility for the elderly, was riding around in Utah at the time. And the photo was also used as the header of their website. This type of earnings is not normal, but it can happen with patience and persistence. Who doesn't buy stock and why? If a company makes a product, clearly, they cannot use stock to promote it. They want to show the product and choose their own models. Another group of people that doesn't use stock is afraid that perhaps the competition will use the same image, and that is a real risk, but many people don't know you can license stock imagery exclusively for a certain period. And then you are the only one using it. Finally, a large group of naysayers have a disdain for stock and they don't want to be associated with it. And I think they haven't seen what stock can look like these days. More about this and why they can drop this notion in the next lesson, where I'll debunk a big myth about stock imagery. 4. The Truth About Stock Imagery: After learning what stock photography is and who buys it, now let's have a look at why looking down on stock is silly. I can spot stock photos from a mile away. Many people who are not familiar with modern day stock imagery, think it still looks like this with the ever present white background, people fake, smiling, visual stories that are cheesy or don't make a lot of sense. Unnaturally white teeth, unrealistic exchanges between people, unnatural emotions, or too perfect lighting in everyday settings. And it's quite true that this type of imagery is still around and it's still being made. And to be honest, I too have made some very bad, cheesy, crappy imagery. And I still do this, and I think it's okay because we have to learn and making bad stuff will make us improve as well. So even though this crap is still around, most stock photography is not dumb and bad anymore. And even among free stock, you can find lots of quality imagery. And over the past decades, new styles have evolved that are more personal, experimental, and often rougher around the edges. Aa a stock photographer or videographer or illustrator for that matter, you have to approach this quite cleverly. You have to anticipate what might sell, you have to keep up with trends, and sometimes you even have to predict the future. We climb into the client's skin, and we wonder: what can we do to solve their problem? I will elaborate more in the class with a surprising title Tips to Sell More Stock Imagery. The way I got into stock photography was way back when I still had a Flickr account and I posted a self portrait every day. At the time, Getty Images was looking for new talent and they partnered up with Flickr. And they discovered several photographers in this daily self portrait group. And much to my surprise, they reached out to me, too. And many of my portraits were pretty strange, but they still started selling after a while. Even this very strange carrot photo was sold several times. So slowly but surely, I decided to take this more seriously, and I started shooting on a regular basis. And I also started working with models. These weren't trained models or overly pretty people, just normal people, friends, and family, people I knew and I seldom did studio photography at first. I will share more about why your models shouldn't be models and how to treat them like real people, in a future class in this series. The great thing about this type of image making is that you can develop your own style and tweak it based on what you like doing and on what seems to sell. In this class, I hope to help you discover your daily topics and style and be commercial about it, too. In the next lesson, let's start with that. 5. Find Your Topics & Style: After learning that stock doesn't equal poor quality, on the contrary, it requires clever anticipation and your unique expression, In this lesson we'll dive into that latter aspect. Let's find your style and your topics. They're already there, right in your phone or camera. Assignment one, let's look at what you've already created. Take some time to look through your camera roll or look at your most recent illustrations. When looking at your work, what do you notice about it? Is there something that you keep doing, something you like capturing, a certain way you frame what you see, a certain angle you like? Topics you keep repeating, lens effects, composition, a color palette even, or is there another quality that seems important to you? Like beauty, speed, roughness, clarity, complexity, or spontaneity? Ponder this for a moment and write down the answers. You may write them in your journal and then share them in your project. You could also add a few examples of imagery that best represents your style or styles. You can download some examples under projects and resources. Storytime. In my photos and videos, technique is never the most important. So many images don't have special lighting, and some of my best selling photos are not even in focus. So what was it that made Getty Images choose me as one of their new contributors? I think it was a mix of quirkiness and realness and not following any rules. Mostly because I didn't know them. Which can be a huge advantage. Nowadays, most of my images and videos are realistic, pure and simple, and I capture moments in my daily life. And when I work with other people, I seldom ask them to strike a pose or stop moving. Authenticity, even in staged settings, is my main thing to go for. And a positive vibe in most of my work, but I don't shy away from heavier emotions like grief or loneliness. I will share more about how to achieve realness when working with people in a future class in this series, Why Your Models Shouldn't be Models, in which I'll teach you how to guide your models into showing their realness. You can already learn a lot about this in one of my older classes, The Authentic Portraiture Toolkit. Now I invite you to spend some time discovering what your style is, and perhaps you have more styles and ponder what topics make you the happiest. Train yourself to recognize opportunities when traveling or eating out, relaxing with a friend, walking, gardening, riding your bike. And remember, you are not stuck with this choice. You will evolve over time, learn new things, and you will get better at creating work that is attractive and valuable for your customers. It is important, though, that you don't lose yourself in this learning process of adapting to the market. You're not an AI machine excreting images on demand. You're a human artist, and it's important that you stay happy and inspired in your creating process. So stay close to yourself, even though you can learn from external factors. After looking at what you've already created, recognizing your style, and discovering what gives you the most joy, in the next lesson, let's look at what makes a series and what are similars. 6. Make Series, not Similars: Now that you've looked at your style and what you enjoy creating most, in this lesson, we're going to have a look at what makes a series and what are similars. Stock platforms and customers, for that matter, do not like similars because they clog the system and take up valuable time when somebody's looking for a suitable image or video, and people get annoyed. A series clearly shows different images that can't be replaced easily by another one in the set. They vary because they look different and they tell different things about the topics they portray. Similars differ only slightly, and losing one from the set doesn't really change the story. Most of the time a client only buys one asset from a set, but sometimes they want to buy the whole series so they can use it in a series of ads or in an article, and they like to have options regarding angle and crop and aspect ratio. It is not so difficult to separate series from similars when you look at other photographers work, but it's very difficult to do it for our own. So please ask someone else. There's no shame in asking for help. Help. Show them a set of ten photos and ask them to create a little series of three that complement each other. Now, let's do Assignment two. In the previous lesson, you looked at your own work and you discovered some common traits. Now, create and share a series of three images that portray an activity or experience from your real life. Practically, anything can be a topic, food, shadows, pet, your kids toys, making art, and even the dirty dishes. Pick just one topic for three images. Make sure these images are different by varying the angle, for example, the angle of your camera towards the topic, and varying between close ups and wider lens angles, for instance. And you can also change what is in focus like so. Keep a possible customer in mind who could buy these and how would they use them. Upload the series and a few words to your project and comment on at least one project of a fellow student with some constructive feedback. You can repeat the exercise a few times to discover what gives you the greatest joy in terms of taking the images and in terms of the results. And both are important because you will be spending a lot of time with the images after making them. It is really a lengthy job to select and edit all the images and add them to your portfolio, give them the right titles and captions and keywords. I will address this whole process in the next class in this series, and I will talk about how to do all of this, so you will sell more of your work. In this lesson, you learn to avoid similars and create a little series. In the next lesson, let's step it up a notch and capture some ideas or stories. 7. Create Images with an Idea: After shooting a variation of images from your daily life and combining them in a series, in this lesson, let's look at how to make them even more attractive to customers by adding an idea or story component. Straightforward images and videos from your daily life can already be valuable to customers. They can use them on their website or illustrate articles. But what if you could add more value by looking at the moments of your life differently? In this lesson, I'll share a few ways your assets can get another layer of meaning and become more valuable. Train your eye. I often take out my phone to capture the things I see. Many simple things are beautiful and attractive or interesting or straightforward ugly. And those are needed, as well. By shooting on a regular basis, your eye will get trained and you will recognize interesting moments quicker. Usually, I start just capturing what I see. Then I pause and look again. Can I see more? If I add, remove or change something or change the angle radically, does it become more interesting? It can be difficult to recognize interesting topics if you keep the task too wide. It can really help to give yourself a little assignment like shooting round objects, just shoot below your knee or choose a certain colour palette even. Include point of view. Personal perspective shots are always wanted because they are immersive. They feel like the viewer is included in your experience. So if it makes sense, include your hands, your feet or your shadow to add an extra personal layer. You can also use someone else's hands, which is easier to take a good picture. See faces. Faces in objects always sell because they represent people without showing them, and they're more widely applicable. Somehow, the best faces are not made, but accidental. So a fruit face on a plate can probably sell, but accidental faces, faces you discover, are often more interesting. I can't unsee this cute face that is always looking at me. Machines often have faces, too, or the knots in wooden planks look like dogs or other animals. And what about cutting fruits and vegetables and finding a face or another image inside? Next time you see a face in your food or anywhere, capture it and play with it and try to make a series out of it. Tip at the end of the shoot, cut up the vegetables and film it or photograph it and make a soup and take a picture of that, too. This way, you don't waste anything and you create more opportunities for sales. Note that this must all be real and no AI. No serious platform allows AI. Customers don't want it. Even if they can use AI with your image, you are not allowed to do it. You can use AI to remove a logo, for instance. But even there, there are some rules. So please read the guidelines of the platform before you add anything. Your image may be flagged if you add it to your portfolio. Recognize a metaphor and tell a story. I recently put this toothbrush holder in my bathroom. Started noticing how the brushes were telling a story that can represent the concept of relationships or human interaction. Turn this into practice. Play and be open to surprises. Exercise three. Shoot a few versions of a regular moment and try to turn it into a little story. Upload it to your project with a few words about this process. After practicing turning images of your regular life into imagery with an extra layer of meaning, in the next and final video of this class, I'll recap what we've discussed. And I will also add a few tips on important things you need to know if you want to start creating stock now. 8. Recap & Important Tips: In this video, I'll quickly sum up the things I've discussed in this class, and I will share some important tips. I will dive into all of these things deeper in future classes, but these are already important if you want to start creating stock now. In this class, you learned there are two main types of stock, creative and editorial that allow for different types of usage. Then I shared why stock imagery isn't all that bad anymore. On the contrary, it requires quality and realness and a smart prediction of the future. By doing the exercises, you took a few first important steps in creating a videography, photography or illustration stock portfolio. You looked at the work you already made and recognized your own style and favourite topics. You then created a little series about a topic from your personal life, and you added all of this to your project. You went a step further and added an idea and a layer of meaning to your work. You also commented on at least one project of a fellow classmate. Like I mentioned a few times, more classes in this series are in the making. In these classes, you can learn how to improve your chances of selling your work. I'll be sharing loads of tips, and I'll be sharing everything I learned about what is necessary when you add imagery with people to your portfolio. And if you immediately want to learn more about working with people, just go back to my older class, The Authentic Portraiture Toolkit, that helps you work with normal people and make them come alive. If you are ready to take all of this seriously and you want to start uploading images with people or property, you must know that you can never do so without the people in the image or the owners of the property signing a model release or a property release. You will need their explicit written permission on this official document. Otherwise, the images cannot be sold. At least, this is if you want these images to be part of your creative portfolio. For editorial the rules are a bit different, but I recommend always asking people to give their permission so you can use the images the way you want. Please read the guidelines of your chosen platform before adding any images. This also holds for property like homes or artwork. These release forms are usually provided by the stock platform. Or you can use a digital app like Easy Release. And if you intend to do a lot of shoots, I can highly recommend it, so you won't have to keep repeating all the information. You only put it in once, and the model and property owner just sign. It's very convenient. Something else that is really important if you want your images to be eligible to be used in advertising: You cannot use any logos, and you must remove all branding and recognizable interfaces. This goes really far. Even these connections and sockets must be removed as they can be recognized as being an Apple product. Include copy space. You may have noticed that many of my pictures have open spaces. That is no accident, and it is called Copy Space. So space where the customer can add their copy or graphics. I recommend you make this a habit, too, so leave natural open spaces in your work. Also add the words 'copy space' to your caption and keywords. Well, that's it for now. I hope you've enjoyed it and hope you've learned a lot. Go and practice a lot, even if you're not ready to start your portfolio, and do your project. Let me know in a short review how you've experienced this class and follow me for updates on new classes and giveaways. If you have a question, you can ask it in your project or in the discussions section below this class. Happy creating. Bye.