I have been often asked what strategy I use to better my chances submitting images to sell as stock photography and what's involved to make it happen? Simple...

OK...It's actually not simple at all. I submit the highest quality images I can produce to maximize both my acceptance rate as well as sales potential. The result is long hours, meticulous work, and more sales. Keep in mind, when you edit, it is very important you view every image at "actual size" or "100%".  I felt compelled to write this article to give people a taste of what's involved to do a shoot as a professional photographer and how pain staking it usually is to come out with the highest quality images every time. I hope this helps some of you. Here's an example of just one frame out of 267 from a recent shoot. Some issues I actually had to fix, others I added as examples for your benefit. Lets pick it apart and go behind the scene to see what was involved. 

From concept to creation, this shoot took about a month. Here's what we did.

Kimber, (my art director) and myself came up with the creative concept. Then created a shoot list from that. In this case a tennis-themed sport/lifestyle shoot. Location was scouted out keeping in mind background, foot traffic, sun angle, access and over all look and usability of the spot. Once that was nailed down we started to book the right model with the right look and talent for this job. As always, fabulous work Nikki! Once we had a specific shoot date we started purchasing props and wardrobe consulting with our model for sizing. (A daunting task trying to find a white pleated tennis skirt let me tell you. After we all checked seemingly every sport store around we ended up settling for this non pleated one from a Golf store.) Not cheap, but styling is everything. Shoot time was 5:00am so everything was packed the night prior ready to roll and we headed out at 4:00am with coffee and Redbull in hand and set up. This is a list of what we used:

- Canon 1DS Mark II

- 17-40mm f4L lens

- 24-70mm f2.8L lens

- 2 Vegabond II power packs supply the juice

- 2 Profoto 600R monolights

- 2 medium Profoto soft boxes 

- 2 Manfrotto stands

- 3 Pocket Wizard PlusII

- 2 Pocket Wizard 1/4" - 1/8" cables

- 4x6ft Westcott reflector

- 4x6ft scrim

- 1 6ft fiberglass  ladder

- 15" Mac Book Pro writing everything directly into Light Room2. This is essential to quickly and accurately check sharpness and write back up files to your hard drive just in case some thing happens to your card.

- 3 hours of sleep

- 6 pack of Red Bull 

- 5 hours of shooting 

Here's a quick look at the set up

 Five hours of shooting later...

ORIGINAL FRAME:

 This image seems to be of good quality. In reality it would fail miserably after even a drunk inspector looked at it for more than 30 seconds. Here's why:

ALL REMAINING SAMPLES ARE AT 100 %

 ARTIFACT:

I put this one first because it's probably the most common mistake for new photographers. Here jpeg artifact is noticeable in the sky. dotty, broken transitions of color. This can be not uncommon in blue primarily. It sometimes can be noticed as bands of color, or, "banding" , other times as jagged edges on what should be straight.

The biggest way to  side step this problem is to work on your file as a TIFF, and save it to JPG only as a final draft. Opening and closing JPG's will degrade them. Keep in mind, working on such big files (TIFFS) calls for pretty big computer power, so if you have to use JPEG open it only once and save your self a lot of headache.

 Chromatic Aberration:

This can also be referred to as purple fringing and will usually happen on edges of high contrast areas. In other words, areas with high dynamic range. Here you can see purple fringing on the top rim of Nikki's hat against her light colored hair. If you look though you can also see yellow fringing on the bottom rim of her hat against the black shadow. Can you see a third thing wrong with this image? It's there let's talk about that next.  

Sensor Spots: 

Have another look at the Chromatic Aberration image, top left area. There are two sensor spots, or dust spots, shown and on this image I count 10. When working on location it is always  very dynamic and there is constant problem solving going on:

Where's the sun? How fast is the sun changing position? How much morning light do we have? When will we have to move into that shadowed zone? Are those poeple going to walk in my shot? Can we try and get that ball in the air at the right time? What's the next pose on the shooting list? Damn those people did walk into my shot. Can we do that pose again this time with out them in it. Now the sun has changed and we have to hang 10 here until we move and reset the lights 15 ft over.  ect ect ect. You get the idea. Now with all this going on it is pretty easy to forget to wipe your lens off to get rid of dust for the 47th time. But, if you do forget, this is what you get. 

Its ALWAYS dusty when working on an outdoor location even if it doesn't seem like it. 

Blown Hightlights:

Blown Highlights are highlights of your image that have absolutely no digital information, blank. I'll tell you, it does take time to develop and eye to spot these. In this case you can see her hat lost all texture in a few spots because of over exposure. I'll also tell you that the best way to fix them is to avoid them in the first place so pay attention to your in camera settings and exposure. These can especially be a headache when your subject is wearing white. If a non essential part of your picture is blown out in this case maybe a bit of the white line off in the background it may pass inspection as a stock photograph but if it's on the face or clothes at al, it's pretty much sure to fail. If in doubt and it can't be fixed, I dont use it.

Copyright Protected:

The nature of stock photography is that you are going to run into this all the time. The key is to consciously eliminate it while shooting if possible. Like she is doing in this image by making a conscious effort to hold the tennis ball with the name turned toward her.  There is however a copyright issue still though. If you look at the full picture you'll see the writing on the edge of the head of the racket , but that's obvious so I didn't bother pointing it out in the sample. However, the red, black, and white logo you can see on the end of the grip by her hand would still get you a rejection. Even though it's not legible, it's still identifiable. I actually got rejected once because, at 100%, you could partially make out the YKK letters on a zipper on a full body shot similar to this one. Since then, I remove EVERYTHING that's questionable. Wasted time is wasted money so get it right the first time.

 These are just a few things you have to watch out for while shooting. Keep in mind there are other rejection reasons you may come across, focus too soft, over filtered, obvious cloning, over sharpening, image not suitable for stock content just to name a few. Therefore, having said all this, when you finally wrap for the day and pack up, you're only half done.  As I have shown above, you still have a lot of editing to do. For every five hour shoot I will average thirty hours of editing.  

Once the editing is done, the final product is uploaded and key worded,  another twenty hours of work. Then they're organized into lightbox categories and are ready to be licensed.

Stay tuned for more of the same. You can RSS my blog from the RSS link on top of my blog page. You can rate this article at the top of the page.