No Salt

It’s Saturday night and all is quiet… Too quiet and that’s what is irritating me for some reason. Nothing much is happening and that means not much progress is being made. The world has taken something out of me this week but rather than complain, I’ll try recapping my activities instead.

I ordered another flash on Friday and took some more demolition photos under bad midday light. This whole week has been slow as far as photographs go but I do have some ideas sloshing around in my brain for next week even though the new flash will probably not make it until Thursday or Friday.

I could use another flash (radio) trigger but I’m thinking of upgrading, so it will probably end up being a bit longer before I buy anything new since I don’t want to add stuff I’m not going to use going into the future. I’m hoping to test a few of the new flash triggers by Radio Popper and Pocket Wizard soon to see if I can settle on a clear favorite. Of course the reality is that you can only use what exists at the time you want to use it even though a lot of tempting things are in the works. New gear is always exciting but often more of a want or a wish than an actual needed item to get the job done.

On a more mundane level, I also need a few more reflectors. I have been using the plastic sheets that yard signs and store displays often made of. That material (Coroplast) seems to hold up better for me than foam core board which is also popular to use as a reflector. Coroplast can be wiped off when it gets dirty and is easy to cut like Foamcore material. You can also use it to make gridded snoots for your shoe mount flashes. I think I’m going to need a few more pieces of it for my outdoor photos next week. It’s pretty handy stuff and it is inexpensive when compared to the other options like collapsible reflectors.

David Hobby has a new Strobist Boot Camp assignment (sbc2assign4) going on right now over at www.strobist.blogspot.com so I am going to try throwing some effort in that direction because it is a lot of fun and a chance to interact with some other photographers as well as actually learning a new trick or two. The subject this time is “Transportation.” There are also some cool prizes for the winning shot to motivate you so go check it out.

Balancing Act

This one is all about balancing ambient light with fill flash which just happens to be one of my favorite things to do. In this shot I am using a minimal amount of gear, a single off camera SB600 flash triggered by Nikon CLS, better known as the Creative Lighting System. It’s automatic and fine tunable from the camera. I thought I might have issues with triggering the flash outside but it worked flawlessly. Of course noonday sun might interfere with the optical triggering but I have not tried that yet so I can’t say for sure.

Tech info: f/10, 1/250th, ISO 800. SB600 flash triggered with Nikon CLS off camera left.

Micro Stock Pot Luck

At the risk of getting my feelings hurt, I submitted a couple of photos to a micro-stock website to see if I could get any of my work accepted.

Since I seem to have a lot of photos that are likely never going to see the light of day again, I thought micro-stock photography seemed like something worth exploring.

This morning I went through all the photos I made with my Nikon D70 during the year of 2007 and found that I had very few if any images that I thought might work as stock photography. First I rejected a bunch for technical defects; like noise and chromatic aberration; while some just were not that interesting (what was I thinking). Many of the other photos contained trademarks or recognizable buildings and landmarks that can’t be used without a property release. There were a few shots of people that I could have used but then I would have to go back and get a model release from each person before I can submit those photos. I certainly didn’t want to spend hours editing a pile of images just to have them rejected for one reason or another.

I was hoping I could come up with enough stock images to at least buy a new flash or some other accessory but the truth is I don’t know if I can come up with even a hundred images suitable to use as stock photography that would actually sell. My best guess is that the name of the game is specialization and that a streamlined work-flow is essential to making money in micro-stock.

As usual, I was looking to harvest the low hanging fruit but I don’t think that is going to work very well. I’m not sure the return on investment is worth it unless you get in on a massive scale. I’m thinking that you would need a dedicated workspace to serve as a small studio and then come up with a standard lighting scheme. Everything would have to be done in an assembly line type environment in order to make an average of less than a dollar per image. Is it really worth it?

I don’t have room to keep a tabletop studio set up all the time, let alone a big seamless backdrop for shooting models. What I am going to try to do is to incorporate some stock shots into my regular photography routine and see if I can come up with a few good samples each week. It never hurts to try something new except maybe to bruise the old ego which hates being made to look like a fool.

They ONLY Make It Look Easy

Some things look deceptively easy while others tend to look extremely difficult. It’s often easy to dismiss the difficult ones when you don’t know or understand the effort that went in to it. It’s generally a good idea to try new things and to operate somewhere near the upward edge of your existing skill level, except perhaps at those times when you are doing work for hire and other people are relying on you to produce a finished product within a given time and budget.