Home Studios

Hello again! Firstly, let me apologise for my poor output of late, my only excuse is that I've been rather busy, but I will endeavour to change this! My lack of spare time has also led to a lack of photos being taken and the lack of income that is associated with that, but I'm now finding time to shoot again, which can only be good news.

For a while now, I've been trying to develop a 'home studio' of sorts and I'll admit that I had no success for too long. My first attempt, some months ago, was to simply buy one, which seemed like a good idea at the time. However, I quickly learned that this was not going to work out, perhaps because I had bought a relatively cheap one... The set in question included a fold out white sheet between two diffusers and two lamps to illuminate the scene. It seemed ideal, yet it actually turned out that the lamps included were not of the highest quality and were not, in fact, bright enough to have any noticeable effect when shone through the diffuser walls. On top of this, the white sheet was quite heavily creased, which was a small nightmare to edit out.

Effectively, don't bother. There's a much easier way.

First things first, I expect you have a tripod. If not, get one, you'll really thank me. My easy home studio (which probably took an unjustifiably long time to develop) is a humble piece of A4 paper; if you can get larger, I'd use that, but A4 should suffice in the most part. The set up is fairly simple, you'll need a fairly hefty amount of natural light, preferably diffused by clouds or otherwise, and then all you need to do is place your subject about a third of the way into the piece of paper, then prop the far side up against something (I used a box of grapes, possibly an odd choice) and you're away!

In terms of shooting, you'll want to use your tripod and fill the frame with your subject - you may need to adjust your setup to ensure your background is all white. You'll also need to use as wide an aperture as possible to ensure that the entirety of your subject is in focus - my first attempts had quite selective focus, which was not the effect I was going for. About f/16 or over, depending on the length of your lens. If you're shooting in aperture priority mode, you may want to increase the exposure compensation to make sure your whites are bright; if you're shooting manually, just open the shutter for a bit longer.

You'll also need to spend a bit of time on editing. I use Photoshop Elements because it's all I can afford, but it certainly does the job. Firstly, you'll need to whack the brightness right up so that your whites are really bright - don't worry if your subject becomes over-exposed, we can fix that right away. Next you'll need to head into "Shadows/Highlights" and Darken Highlights until you're satisfied. The rest is up to you really, do as much or as little as you want to it.

So, there it is, perhaps not the most exciting breakthrough a photographer's ever made, but certainly one I was happy with. Let me know how you get on, will be interested if anyone else can have success with it.

The Importance of Keywording

Any microstock photographer will tell you that good keywording is absolutely vital to being successful in the industry, so naturally I'm going to tell you the same thing. Thankfully, the fact that it's important doesn't mean it's difficult to do; though, you may find it's one of the more tedious jobs in your workflow.

Firstly, you need the right tools. The main program I've heard discussed and the one I use is ProStockMaster and I can't see any others doing a better job really. It's easy to navigate and gets the job done, simple as that really. Download it at http://prostockmaster.com/ and you're on your merry way.

Right, the hard part (well, the "hard" part) - you have to think carefully about the keywords you use to make sure that the right people see and download your images. That's the theory, at least. In reality, there is a wealth of ways you can do this relatively painlessly. One way, which I found very useful at first since it reminds you of words you might have forgotten, is using the PicNiche toolbar with Mozilla Firefox. It may take a little bit of downloading bits and bobs, but should be worth it in the long run. Effectively, you type in the main keyword relating to your image and it gives you a long list of related keywords which you can simply click and then copy to your clipboard. It works a treat, in my experience, so it's definitely worth the download (which is luckily free).

Another (slightly less moral) way of doing it, which I shan't actively condone, is to simply find a similar looking image and simply copy their keywords; check out istock if this appeals to you. However, recent developments at Shutterstock have seen a new key wording tool, which lets you type in your keyword, choose the images that are similar to yours (about five) and they provide you with your list of keywords. It's basically the tool I've always wanted, however sad that may sound...

Whatever you do, don't try and concoct a list of keywords in your head! No matter how hard you try, your list could be twice as long and SS have just made your life so much easier!