PJ. Morley

Wouldn’t be great if the sites selling our images told you what keywords were used to locate the images you sold? With that sort of information, you could streamline your keywords and ensure that only the most efficient keywords were used thus ensuring maximum exposure for your images. That sort of information would give you an insight into the way real buyers find images.

Well there is at least one site Dreamstime that reveals this information and it is proving to be very helpful when deciding on keywords for images. Well in most cases it is….

Look at this illustrated image of a solar eclipse.

Let’s say you wanted to buy this to use in a project. What keywords would you use to locate an image like this? Well, maybe you would start simple with ‘illustration’, ’solar’ and ‘eclipse’.

WRONG!

The actual keywords used to find the image of the solar eclipse were…….. ‘flight’ and ‘geese’. Hmmmm…..

OK, that could be just a one off. Let me think now. I need an image to suggest a good idea. How about a lightbulb or even better, two lightbulbs, yes that would work, it suggests sharing ideas. Start simple and I’ll use the keywords ‘two’ and ‘lightbulbs’ and see what happens.

Success! But apparently, the keywords actually used by someone to find and buy this image were ‘art’ and ‘easter’.

OK how about this image.

Keywords used: Blindfold

Or this one

Keywords used: Strawberry

Or this one

Keywords used: Handshake

Well it seems this keyword thing is a little bit trickier than one would first imagine. I’m just not thinking like a buyer would. It seems the buyers start out looking for one thing and then get sidetracked in to something completely different. I think I’ll just stick my usual approach of keywording for now.

Most compact cameras aimed at the enthusiast have a multitude of not so useful settings like fireworks, museum, underwater, sports and portrait etc. Does the average photographer spend that much time taking photos of fireworks or underwater to deserve its own setting? I don’t think so but then again if you want it, it’s there.

For the prosumer i.e. a digital SLR, those options are generally restricted to landscape, macro, sports and portrait mode. Useful? Maybe but if you are going to spend in excess of 2 weeks salary on a camera and then buy lenses on top of that then maybe it’s a good idea to learn the basics.

Now whilst all of these settings may be useful, even if it is only rarely i.e. the museum setting. None are difficult to learn and remember and none are difficult to set up using basic shutter speed, aperture and iso setting combinations. What’s more you get more control over the final image by doing it yourself.

What I’m suggesting is that if predetermined settings are to be included in the firmware, they should be ones that are time consuming and sometimes difficult to work settings, for example hyperfocal distance to achieve front to back sharpness (and I don’t mean that random A-DEP mode found on some Canon cameras)

So how about these settings instead?
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Do you ever wonder how long it takes for your blog post or forum thread takes to get indexed by search engines? So here I am writing a post about my imaginary friend Zmaos Abumpty. At the time of writing, he appears nowhere at all on a Google search, he must therefore be the most unknown imaginary person in the world. So I’m interested to see first of all how quickly this thread appears in Google but more interestingly, how many results we get over time.

You can help me out here by mentioning my friend Zmaos in any forums or blogs that you participate in. I’ll be giving regular updateson Zmaos Abumpty so stay tuned.

If you regularly contribute to microstock photo agencies you would be forgiven for thinking that you are entirely responsible for obtaining and supplying model or property releases before you are allowed to make your images available for sale.

A model release is similar in context to a liability waiver. What that generally means is that the model or owner of the property signs to say that the photo of them or their property can be published and used in a particular way and in accordance with the restrictions or usage allowances as laid down in the release. It is for all intents and purposes a contract that usually includes some form of compensation to the model or property owner to allow the photo to be published.

Failure to acquire a release could result in civil liability against the person that publishes the photo.

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When you take a photo, do you ever wonder what the cost taking that photo is? Well for a professional it’s something they do as a matter of course. Maybe not in the same way as I’m going to suggest here but certainly they factor in the cost of equipment, traveling, time spent taking the image and one thing a professional will do, that an amateur won’t is take into account the commercial value of the final image which determines the profit. That alone may be the deciding factor that determines whether it is worth taking the photo in the first place.

But what about simply taking a photo for pleasure? We rarely consider the cost of that. Here’s one I took purely for pleasure.

It may be the sort of photo that any amateur or hobbyist would take. I put a similar one for sale on my website recently but it hasn’t sold yet. Now working this out is not as simple as it sounds because it depends on the cost of the equipment used and how may usable photos you have produced with it so let’s keep it relatively simple and consider just the camera and lens in this case. No account of computer equipment or software which could easily top a couple of thousand are considered.

1 x Canon EOS 30D @ £700.00
1 x EF24-105mm f4 L IS @ £600.00
1 x Sandisk 2GB CF card @ £23.00

Total Cost 0f £1,323.00

A simple table shows the cost of this image depending on how much use the equipment has had.

Obviously, the more usable images you get from a given piece of equipment, the more cost effective it becomes. The question that should asked before upgrading equipment is how much has this cost me per usable image so far?

So how much are your photos costing you? A bit more than you imagined?