I appreciated that as I am a fan of the Antiques Roadshow!  Now I am even more of a fan!

Greg Witt, the author phoned me and let me know that Falcon Guide had made an error and mistakenly attributed the photo to him.  He apologized and let me know that he has requested that they address the attribution mistake in the next printing of the book.  He gave me a copy of the book as a gift.  The book is great and I am happy to be on the back cover.

It is published in a book called: Amenorrhea: Why Your Period Stops.  It is from the Library of Sexual Health.

When I found my name in the photo credits, I had to figure out what image they used.  I don’t have any images in my stock portfolio that I envisioned would be appropriate for a book about why your period stops.

I called the publisher and explained who I was and what I was trying to do.  They said that they would have someone pull the book and send me a photo copy of the page that had my picture in it.  After a couple of days with no email, I decided on a different method.  I checked my local bookstores and was told that I could special order the title.  Not wanting to add this particular title to my collection, I tried my local library with no results.

I looked for the author (Tamra B. Orr) online to see if she had a website that featured her books.  She is a well published author – without a homepage.  Another strike.

Finally, I searched and found a library in CA that had the book on the shelf.  I called the library and asked for a favor.  The library pulled the book from the shelf and described the image to me.  It is in the chapter on “Taking Care of Yourself”.  Now I can see a connection of why my yoga image would show up in a book on Amenorrhea.

Mystery solved, and I am proud to be published in a book on Sexual Health <grin>.

It would seem so simple to shoot a skyline image, but I have found that it is not as simple as it looks.  It takes time, planning, research, and the weather has to cooperate as well.

Phoenix, Arizona Skyline Stock Image

Say for example, the skyline stock image that I took of Phoenix, Arizona.  I don’t know if you have been to Phoenix, but it is FLAT.  There is a small hill (I think the local’s call it a mountain) off in the NW of the city, but other than that, the tallest thing around are the freeway overpasses.  So getting a good skyline image is not easy to do.  I drove around for a couple of hours looking for the perfect location.  I shot a couple from around the airport overlooking the downtown that didn’t turn out exactly the way I wanted. The light was wrong. I was shooting in the magic light hours, but I was shooting northwest, not exactly towards the sun, but enough where it was ruining my shot.

So I got in my car and drove around again. The light was fading fast. If you have ever been in a situation where you are racing the sun go down, you will relate to how fast the sun actually sets.

I finally found a place that I could shoot and came up with this image.  It took a lot of photoshop to take out the powerlines that were running through the image.  But I think it is a good representation of what Phoenix looks like.  You have the palm trees in the foreground, the skyscrapers in the background and lots of clear, blue sky.

Salt Lake City, Utah Skyline Stock Image

I also have some shots that I took of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, with the magnificent skyline framed by the Wasatch mountains in the background.

I have shots in the middle of the calm in the middle of the storm, some fabulous night images, and summer shots of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah with no snow in the mountains.

Looking west to east in Salt Lake City, Utah is a beautiful view. The mountains are impressive. The downtown area is consolidated to a fairly small area. The problem is where to shoot.  I have driven around Salt Lake City (similar to the time I drove around Phoenix) looking for the perfect place to shoot.

Salt Lake City Skyline at Night Stock Image

I want to capture a good representation of the downtown skyscrapers and the world famous Salt Lake Temple from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with the Wasatch mountains framed in the background. There are a couple of good places right off the freeway, but it is not easy to stop in the emergency lane to frame the shot. I also like to stay for awhile and capture the light as it fades to dusk, so a shot will take me 2-3 hours of shooting, plus the time it takes to find the location to shoot.

Salt Lake City is one of my favorite cities in the United States. The city planners have done a great job and it is a fabulous place to visit! And – it is a fabulous place to shoot!

Raleigh, North Carolina City Skyline Stock Image

When I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, I had some time between meetings that I decided to find a place to shoot a skyline shot.  I had two time slots, one in the middle of the day, one in the late afternoon during the golden light of the day.  I decided to shoot both shots to give designers the ability to choose between mid-day blue sky lighting versus the late afternoon more warm lighting reflecting off of the skyscrapers.  Both of the Raleigh, North Carolina City Skyline stock images are available in my iStockphoto portfolio, although the mid-day blue sky image is selling better than the late afternoon image.

Raleigh, North Carolina City Skyline Stock Image

Downtown Salt Lake City, Utah Skyline Stock Image

Another downtown skyline image of Boise, Idaho. This image took forever to photoshop! There were so many telephone lines in the foreground of the picture. It took hours to get them all out…

Downtown Boise, Idaho Skyline Stock Image

iStockphoto.com has a section of their offerings called the Dollar Bin. It is a selection of images that are moving a little slow for whatever reason and they want to give customers the chance to view and purchase those images for a good price. There are images in the dollar bin that have sold hundreds of times and it is a good place to get more exposure to your work.

I currently have several images in the iStockphoto.com Dollar Bin, that are some of the first images that I uploaded and haven’t been my best sellers.

I know – not my best work, but I am getting better.

Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada Sign Stock Image

This sign has come to symbolize the world famous city in the deserts of Nevada. The front of the sign was slightly in the shade (as you can see), but the lighting was perfect for the back of the sign.

Drive Carefully - Come Back Soon Stock Image

The sign actually has a TON :> of telephone and power lines around it and connected to it. It took forever for me to Photoshop all the power and telephone lines out of the images, but I think they turned out OK.

I uploaded both signs to my iStockphoto portfolio at istockphoto.com/legacyimagesphotography. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Dave

OK – now that I have made it into Forbes, I need to work on making it into Forbes the old fashioned way – on their Top 100 wealthiest List.  That would be good

Have fun and keep shooting!

One of the methods that works for me is submitting images to an online micro stock agency, iStockPhoto.com.

My portfolio is featured at http://istockphoto.com/legacyimagesphotography.

The Internet has changed the world of stock photography. Twenty years ago, the typical way you became a stock photographer was to have a portfolio of thousands of slides (with releases) which enabled you to be signed at an agency like Getty Images or Corbus. Today, you could have a handful of images available and be a profitable stock photographer at a micro stock agency.

I joined iStock to get some of the images I had taken for fun – and that I thought were pretty good – off my hard drive and out of my slide collection and make them available to be purchased. The beautiful thing is there is a market (however small) for almost every type of image. It could be nature, food, landscape, flowers, even brick walls or wood floors. Obviously, some markets are much more lucrative than others and some markets are more popular than others.

Most magazines you look at will contain images that were probably purchased from a stock agency. This is also true for book covers, corporate brochures and reports, websites, even billboards.

Stock photography has changed the way I approach photography. The images I am shooting today are different than the images I used to shoot. I am constantly trying to maximize the potential revenue that I can make from each shoot. I think to myself, is there a market for this (besides adding to my portfolio or the model’s portfolio)? What are the most profitable types of images and markets for stock photography?

I am more conscious of image quality (lighting, focus, eliminating distracting elements, using depth of field and other techniques to center focus on the subject, eliminating artifacting in my post processing, etc.) I am also much more aware of copyright issues and obtaining model releases and property releases (i.e. you can shoot a model sitting on a statue in a park and publish it for sale if you get a release from the model and a property release from the statue artist).

Micro stock photography is not for everyone. You maintain ownership of your copyright to each picture, but you don’t make a lot for each image that is licensed (the revenue you make is definitely volume-based). You also don’t have control over where or how your images are used – only that the images cannot be used in a way that is pornographic or defamatory.

But, for me, stock photography is providing an additional revenue source from my photography. I have had pictures used on Forbes.com and the PBS “Antiques Roadshow” homepage among many other places. I have been submitting for about a year and a half, and it is addicting. Every day, I come home from work and check out my portfolio to see how many images were downloaded that day and how much money I made. I maintain a notebook of ideas and thoughts of potential stock shoots that I think will be lucrative and fun. I even downloaded an application for my iPhone that I can check my balance during the day.

This last year, I traveled to Californa to shoot for a Chef just graduating from cooking school. That assignment motivated me to start shooting food so I feel comfortable doing it. There are so many tricks that can be leveraged in shooting food and I want to learn them all. The best thing is that I will maintain the rights to submit those images to iStock in addition to my fees that I will make on the shoot.

Stock photography definitely has helped me to make more revenue and has helped me to become a better photographer.

Much more on stock photography, how I got involved with stock photography, stock agencies, how to choose what to shoot, how to maximize accepted images, etc. in the near future!

Let me know what you think of stock photography as a source of income for your photography!