- Knowing Your Customers
- New Development
- Searching
- Ingredients of a Stock Photo
- Assignment
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
New Development
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Creator |
Amanda Rohde (istockphoto.com/hidesy) |
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Started |
2003 |
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Home |
Australia |
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Total portfolio |
13,000 images |
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Total downloads |
Over 570,000 |
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About this photo |
Amanda says, "This was taken on my parents' veranda, with a large piece of hessian as the background, and a torch to add to the natural lighting. My camera was the 1ds Mark II at the time, and my lens was a 24-70 f2.8 Canon. I think it's successful for a number of reasons: The concept is obvious, but reasonably broad; it encompasses growth, protection, development, infancy, and environmental concepts. The colors fit with many of the colors used in these types of designs, and the torchlight adds warmth to the image. The hands are just right for the image. They aren't smooth, well-manicured hands, but are hard-working, older hands, which enhances the earthy tones to the image." |
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Amanda's tip |
"Research what your target audience wants. Think about things that you enjoy photographing, and work out how they should be photographed to provide a useful product to designers. Study advertisements that you see—billboards, magazine ads, television, brochures, reports, church newsletters, junk mail—the list of places stock photography is used is huge. At the beginning of my time on iStockphoto, I spent months cutting up magazines that I bought by the stack from garage sales, and put them in scrapbooks for ideas, inspiration, and composition." |
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Figure 3.6 Delight.
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Figure 3.7 Take Flight.
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Figure 3.8 Coffee at Cafe.
An object on a white background is a perfect example of raw material just waiting to be put to use in a larger project, which is why you will see so many examples of this type of stock everywhere. In this case, an art teacher (and microstock contributor as well), Mark Evans, was putting together a poster (Figure 3.9) for an annual student art exhibition at his school in Melbourne, Australia. The exhibition included work from visual arts, food technology, media, woodwork, and metalwork students. He sought out various stock images that were representative of those disciplines and crafted them together to create the figure in the poster. My frying pan never looked so happy.
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Figure 3.9 Crescendo exhibition poster.
When I shot that frying pan I did not intend for it to be a work of art, but because of its ability to communicate a simple message, it found a new life in a fun project all the way on the other side of the world from my kitchen. It's been downloaded more than 100 times, and I can only imagine all the other places it has been.
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Figure 3.10 Searching. Downloaded over 700 times.