Ninja
This ninja picture is moving up to what I call a “Tier 1″ image in my iStockphoto portfolio. Many iStockers are notorious stats junkies, and I’m no different. I’ve divided my portfolio into 3 tiers: Tier 1 photos are those that sell more than 15 times a month. Tier 2 photos is anything that sells more than once a month. Tier 3 photos are the ones that surprise me by selling at all.
I have maybe 10 Tier 1 images. These are the homeruns, and it thrills me to hit one. About 40% of my portfolio (about 120 out of the 300 images) falls into Tier 2. Continuing the baseball analogy, these are the singles and doubles that win games. The remaining images are Tier 3. There’s no pleasant baseball analogy for these.
So the ninja appear to be a Tier 1 image. I say “appear” because it’s entirely possible there’s some seasonality to the image. It was uploaded at the end of September, and has sold well through October. We’ll see in November whether it was the Halloween boost that pushed its sales forward. I don’t have “Halloween” as a keyword on the image, but I do have “Costume”, so that may account for some of it.
The image itself was a lot of fun to shoot. That’s me in the costume. I set my camera on the tripod and used my programmable remote trigger to take a series of images. I set it for a series of 6 images, taken at 4 second intervals. I probaby ran through that program about 5 times, for a total of 30 shots of myself jumping, posing, crouching, and otherwise ninjaing. About an hour or two of Photoshop later, and I had this class photo from Ninja School. The black belt on the costume had some yellow embroidered text on it, so that required some editing in post-processing.
The light setup was pretty much what you’d expect: one light to blow out the background, and another light (with softbox) as the key light on me. I used a reflector to my left (image right) to fill in the shadow side.
I’m happy with this image, even if it turns out to be a seasonal Tier 1 and not a long term Tier 1. I’m planning some more multiple exposure group shots in the future. I think having the same model playing all the parts forces the image into the “humor” realm, so I probably won’t do a group of doctors or corporate board members.