Myerson Photo Blog

Back in part one of this article, we talked about some ways to help your images get found on iStockphoto. Those tips mostly centered around things you can do before you take your shot; how to plan your shoot and compose your shot to help separate from the pack. In this part, we’ll look at some techniques for after the shot is already online.

Once the image is approved and available on iStockphoto, you’ll want to maximize exposure. There are a few ways to go about this: keywords, lightboxes, and cross-promotions are the biggest ones currently available to you.

Keywords
We discussed keywords some in the first post, so I won’t spend too much time on it here. Instead, I’d like to propose a couple of great ways to help think of keywords for your images. The first is to try to find the image yourself. That is, do a search on iStock the way a customer might. Think of how a customer might start that search, what keywords might he use, which ones would he exclude with a Boolean search string. Imagine, for instance, you have an isolated shot of a toothbrush. Pretend now that you’re a customer looking for just that - an isolated toothbrush, nothing else. A search for “toothbrush” reveals 1500+ other toothbrush shots. As a customer, the first thing I might do is remove all of the shots that also include “Dentist” and “Brushing”. That brings the count down to a more reasonable 500 images, and should provide good reason to avoid using related keywords. If you had included “Dentist” and “Brushing” as keywords, your image would now be part of the 1000 images removed from my result set. Be the customer. It will help you think of words that should and should not be part of your set of terms.

The next handy tool for keywording is the Suggestinator at iStock-apps.com. It’s a simple tool that lets others suggest terms for your images. It’s easy to use, and generally reveals some pretty good options.

Finally, iStock has started to encourage keyword requests in the Critique Forum. Start a new thread there, with “:KEYWORD:” in the thread title, and get lots of great suggestions. I did it recently for this rocket ship illustration, and was rewarded with maybe a dozen new terms, all of them appropriate and accurate.

Lightboxes
Lightboxes are collections of images on iStock. There are two kinds: public and private. Public lightboxes are curated collections of files all around a specific topic, such as “Families”, “Coffee”, “Mountain Climbing”, well you name it really. Any topic that has images on iStock probably has a lightbox or two around it as well. The files in the lightboxes are the ones that the curator feels best suit the theme. They may be those images that have the most sales among the images that fit that topic, or those that have the fewest, or those that the curator likes best, or those that were contributed within a given time frame, etc. Curators are free to add whichever images they like to their lightboxes, and are really under no obligation to add any at all. If you find a public lightbox that you feel might be a good showcase for one or two of your images, send a polite sitemail to the lightbox manager and ask if they would add yours to it. Some will, some won’t. Showing up in the lightbox may help visibility, or it might have no effect at all. It’s hard to know, but early on, it’s fun to try to increase visibility, so why not go for it.

Cross-Promotion
This is a big one. Cross-promotion is simply providing customers with a link to see some more of your relevant images. In the description field of your isolated toothbrush image, you can give folks a link to see your other dental hygiene images. I wrote a pretty thorough tutorial on how to set this up for your files, which can be viewed here.

Any other great ideas for getting found on iStock? Leave me a note in the comments or send me an email, and I’d be happy to add it here!

I shot this image of a newlywed couple a few years ago. Generally, we were pretty pleased with the results, but there’s one thing about it that has bothered me from the very beginning. We shot this image with a single strobe off to camera left, reflecting some light back onto the models from the wall off to camera right. A very very yellow wall.

The yellow cast on the left side (camera right side) of the models’ faces has always kept this from being an image I can truly be proud of. It’s time to finally fix that. Using Hue/Saturation, this is one of the easiest fixes we can do.

I opened a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I could have just performed the Hue/Saturation adjustment to the existing layer, but I am a firm believer in the “exit strategy” philosophy: make sure that any changes you make to the file are non-destructive, and can be undone. Or more importantly, make sure they can be partially undone, as we’ll see here in a moment.

The key to this fix is the drop down menu in Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation dialog box. Rather than adjusting the hue and saturation for the entire range of values in this image, we can use that drop down box to select just the ones we want to modify. In our case, that’s the yellow values. Select “Yellows” from the drop down, and you’ll see the color range selector at the bottom of the window will now indicate the smaller range of affected values. There are three sections to that range indicator: the left fringe, the middle bar, and the right fringe. Input values (those colors above the selection indicator) will be affected by the slider actions and become the output values indicated on the color bar below the selection indicator. Those input values above the left and right fringes will be modified to lesser degrees than those values above the middle bar - from 100% for those values immediately adjacent to the middle bar, down to 0% for those values at the end of the fringe (marked with a rhombus shaped handle).

If that last paragraph was a little kooky, try playing with the sliders yourself to see what I mean.

With the proper input value range selected, I pushed the saturation all the way up to +100. This gave me a good sense of what values would be affected. I had to tweak the fringe sliders somewhat to get the range just right. Once I did, I could start making the real edits. I dropped the saturation down, increased the lightness, and slid the hue over a few degrees to make the last traces of yellow turn more red. Here’s what that gave me:

Not bad at all, but as you can see, it took out too much of the bride’s skin tones, leaving her much too pale. This is where adjustment layers have direct adjustments beat, hands down. I just masked out the adjustment layer, to allow more of the bride’s original image coloration to pop through:

Voila! All traces of the offending yellow wall have been removed in just a few easy steps.

iStockphoto.com has become one of the largest Royalty-Free photo libraries out there. Contributors to iStock have a great opportunity to reach a global marketplace for their images. That opportunity is only great, of course, if the images can actually be found. As an image inspector for iStockphoto, I get to see thousands of images each month as they move through the inspection queue and into the collection. So how do you go about getting your image noticed in the vast sea of 2 million+ images (nearly 3 million as of this writing)?

There are no guarantees, of course, but here is the first part of a two-part series on things to consider for your images. It may not come as a great surprise to find that much of the most important work you can do to get your images found actually takes place before you click the shutter.

Don’t push into the crowded bus
You aren’t really jockeying for position against the other nearly 3 million images. You’re only up against the images that share primary keywords with your images. You may have just shot the world’s best image of an apple, perfectly isolated on an infinite white sweep. Congrats! It’s now one of over 5,000 images that comes up in a search for “Isolated Apple” on iStock. Designers will often search well beyond the first page of results to find the image they need, but even the hardiest of image researchers will hesitate to comb through over 5000 images.

Let’s say instead of “Apple” and “Isolated”, your image was “Apple” and “Fire”. Now it’s one of 19 images. That’s a much greater ratio. The downside? As of today’s writing, those 19 images have a combined download total of about 75. Not a whole lot of demand for Flaming Apples.

Your job, then, is to find that sweet spot. Look for the underserved image markets on iStock. Often all it takes is adding a key element to your image (”Fire”, in our example above). Rather than shooting an attractive model in a business suit isolated on white (and, yes, I know I’m guilty of that as well), shoot her doing something that isn’t overdone in the library. Not talking on the phone. That is overdone. Have her balancing the books. Or balancing on a tightrope. Or balancing another businessperson on her head. This, of course, has to be thought out in advance of actually creating the shot.

Keyword Thoroughly and Accurately

Each keyword you add to an image is another search under which your image will be found. It’s absolutely in your best interest to be thorough about your keywords. This image has the following terms
applied to it:

• Single Object
• Small
• White
• Toned Image
• Horizontal
• Scarcity
• Place Setting
• Plate
• Nobody
• Empty
• Dishware
• Sparse
• Green Pea
• Food
• Silverware
• Poverty
• Famine
• Hungry

You can basically break the list up into three categories: the literal, the conceptual, and the compositional.

Literal
The literal contents of the image (plate, silverware, green pea) are the easiest keywords to add. Just look in the picture and name the key elements that are in there. An important note, however, is to avoid “laundry lists”. As an inspector, I often have to reject images for keywords when they rattle off every minute detail on the image. An image of a person, for instance, probably does contain a Human Face, Human Lips, Nose, Human Eyes, etc., but if these aren’t what the image is about - if they’re not key elements of the image - don’t bother adding them.

Another point about literal keywords - consider using parent terms if they still make sense. For example, in the image above, I have “Green Pea”, and its ancestor term “Food”. What I didn’t include, however, were the parent terms between Food and Green Pea; The actual taxonomy is Food > Vegetable > Legume > Pea Family > Green Pea. “Food” makes sense for this image, as does the specific food “Green Pea”. Arguably, “Vegetable” makes sense, but I get the sense that someone searching for “Legume” or “Pea Family” is more interested in a shot more devoted to those keywords.

Conceptual
Conceptual keywords are harder to define, harder to use, and harder to inspect. This is a muddy and slippery region of the keywording landscape. I feel the image above portrays concepts such as “Hunger” and “Scarcity” pretty well. It doesn’t at all represent “Business” or “Friendship”. What about the gray areas? Agribusiness? Competition? One could probably make an argument for those words, but my feeling is that if one has to make an argument for them, they’re probably not the best candidates. Stick to the ones that you had in mind when you made the shot.

Compositional
These are the metadata of the metadata world. These terms represent the photographic details of the image more than the contents. Horizontal, vertical, diagonal, above, below, close up, wide angle, worms eye view, monochrome, cross-processed. Again, this should be a pretty easy set of terms to define and use.

Don’t Spam
Spamming is including terms that are outright incorrect, or are so stretched so thin they’ll snap. Spamming on iStock also includes incorrectly disambiguating your terms. Spammers will be drawn and quartered on sight, so don’t do it.

Be About Something
The way to achieve both of the points above is to have your image be about something. That is, before you take the shot, decide what the shot is about. Start with the concept. Be intentional about the photograph. Don’t just set out to take a picture of a tree. Decide what it is you want the picture of the tree to portray. In essence, this means preselecting a literal keyword and a conceptual keyword to describe what you’ll be shooting. Consider the following combinations of “Tree” and conceptual terms:

• “Tree” + “Childhood”
• “Tree” + “Despair”
• “Tree” + “History”
• “Tree” + “Satisfaction”
• “Tree” + “Frustration”

Could you envision an image that could be accurately keyworded with any of those combinations?
By being more intentional about your stock photography, you gain several advantages. The first is that you can actively choose to put your image in an underserved market niche. Let’s say your research shows that there are over 220,000 images of trees, but fewer than 100 also include a given conceptual keyword. If you feel as I do that that’s an available market niche, you could plan your tree shot to portray that concept. Now it’s not just a tree image, it’s a tree image about something, and what’s more, it’s one of only 100 images about that something.

Being about something also helps in the keywording phase. The conceptual keywords - that category that is often so difficult to do - is basically handled ahead of time. You have alreay decided that your tree image would portray a given concept. The keywording is guaranteed to be easy and accurate.

Finally, by deciding ahead of time what your image is about, you give yourself the ability to remove distractions and make a better image. Does that mailbox in the background really help your tree image portray “desolation”? Is that garbage at the base of the tree really the best way to show “Stately Elegance”? Stock photography is all about iconic images that read quickly. Your job (ok, one of your many jobs) is to eliminate those elements that prevent the image from being iconic.

Join us for part II of the series, which will explore those things you can (and those things you cannot) control within iStockphoto’s environment to help boost your image’s exposure.

I’m heading off to Utah tomorrow night for a few days of shooting with some great models and gorgeous locations. I’ve been looking forward to this shoot for months, so I’m thrilled it’s finally upon us. I promise to get some images online as soon as possible. Before then, of course, I still have to formalize my sketches into a shot list, prepare my gear, charge up my batteries, and pack.

On the recommendation of virtually everyone I know in the photography community, I recently picked up Joe McNally’s new book “The Moment It Clicks”. This book is really something special, folks, and if you’re looking for a new book to put on your Amazon wishlist, this would be a great option.

Formatted like a coffee table book, it reads like a series of private conversations with McNally. He takes us through the processes of creating the images in the book. He gives us insight into how the shots came to be, what thought processes led to the final result, and in some cases we even get technical set up information. Technical terms are conveniently defined in footnotes, making the book very accessible to novices and pros alike.

Joe’s career has included assignment and staff jobs for Life magazine, Sports Illustrated, Time, NatGeo, and many other commercial and editorial jobs. He’s exactly the kind of photographer you’d like to be able to sit with for an hour or three, chatting about images. Fortunately, that’s precisely what he gives you - and then some - in this book.

Each photo and discussion encompasses just a two-page spread, so it’s very easy to digest bite size portions in the 10 minutes before bed or the 20 minutes before a client comes into the studio.

The best thing about the book is that it’s not all technique, nor is it all philosophy, nor all theory. It’s a little of each, with a little opinion and life lesson thrown in for good measure.

A question that comes up periodically among new contributors to iStockphoto is “how do I attach multiple model releases to my upload?”

It’s a good question, as there is only one upload box in the interface for attaching a model release. If you upload one release using that box, then try a second, it’s only the second that gets attached.

The solution is pretty simple: Just combine your releases into a single JPG document, and upload that. Your model releases should already be JPGs; just open a new photoshop document large enough to accommodate your two (or three or four) releases, and paste them into it. I like to do mine side by side, I see lots of folks stack them vertically into a single long document. Once, when I had five or six releases all in one document,  I went one step further: I tiled them into a document 3 releases wide by two releases high, and included a reference key indicating which release went with which model. It’s not required, of course, but that little step certainly can make things nice for the inspectors.