Myerson Photo Blog

Like any community, the iStock forums have evolved their own peculiar vocabulary of acronyms and terms. Here are some of the more common ones for newcomers and oldtimers alike.

AOTW
Artist of the Week. A weekly honor bestowed upon a contributor who has stood apart from the crowd for some reason. See xOTW.

BM
Best Match. Best Match is one of the search results sort algorithms,  the one that seems to cause the most forum angst. It’s powered by a super secret recipe, the details of which are often the subject of speculation in the forums. Thanks, Karen, for reminding me to include this in the list!

BME (also BDE)
Best Month Ever (Best Day Ever). Commonly seen in the “How were your monthly stats?” threads that tend to pop up as soon as a month ends somewhere in the world. See WME.

CN
Creative Network. Your list of iStock friends, contacts, lovers, and idols.

Crickets
The crippling near-silence that follows a failed attempt at humor, trolling, sympathy, or other forum reaction.

CV
Controlled Vocabulary. This is the lexicon of official tags (keywords) in use on iStock images.

DOTW
Design of the Week. The weekly showcase position in the Designer’s Spotlight. See xOTW.

DL
Download

EL
Extended License

ETA
Edited To Add. Fixed a forum post? Add your little “ETA: ” message at the end to let others know what corrections you made.

F5
The F5 key on Windows machines is the page refresh key. iStockers tend to wear the F5 key down to a dull shiny nub when new announcements are on the horizon, when they’re on the verge of a milestone download, or just any old time, really.

FIOTW
Free Image of the Week. Each Sunday, a new image is offered to the community as a free download. To have an image added to the pool of images considered for the FIOTW honors, please send a sitemail to JJRD. Free downloads do not add to your download count for your next canister, but it does earn you some cool visibility. See xOTW.

H*ck
Once, long ago, there was a splash page on iStock that depicted a character uttering the just-past-censors word “F*ck”. Folks felt that, asterisk or not, this may have been too racy, so it was amended to read H*ck. The splash page eventually vanished (was it a 404 page? a contest? I don’t remember…), but the near-expletive lives on.

HHUR
Heart Heart Unicorn Rainbow. Peebert-only.

IOTW
Image of the Week. Each week, the site admins select one of the newly uploaded images as Best-In-Class. On Sunday, the champion image takes it showcase position on the front page. Along with this honor comes a cool little icon, and a week’s worth of front-page visibility.

Lypse
iStockers tend to congregate, descending on a location like a swarm of photographic locusts for the purposes of camaraderie, cameramanship, and consumption of comestibles and … uhhh… booze. Get togethers planned and executed through iStock HQ are known as iStockalypses. Those put on by the community members are known as mini’lypses.

OP
Original Poster, or Original Post (Thanks Mikael!)

Pimp
Generally frowned on in the forums, this is the act of putting one of your own images into a thread discussion (other than into a thread devoted to critiquing, that is). There is a weekly sanctioned thread devoted to themed pimping, however. See PTOTW.

PTOTW
Pimping Thread of the Week. A weekly forum thread (found in the iStockphoto Discussion area) devoted to letting members pimp their favorite images around a given theme.

UL
Upload

Wiki (v)
To wiki a file, in iStock parlance, is to click the “Report Inaccurate Keywords” link to notify the admins of a poorly keyworded image. Wikiing a file puts it into “Keywords Under Review” status, which prevents further wikiing, but does not impact search results.

WME
Worst Month Ever

xOTW
Something of the Week. See IOTW, DOTW, FIOTW, AOTW, PTOTW

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What did I miss? Throw additions into the comments section, and I’ll get them added up here.

I just added a new series to my iStockphoto portfolio: Little Boy Blue.

It’s true what they say about working with children. You’d better be ready to go when they are, because you only get a few minutes before they are ready for something else. Ordinarily in a model shoot - especially with untrained models - I find I have to keep shooting and shooting in order to get the variety of looks and expressions I’m after. This little guy gave me these five expressions over a span of 8 shots. We were done in under 3 minutes, and about 60 seconds of that was my own monkeying with lights. I don’t even get that kind of signal-noise ratio from static product subjects.

Then again, nobody promises to take static products out for ice cream afterwards…

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.

Philly photographer extraordinaire Andrea Gingerich often posts the results of her Center City texture hunting expeditions on her blog. I’m often jealous of the wealth of great gritty urban textures she has within blocks of her studio.

Before this past weekend’s Tucson Photo Meetup, I had a few minutes to kill in the downtown Tucson area, so I thought I’d post a few of the urban textures I managed to find as well.

I’ve been planning to organize a group shoot for some time now, and it’s finally starting to take shape. I won’t go into the details too much at this time, but I can say that it’ll be early in January 2008. We’ve got a date, a location, and models are starting to sign up to be part of it.

The shoot will take place in an indoor gymnasium, and is being conceived as a sports themed shoot. The models will all be sports and fitness oriented. We’re looking for “extras” to fill out the crowd shots, so if you want to see a commercial shoot, but don’t want to participate as a main model or a photographer, we still have a place for you. Just leave a comment here in the blog, or email me.

A handful of photographers has already started signing up to be part of the shoot. If any of my readers are interested in joining the shoot as well, we have a signup page over at Meetup.com.

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.

This weekend should be a good one for generating some new images for my stock photography portfolio. As an image inspector for iStockphoto, I try to inspect as many images as possible on the weekends. This weekend, however, it looks like iStockphoto is undergoing some server maintenance, so it’ll be a perfect time for me to generate some new portfolio pieces. I don’t have anything scheduled with professional models, however, so I’ll be shooting one of two options:

Option 1: family and self portraiture. Not a bad option, because my son is adorable and my wife is both adorable and very pregnant. That leads to some good photo possibilities. I’m myself neither adorable nor pregnant, but I take direction well.

Option 2: product photography. Some of my best selling images on iStock are product shots. It’s an easy way to generate some assets. There’s no one to hire, no one to get tired of smiling and posing, and I can keep shooting until I get tired. I’ve never had a golf club or basketball ask to “take five”.

There’s a third option, as well, which would be to generate non-photographic assets. I have several 3D renderings and vector illustrations available in my iStock portfolio. Those tend to be rewarding, both artistically and financially, but often take much longer to create than photos.

We’ll see which direction this weekend goes.