Lessons
Class Introduction
15:28 2All About Stock
18:52 3Finding an Agency
13:12 4Model and Property Releases
19:00 5Briefs, Trends and Inspiration
11:25 6Interview: Gallery Stock Creative Director, Jen Fox Freeman
43:55 7Production
14:09 8Self Producing
11:57Archiving, Storage and Back Up
10:01 10Ingest Images
11:46 11Culling Images
29:24 12Keywords
08:45 13Editing Images in Photoshop
24:43 14Equipment
33:14 15Gear on Location
08:56 16Location Scouting
05:18 17Shoot: Working with a Model, Wardrobe and Direction
27:13 18Variation of Angles
03:40 19Final Image Review
05:38Lesson Info
Ingest Images
I'm going to just do kind of a show you my process. There's no right or wrong way to do this. There are lots and lots of tutorials out there. CreativeLive, I'm pretty sure has quite a few photo shop and Lightroom classes. So this is just kind of my process in how I do it. So feel free to ask questions. If the questions are like too technical or I don't want to put too technical but if they're a little advanced then maybe we'll not worry about that. So does everybody ingest their CF cards with one of these? So I'm gonna, this is a card from the shoot on Friday that we'll get to watch here in a little while. So my process for this is I import directly in the Lightroom, little import. Alright, so there's the pictures. I do a copy and then the kind of most important things are your naming convention. This is anybody have a favorite way that they'd name their photos or do you just drag and drop them straight onto your desktop and then open them up in photo mechanic or one of those? There's ...
nothing wrong with doing that if you can keep a handle on it, as long as you know where it is and you can control that and it's not gonna get out of hand there's no right or wrong way. The method that I've been using since pretty much digital photography started and the way all of my archive is is I rename the images off the card and what I do is I just put them in by date onto an interscore and then I'll just do a sequence of how many is there four numbers, four numbers, five numbers, doesn't really matter. This is great 'cause if you need to know when a picture was taken or you have an idea when a picture is taken and you don't have Lightroom or something to open it up or just visual reference when you're moving and cleaning stuff, you always can see when that picture was taken. And so I'll look at stuff, I'm like oh that was taken in just because the naming sequence is there. You're not gonna run into any duplicates this way. If you are ingesting more than one card then you need to make sure you don't, that you make sure the next sequence number is what you start with so you don't overwrite stuff. But this is my naming convention, does anybody have something similar to this, you guys use something like this? Yeah, I think a lot of people do. It's great so that's what I use for that and then so start number one and then the next thing is where you put your pictures. So I'm gonna put mine here in the desktop and I've got this CreativeLive course so this would be like my archive. So I have a folder called stock and in stock I have all of my photo shoots. So if I open up the stock folder this is kind of an idea of what you can see there's a few in there. So if I open up my catalog at home there is like, I don't know, and I can just scroll down and I can look from like 2005 and just keep scrolling all the way down to of all these photo shoots that I've done. And this is just my personal kind of what I call my stock work it's just my everyday walk around stuff. If I'm doing a shoot for a client or I'm doing a bigger production then a lot of times I will actually put that into a separate group of, I have client work which is another whole archive and then I have one that's produced work, which is stuff that is bigger production. So there's a lot to manage. But this is just how I do all of my kind of smaller individual shoots when I travel. I've got stuff that has from you know, a trip to Mexico that has 1500 images in it, in one of these and then I have one from a flight to Los Vegas and I snapped 10 pictures out the window. So I've got a folder that just has 10 pictures in it. But you know there might be a picture in those 10 and there might be you know a picture in those 1500 from Mexico. So I just keep track of everything that I do by kind of shoot and date. If you all just would lump it into one folder you can do that or if you want to put all your stuff into a folder by week, by month, by you know, year, you can definitely do that and that's completely fine. And if you do that though you need to have a way that you can find those, Lightroom allows you to search by date which is good. You can also search by key words that you've put in there so that's another way that you can do this. I kinda choose to do it this way first off because when I first started my archive Lightroom didn't exist and it was a little more manual. But it's just been kind of a routine for me and it's so easy for me to just go back and be like oh yeah remember going on that hike or this was Fourth of July in so let's go back and look at that. So I also have a little visual reference. And Lightroom's super cool 'cause you can you know, have these folders but you can also select them all and have them into one big view. So those are kind of the most I think real important parts of your archive is to be consistent and keep the same you know, naming of your files and then keep them organized you know by folder or like I said by keyword. And this is, you'll see later as I go back, it's like so critical to managing an archive. So I'm gonna go ahead and put them in there. I'm gonna put them in a folder, I just start with a date so that was taken on 2017, April 14th. And so I have it in their already named (mumbles) but I'm gonna go in just for demonstration purposes I'm gonna call this morning jog. And so I'll go ahead and put it in that folder. So there's a few other things in Lightroom that I like. I like to build standard previews because I'm gonna go ahead and usually at least do one pass of editing in the previews. If once it's done building I can walk away, get coffee, and it just starts building those previews for you that way when you go to the next image you don't have to wait a few seconds for it to pop up. And I don't deal with smart previews, any of that stuff you can, I'm not gonna go into that too much. All these other things, add to collections, I don't necessarily do that for this stuff. Was there, okay so there's some other things here that I like to do. Metadata, I don't have any saved in this new catalog but sometimes I'll put metadata in and mine's on default, you can just keep your copyright information already saved in there, have it on there. Copyright information is important for this kind of work that we're trying to do, our own personal work that's gonna go to hopefully a stock agency. I don't think it's nearly as important as it was like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. There isn't too much of a problem of people stealing photos quite the way that they used to. I know in some industries in the kind of wedding portrait stuff people like to put their watermark on it for a couple other reasons but for this stuff I keep my name on the files so that that way if it does get picked up somebody can see where it came from and if there's a copyright maybe they'll contact me but pretty much if somebody takes the picture even if there's a copyright there and they wanna use it, they're gonna do it. So and then development settings (mumbles) sometimes I use all makeup settings so if I know I'm gonna bring my pictures and I know I want them to come in just real flat initially to view I'll do that but a lot of times I'll just change that after I've already ingested them. And I think that's it so we'll go ahead and put that ingesting so. Does this all seem like pretty common stuff everybody sort of knows this, follows along? It's never too late to go back and start reorganizing and renaming your files and doing this. It definitely helps. Is there any questions so far about any of this ingesting process? So we have not about specifically about the ingestion process but kttsb wanted to know if you watermark your images? I don't watermark my images, I just don't. I don't think it looks good with a watermark on my images. The nice thing is when you do have images that are at a stock agency they go after people who use them without permission because it cuts into their profit so that does happen the agencies have a legal team and they keep an eye out. They use software to look for where these pictures go. So they will actually you know go and try to collect off of pictures that has not been properly used. The picture of the lightning strike was used by a British publication without any use because they took it off of a Flickr site that somebody had taken off of the internet and kind of cropped it and put it on their own Flickr site so they had used it there. So Corbis went and told them that they couldn't do that and so they paid whatever the price was and then Corbis' name, my name was put onto the bi-line. So it does exist it is out there, it's tough to control. If you wanna put watermarks on your images, go ahead, I wouldn't put a big watermark right across the center of it 'cause nobody wants to look at a picture with a big watermark in the center of it. If you are giving proofs to someone then it might be worthwhile, I understand that if you're a portrait person because you don't want them to just take those images and go and print them when you're you know controlling that. So in that aspect watermarks do make sense.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Amy Vaughn
Personally, I really liked this class, but I can see why it wouldn’t be for everyone looking for information about stock photography. I’ve already researched and started doing microstock, but now I’m looking for more information about other options. This class was a good fit for me. Although Geo seemed new to public speaking and used too many fillers like “uh” and “um”, I found him likable and surprisingly relatable considering our different photographic niches. This class may be best suited for: Learning more about boutique galleries, rights managed stock and alternatives to microstock Seeing how this particular stock photographer works, gets inspiration and has been successful Getting ideas about current trends and sources for inspiration Getting the perspective of a creative director for a boutique agency Those interested in lifestyle photography May not be as suitable for: Broader and more in depth information about the variety of options in stock photography Those who want to focus on microstock New photographers who want detailed information about getting started and meeting technical requirements Those who prefer a more polished speaker
Christina Biasi
I loved this class! I cannot agree with some other reviews below at all Geo gives so much valuable information, and in fact I love his style much more than many other over-self confident speakers. He is sympathetic and likeable, and most importantly give very much valuable insights into stock photography. I just started with stock and got all my questions answered. I watched it already three times. The only part which I did not like so much was the post-processing part, because he could have explained better his workflow and why he chose certain actions. But that does not impact on the overall quality of the course. I can only highly recommend this class
Carol Totaro
I thought this was a great class and have to disagree with some of the comments from the hands down viewers. The audience was listless and did not seem to be interested in being there. Do you know how difficult it is to stand up in front of a bunch like this and keep your mojo racing? Very difficult. Hardly anyone asked questions and they all just gave a lot of nods most of the time. If your read ahead of time the info on the class, you would see that he was going to go into Lightroom and workflow. Yes, some of it was a drag especially all those pictures taken from the condo at a FL panhandle beach. But nothing's perfect. Maybe I got a lot out of this because I am newer at photography. I was glad to know about his equipment. Everyone's personality is different and for all the talent and success Geo has enjoyed, he remains a humble and very likeable guy.