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Flying Money, My First Photoshop Stock Photo

I noticed, when looking through my sales history, that many of my images have a very long life. The above image of flying money, which I named many years ago, Flight of the Greenbacks, is one of those long-lived pictures. It brought in just under $400.00 over the last year.

Now $400.00 in a year for a stock photo is hardly what one would call spectacular, hardly worth mentioning, I suppose. But the cool thing about this image earning that amount over the last year is that I created this image in 1990! This image was, I believe, the first stock photo I ever created in Photoshop.

Hundred Dollar Bills and Wings of Egrets

I photographed the money, a $100.00 bill, with a 4×5 Sinar camera using Ektachrome 4×5 transparency film. The wings came from a 35mm slide of an Egret in flight that I had photographed for part of a housing project brochure. I photographed the Egret using either Ektachrome or Kodachrome slide film, I don’t remember which.

The cloudy sky image was also from a 35mm slide. I had all the transparencies scanned on a drum scanner at a separation house. It cost me a hefty $110.00 a scan, and each scan was transferred to me via SyQuest disk.

Photoshop 1.0 and a Macintosh II

I used Photoshop 1.0 for the digital work on a Macintosh II. My machine had a whopping 32 megs of Ram and a un-calibrated 13 inch monitor. In Photoshop, back then, there were no layers, there was no history, there were no layer masks and there wasn’t even a pen tool to create clipping paths (at least at don’t remember one).

It took me two full days to create this image, and probably a third day of just cleaning up edges. Trying to get things perfect was the difficult part. Well, that and the fact that everything took forever to do! Rotating a 30 megabyte file took over half-an-hour, and since all you could see during the duration was a bounding box, accuracy was non-existent! I don’t even like remembering it.

Finally, I had to deliver the image to Tony Stone Images (this was before Getty Images existed) as a 4×5 transparency output from a film recorder.

$15,000.00, Fifteen Years, and a Time Magazine Cover

Though the earnings of this image have dropped considerably, way back in the day, it earned some good money. I would guess my total returns for this image is in the neighborhood of $15,000.00.

Another interesting point is that it took fifteen years from the time I created it for it to show up on the cover of Time Magazine. The people at Time isolated the flying money and added in a face to illustrate an article on what they called “The Great Retirement Rip Off”.

Photoshop, Progress Bars and 3D Programs

In the early nineties I was constantly being told that you couldn’t use Photoshop to do professional level work. I just smiled and went back to watching that progress bar. Actually, I should say several progress bars.

You could be much more efficient with two or three machines. I remember once using the “radial>zoom>blur” filter on a photograph in an operation that took 19+ hours to finish, then it didn’t look very good so I did the old “command-z”. I suppose there are those out there (Colin Anderson, Shalom Ormsby and Phil Banko, for example?) who now experience those same situations doing high-end work with 3D programs.

Income Producing Assets

Every time I set about to make a stock photo, I am trying to create an image with that kind of staying power. In the well-known investment book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki advocates investing your money in “income producing assets”.

That is how I view my stock photos, as income producing assets. I am investing my time, my money and my ideas in stock photo assets. I don’t know about you, but I find it very reassuring that those assets can still, even in these years of industry turbulence, have a long and healthy life.

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And Wonderful Idea and a Book

A number of years ago I was interviewed as an early adopter of Photoshop, as part of a book on Adobe Photoshop. When the new book came out, the writer sent me a copy.  The book was very beautiful and I phoned her up to congratulate her. I then asked her what her next project was.

She replied that she didnâ??t know yet what her next project would be. I  immediately suggested that she write a book on meâ?¦ and she replied that it was a wonderful idea! A year later my book on Photoshop (Adobe Masterclass: Photoshop Compositing with John Lund) came out.

Would You Model For Me?

A few days ago I had just boarded a plan back from New York when a very attractive young woman sat down next to me. After a very brief conversation I asked her if she would model for me (I always cringe when I ask thatâ?¦). She agreed and two days later we were shooting. The shoot turned out great and I got great model released stock photo images, as good or better than I had imagined when I first asked her if she would model for me.

Photo Shoots of Operations and Physical Therapy

Three times I have asked surgeons if I can either have my operation photographed, or, if I can use their facilities to stage a stock photo shoot. Amazingly enough, that has resulted in two actual still photo shoots of operations on me (including a video in which a mesh is installed beneath my abdominal muscles) and an extensive shoot in a physical therapy facility virtually for free (OK, the operation did cost me $10,000.00).

Tony Stone and a Career in Stock Photography

Way back before the beginning of time I once asked Tony Stone if he would loan me enough money to buy a powerful computer so that I could create cool stock photos for him (his company, Tony Stone Images, was the company purchased by Jonathan Klein and Mark Getty and turned into Getty Images).  Amazingly enough Tony said yes and my career in stock photography took off.  Of course, the answer isnâ??t always yes. I would like to point out I first asked the owner of another stock agency for the money to buy the computer, but he declined.  Silly man!

 
The Most Important Question

In yet another ancient and audacious act of asking, I approached the owner of a photo lab (remember those?) if he would loan me $5,000.00 to purchase a Beta copy of a program called Live Picture.

Back then Live Picture had layers and a liquefy filter as well as â??historyâ? and Photoshop did not. He loaned me the money, I bought Live Picture and for quite a few years was able to work far more efficiently for certain tasks than I could with Photoshop. In fact, the very first job I did with Live Picture that I could not do with Photoshop netted me a not-too-paltry $11,000.00 profit!

Of course, Live Picture lost the battle to Photoshop and there are few people left who even remember it. Oh wellâ?¦.

Perhaps the most important question of all, though, is one to ask your self. That question is: Why not?

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Ever since man invented the computer, it has become an invaluable tool. As more people learn to use the computer and take advantage of its capabilities, it has become a part of our everyday lives. And computer use is growing each year.

With computers in homes, offices and libraries across the country, the majority of people have access to this technology. Many people are turning to different types of computer software to fulfill a variety of needs with regard to finances, household organization and different business ventures. Software is tailored to suite the clientele and make their lives easier.

Today, a great number of people access their banking information online. From one single account, people can enroll other accounts that include utilities and bills for credit cards. You can even schedule payments for insurance premiums and mortgage payments to ensure they are made on time. The financial world has advanced because of computers to improve transactions for consumers so they are safer and more convenient.

As banking accounts became accessible online, so did stock market investments. The shift from person to person trading has been made to a more sophisticated type of online stock trading. Because of this, companies put up their own websites to encourage their clients to perform the majority of their transactions online. Usually these transactions are done by using stock market software.

To gain access to this information, investors may subscribe for free or pay a stated amount for an account through the trading company’s website. When an investor does this, he needs to download and install the particular stock market software used by the company he works with. This is done so the trading company and the subscriber will be using the same platform.

A wide variety of stock market software is available on the market today. This ranges from simple to extremely sophisticated. The majority of these applications offer similar basic features of a graphical user interface (GUI) that help a user to perform one or more said tasks. This type of stock market software is typically intended for use on a large scale. There are also types of software that cater to personal use. For example, investors can install and use personal financial managers on their computers and digital assistants.

Investors can use the software of their preference to manage their accounts and check on the current value of their stocks. This helps online investors because the GUI helps them to quickly and easily perform routine investment tasks.

Trading companies separately purchase stock market software to use for transactions with their clients. Usually these trading companies have an agreement with the software developer so they can use their product at a lower cost. Other companies hire a software developer to design a customized package tailored to their unique needs.

Innovative stock market software offers investors a valuable tool to maximize the potential of their investments. Unlike days gone by, investors have immediate access to any information they want prior to making market investments.

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I am a photographer that dabbles in graphic design, and a client has asked me to do wedding invitations, well that’s great, but I found a really nice flourish in my stock clip art and it is black, and I want it to be brown. Is there anyway to make it brown. I use photoshop currently with my photography, and didn’t know if I could change the color of the clip art in that program… Your help would be greatly appreciated.

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Stock trading is continually evolving. Every day is a new beginning with new challenges, surprises and major market movements in the vast and diverse market.

There are many reasons why technology companies and software developers have released special software intended to fully equip modern and bury modern market traders.

The rapid increase in population growth and the number of commercial stock investors are really encouraging. This provides a wide range of opportunities for companies that specialize in the development of software for each unique need.

Taking a look at modernity and the latest trading software available on the market is a pleasant surprise. This is because you will find a number of well written unique software. There are several technology companies that have developed the software, but it’s a great surprise that they have each come up with unique products.Therefore every leading software comes with its own methodology.

There is no doubt that the stock market operators that seek to get such market tools are struggling to identify and take action on which software would be the best for them.

The hardest choice would be on selecting the right software for the job. Every software has its own share of plus points. And unfortunately they cannot be combined into one software since they have been released by different developers.

Characteristics of trading software

Every software has its own plus points. Heres a birds eye view of the characteristics of each leading software to help you take your pick:

1. Ticker – You see tickers most commonly on news channels. It is the the bar at the bottom of the screen. A symbol contains the names and the equivalent of stocks along with the price offered at the moment. Tickers are very useful to Traders as they are an indicator of the rise and fall of the stocks.

2. Stock Predictor – This analyses the movement of the stock over a period of time. Using this data, it makes a prediction of how the stock is likely to behave in future. Of course you are never truly sure of how th market is going to react in future.

3. The Chart Tool – This is a graphic representation of the changes on stock prices, and it can give you a quick idea of how the market is undergoing changes. One look at the graph tells you if the stock is displaying a particular trend.

4. Currency Converters – Because cross-border investment or foreign investment is now a reality, many of the software include currency converters to help you get an idea of what your investment is worth in your home currency. This saves you the time of course, to make manual calculations or visit web sites to find out the currency exchange rate.

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I am always on the look out for source material.  While walking along a pedestrian path along the shore of San Francisco bay I encountered a sailboat that had broken loose from its mooring and was beached while the tide was out.  I didn’t know how I was going to use it, but I photographed the boat any way, and from a variety of angles.

About six months later I was photographing rough seas off the Coast of Marin County (at Rodeo Beach) when it occurred to me I could composite the sailboat into the seas and create an image illustrating danger, risk and challenge.  It turned out that the sea wasn’t really rough enough, so I used the waves I had photographed to create a stormier sea.  I used a sky I had photographed years earlier in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I stripped out the sailboat, including all the various lines (ropes and wires) using clipping paths in Photoshop.  Then I pasted the boat into the waves and used a layer mask to make it look like the boat was actually in the waves.

Pictures of Roads and Brick Walls

Recently I have created numerous stock photos from images that I have “collected” to have on hand for future inspiration.  In another such case I decided to create a stock photo from one of a number of road pictures I have taken over the years.  After opening the file in Photoshop I used Bridge to look through a folder of potential images I keep handy.  A picture of a brick wall I had shot some months earlier in a Berkeley neighborhood caught me eye.  It was a simple matter to select the brick wall and insert it into the road picture.  The process took about half-an-hour and cost me nothing.  The result was a stock photo accepted by Getty into The Image Bank brand.

Picturing Interiors

One thing that I am trying to “collect” more of is interior spaces.  I cringe when I think of all the interiors I have photographed in over the years and failed to take advantage of them.  Now I make it a rule to shoot any space I am shooting in with an eye towards using it in a future composite.

A successful example of having an interior space on hand can be seen in a stock photo of a woman sleeping happily on a commercial jet.  In this case the picture I took of an empty seat across the aisle from me on a flight back from Bangkok was the inspiration.  I began with that image and hired a model to pose for me in my studio.  I stripped her into the seat and put a picture of a blue sky from my files into the window.  The result is a stock photo which has been licensed numerous times as a Rights Managed image.

You just never know what image is going to work…or how it is going to work.  An image shot of the ceiling of an airport became a great backdrop for a child astronaut.  Turned on its side, the ceiling became the perfect high-tech background for a space facility.

Creating a library of likely, and even unlikely, composite parts, is a key component of my stock plan.  When I find a likely place or thing I try to get a variety of angles and elevations, as I never know just how things might go together.

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Iâ??ve photographed a ton of money over the last thirty years.  I have photographed money coming out of faucets, being thrown in the air, squeezing through an hourglass, covering a planet, as jigsaw puzzles and serving as a flying carpet. I have PhotoShoped money trees and coins exploding out of piggy banks.  I have made pictures of money being stretched, filling shopping carts and being raked into piles. I have pictures of money on trees, pictures of piles of money and pictures of stacks of money. I have pictures of money from around the world including, English pounds, Italian Lira, Japanese yen, German marks and, of course, Euros. Heck, I have even created an animated stock footage clip of â??raining moneyâ?!

The first stock photo I ever created using Photoshop was a picture of money�flying through the sky on egret wings.  As a matter of fact, seventeen years after I created that stock photo it was used on the cover of Time magazine!  It took me two days and ton of work to create the flying dollars.  I was using Photoshop 1.0 on a Mac II computer.  Just rotating a 30megabyte file took 40 minutes!   I could do that image now in an hour at most.  Back then I had to have a color separator scan the files and that cost $80.00 per file.

I had photographed Snowy Egrets in the wetlands of Marin for brochure advertising a new housing development.  I photographed a hundred dollar bill and had that, and a stormy sky, scanned as well.  Back then I had no clue about clipping paths, if Photoshop even had clipping paths back then.  There was only one level of undo and no layers at all.  Selecting the dollar was done with the lasso tool and cleaning up the selection seemed to take forever.

A number of people told me that professional work could not be done with Photoshop, and even more told me I was getting into it too soon.  But here we are 18 years later; the image is still selling, and, as I pointed out, even ended up on the cover of Time!

When it comes to money be sure and check what the legalities are in your country.  Here in the U.S. the following regulations apply:

Authority: 18 UNITED STATES CODE; 504: Treasury Directive Number 15-56 FR 48539 (September 15,1993) 411.1 Color illustrations authorized.

(a) Notwithstanding any provision of chapter 25 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, authority is hereby given for the printing, publishing or importation, or the making or importation of the necessary plates or items for such printing or publication, of color illustrations of U.S. currency provided that:

1. The illustration must be of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of any matter so illustrated;

2. The illustration must be one sided; and

3. All negatives, plates, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof shall be destroyed and or deleted or erased after their final use in accordance with this section.

Having said that, I never have paid attention to the rulesâ?¦I have just shot what I wanted (hope I donâ??t write my next article from a cell).  Maybe these are rules that the people who reproduce the images have to worry about more.

When shooting dollars it is a good idea to phone ahead to the bank to make sure that have enough clean new bills.  More than once I have shown up at a major bank only to find that they didnâ??t have enough fresh bills for my photography needs.  Now I always phone ahead.  Banks have certain days on which there new bills are delivered.

It can take more money that one might think to capture great concept pictures of dollars.  To shoot a shopping cart full of money I first filled the cart with crumpled paper, and then spread a thin layer of one-dollar bills over and around the â??fillingâ?.  It took every one of my 2,500 one-dollar bills!  Even then there will still some small gaps that I had to fill with Photoshop.

Some day I am sure all of my stock photos of money will either stop selling or fall to a trickle.  That will be when the U.S. finally decides to come out with paper currency as colorful as the currencies of the rest of the world.  Oh well�.

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Come to Your Design Needs a one stop point were you’ll find a free links resource to all your design requirement and numerous resources to assist you in visualizing the design of your project. You can connect with an array of sites related to design.

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Off-the-Shelf Solutions – Stock Media includes photographs, illustrations video footage, music recordings, Flash animations, web site templates, PowerPoint backgrounds and clipart.

Many stock companies refer to themselves as libraries because, like a library, they carry a broad array of materials that tries to satisfy a wide range of tastes and needs.

Licensed Not Sold – With stock media, what you are really buying is a license that gives you permission to use the material you’re interested in.

Once you have a license you don’t in fact own the material. It is still owned by the stock company. They remain the copyright holders. Your license lets you legally use the material in your production.

There are two main types of stock licenses.

1. Rights Managed

The price of a rights managed license depends on how you wish to use the media you’re interested in.

For instance, is it going to be used in a national advertising campaign or is it for your company brochure? Is it being considered for a PowerPoint presentation or is it going to be used in a motion picture? Each usage has a different price.

A rights managed license also takes into consideration how long you will use the media. Periods usually range from 3 months to several years.

If you are going to include the material in a product, your license will be based on how many pieces you plan to manufacture.

With a right managed license, at the end of the license period, you no longer have permission to use the media. Your relationship with the company ends (unless you extend your license).

2. Royalty Free

Royalty free means you are not charged a fee for each separate commercial use of the media. You can use the material as often as you’d like for as long as you’d like. You pay an initial fee for the license and are then free and clear of any further licensing restraints.

A rights managed license is more expensive Why? Because when you license, for instance, a rights managed photo, the stock company removes the photo from circulation for the period of your license. No one else can use it.

This is the main advantage a rights-managed license provides. It protects against simultaneous use – so your competitor won’t be using the same photo as you to launch their ad campaign. When you use royalty free content, there is no such protection. The same photo or music track may be being used by hundreds of companies at the same time.

The question to ask is…is this important to me? Do I care if another company is using this image or this particular web template? If you do, then you will want to pursue a rights managed solution. If, on the other hand, it really doesn’t matter to you, then you’ll want to take a serious look at royalty free media because it is so much cheaper.

Stock by any other name – Rights managed recordings are known as “needle-drops” in the stock music world. This name came from the act of actually lowering a phonograph needle onto a record to place the music in a production. Now with compact discs, they’ve started calling it “laser-drop”. I find “rights managed” to be a much better description.

Royalty free is sometimes called “buy out”. I’ve also seen it referred to as “copyright-free” but this is really an error. The material is in fact fully copyrighted by the stock media company. UniqueTracks is a royalty free stock music company.

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In this case, I want to make a searchable library of images available for users of my website, only on my website. So while many people may use the images, they will all be on one site. Also, the images as displayed need not be large.

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