I'm dreaming of a white Christmas in July

Once again I have to quote my post on Alamy's soft or lacking definition because once again my blogging has been held up by my QC failures. This time I have managed to add Interpolation Artifacts and now Over-manipulated to my troubles!!! I am now shopping for a better camera body as 6MP just takes too much effort to get past QC (and for good reason, as announced here).

Festive blue bead garland 3/4

Festive snowman cut-out 3/4

I've been getting all festive in the last couple of weeks and looking for subjects to fill the buyers' hearts with joy. The result is these cheeky showman images and some limited DoF beadwork.

I haven't started keywording these images yet, I tend to quickly caption them to get them live and then return to them under my own steam. This means that they are out there and can be found by caption and I can link to them but they won't get a great deal of traffic.


Festive blue beads and gold star garlands 1/4

This week is Shoot! the Day (yes, the whole week until the 27th) so I will be trying to get some shots this weekend within the S!TD window. I've sprained my ankle but I'm still going to northern France this weekend and will be shooting peasants (if I see any) so expect some arty french farmhouse images in the offing.


Festive clothes pegs for hanging greeting cards cut-out 5/6

Time out!

This week, I've been mainly adding, cut-outs!

My post about Alamy's soft or lacking definition, which went down so well with you all, reflects the reason for my lack of posts, they kept saying no to my photos until I was running with a backlog of nearly 40 pictures, grrrrr! Finally, yesterday, they relented and my more careful editing (see, I'm not in denial!) has seen me through. If they had said no again I would have been ready to join the ranks of the "6MP isn't good enough for Alamy" brigade, but then again, they may not have looked at my pictures so this still may be true...


Chinese dragon cut-out 6/6 [catchy caption, eh?!]

So...cut-outs. I been working with the archetypal silo rig, large translucent box, infinity white background, SB800 on a stand (free-standing Manfrotto monopod, no less, turning out to be very versatile) triggered on SU-4 slave mode by the on-board Speedlight. Plenty of information on this kind of rig out there, for which I am very grateful. So on to the subjects. I am about to start on some Christmas themes but for now I've found a friend in a chinese dragon, which was procured on a trip to Hong Kong, and some salad servers...this next one of the dragon is my favourite and could well be used for "looking to the future of the Far Eastern economies"


Chinese dragon cut-out 1/6 [no less catchy than the last!]

Cut-outs (or silos) aren't the most exciting things to photograph but they are a staple of the stock photographer's portfolio so I will be adding a smattering of them over time. It is a good environment to go a bit abstract, especially with the help of a macro lens, but I'll keep that for the next post



Blue plastic hand salad servers 3/5

No more recycling bins? I beg to differ

I was saddened to see that there is a glut of wind turbines in stock photography in the PhotoShelter Buyer Survey 2008. We recently visited Holland where wind turbines are 'de rigueur' and we both find them quite fascinating, and on top of that, I have a great opportunity living in Reading where there is an 'urban' wind turbine which towers over the M4 - I was hoping that it would be useful as an example of how wind turbines can be sited in commercial/retail areas without detracting from the area - it appears as though it is in the CostCo car park!


The Ecotricity wind turbine, Reading, Berkshire, UK.
The turbine was designed by Norman Foster
and towers over the M4 at J11

What does surprise me is that the buyer survey said "no more recycling bins" and yet, in the UK at least, I get searches every day for recycling bins. I don't know quite what the buyers are looking for and I'm not the one getting the zooms. I can reassure you that my recycling bin has given a property release and doesn't expect a cut of any sales.

Alamy Measures Stats June 2008

Third full month on Alamy and these are some stats from my measures view of Alamy. Views were down this month, but that was expected as I tightened up my keywords and removed some images which were sub-standard

Proportion of searches for:

1 word = 13% , average of 21.45 pages viewed
2 words = 30% , average of 14.09 pages viewed
3 words = 33% , average of 16.21 pages viewed
4 words = 19% , average of 16.02 pages viewed
5+ words = 4% , average of 5.36 pages viewed

Average number of my pictures viewed matching query: 1.83
Total average CTR for searches in which my images appeared: 1.13%
My CTR: 1.35%

Proportion of searches for:

5 letter words 17.52%
3 letter words 16.85%
4 letter words 13.75%
6 letter words 13.30%
7 letter words 12.64%
8 letter words 7.98%
2 letter words 5.32%
9 letter words 5.32%
10 letter words 4.21%
11 letter words 1.33%
15 letter words 0.89%
12 letter words 0.44%
13 letter words 0.44%

Most popular words (top 5 in each position):

First word: edinburgh, amsterdam, UK, recycling, plastic
Second word: and, bin, UK, of, crowd
Third word: UK, england, and, table, festival
Fourth word: mountain, mile, tantrum, and, books

These stats seem to show that the buyers tend to search with the obvious word first (wow...I mean, how earth-shattering is that statement...it's worth coming back to my blog for that exclusive insight) By rights you could just put this one word in the keywords and get very good Alamy rank but at the expense of rarely appearing in searches. The best approach appears to be combinations of no more than four keywords - but most of my pictures are of something so this is easy. The surprise, that "and" keeps coming up. Should I start putting "and" in my keywords on every image? As it happens, "UK" turns up on most of my "UK" ones anyway.