ShutterPoint Blog

To those who contributed images - thank you! We really enjoyed looking through images for this colorful holiday.

If you are wondering why we have repeat winners from past competitions, it is because we simply love their stuff!

The five winners will be awarded with 500MB of additional storage space and a one year storage extension (extension will be added to the current expiration date) on ShutterPoint.com.

The winners of ShutterPoint Easter Theme Contest are:

Maria Adelaide Silva for “Eastertime!”

C Atkinson for “Easter Fairy”

Maria Dryfhout for “New Beginnings”

Gianna Stadelmyer for “Colorful Eggs”

Sheryl Kasper for “He Has Risen 2″

Congratulations to winners!

The 2008 edition of ShutterPoint’s Marketable Photography E-Book is now available!

Please download it here: Marketable Photography Guide 2008 (104 pages in PDF format)

Contents include:

A guide to lead you through all the aspects of making and marketing your images. It will take you from shooting to post-processing to uploading images.

Tips and advice from some of our best-selling image contributors. Photographers and graphic artists of various levels shared their wisdom about creating marketable images and selling them.

Showcase of over 600 images sold on ShutterPoint.com at least once in 2007.

This year’s edition includes a content menu for super-easy navigation.

Make some time to go through the image showcase. As you look through the images that sell, you will get inspired and come up with your own ideas for the next shoot or image post process!

Thank you for your contributions! There were some excellent images to reflect this contest’s theme, but we had to narrow it down to five.

Winners will be awarded with 500MB of additional storage space and a one year storage extension (extension will be added to the current expiration date) on ShutterPoint.com.

The winners of ShutterPoint St. Patrick’s Day Theme Contest are:

Olga Bogatyrenko for “Clover Galaxy”

Wendy Mogul for “The Offering”

Maria Dryfhout for “Luck Of The Irish”

Gianna Stadelmyer for “Luck of the Irish”

Jim Glab for “St. Patrick’s Day Parade”

Congratulations to winners! Keep up the awesome work!

Lighting is an extremely important aspect of photography, though often it is overlooked. Common sense tells us that objects in front of us will appear on a photograph exactly the same way as we see them. However, in many situations this is not the case. The camera is not capable to capture exactly what we see, unless the photographer makes an effort to light the scene in a certain way.

When you photograph isolated objects, use soft diffused light for best results. Surely soft vs hard lighting may be considered a matter of taste, but for purpose of stock photography, soft light is preferred because it brings out the best in objects and helps communicate its 3-dimensional elements.

I hope the contributors of images I am going to use in this example do not take this post as an insult, but rather as constructive criticism. Metal and glass are some of the toughest materials to photograph, so you get credit for trying!

Metal

	This image suffers from hard lighting. Light is reflected by the curvature of forks, creating bright white triangles that distract the mind from understanding that this is in fact a bunch of forks.
	This is a better representation of cutlery because lighting is soft and comes from a larger source, making the object appear 3-D.

Glass

	Here again, small direct light was used, hence contrasting reflections are noticeable on the bottles and glasses. Green bottle has some interesting detail at the base, which is impossible to distinguish due to incorrect lighting.
	Objects in this photo are properly lit, letting the viewer concentrate on the idea rather than trying to figure out what the objects are.

When photographing objects that reflect light by nature, pay attention to your lighting. Try to use a large light source and diffuse the light. If you are using a flash, apply a diffuser or a soft box. Same goes for any other lighting. Place tracing paper in front of light source for a quick solution.

Let there be light! Diffused light, that is.