I am sure that by now everyone heard the “GO GREEN” phrase many many times!

Many years ago the world was made aware of the global warming phenomena. It took a long time before real and practical solutions began emerging. Now there is a flourishing “going green” trend in response to the issues arising from global warming.

Nowadays, companies are proposing specific solutions to people who want help protect the environment. Supermarkets encourage re-usable bags instead of the plastic bags. Car makers are developing hybrid cars. The eco-minded restaurant businesses buy local and seasonal food. Then there’s the organic food movement, natural birth movement, and many other trends, which are either truly eco-minded, or just claim to be so with clever marketing strategies.

Now, what does all this have to do with ShutterPoint and the stock photography industry you ask? Easy! Images assist marketers in conveying the message through advertisement and you, my friend, is the photographer who provides the visualization for a specific message.

You have a tough job ahead of you because the “go green” trend images are mostly conceptual. Yeah there’s the new green growth coming out of soil image, which is excellent visualization, but think beyond the obvious. How do you illustrate the benefit of using re-usable shopping bags? How do you show that less driving yields less air pollution? Illustrate recycling?

The people are finally realizing how important our planet is and want to make an effort to take care of it. We need to come up with commercial type imagery to help designers convey specific ideas of what can be done to “GO GREEN!”

I am sure that a solid “green concept” image, when used commercially, is a step toward a greener environment on its own.

Got any ideas? I hereby give you a title of an official treehuggerographer!

July 4th - The American Independence Day. This is a very patriotic holiday in the United States. Flags are everywhere, parades, barbecue parties, and of course fireworks. One woman told me recently that she loves this holiday so much that her anticipation and preparation efforts are comparable to what many people do for the Christmas holidays. Many people enjoy all the festivities and of course the imagery that can be associated with this holiday.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this contest! 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 the ShutterPoint July 4th Contest are:

Mike & Connie Mosteller for “Historic Signing”

Gianna Stadelmyer for “A United Nation”

Bruce Becker for “American Flag and Eagle”

Paul Cavill for “November 5″

Jennifer Ralston for “For the Fallen”

Congratulations to winners!

PS: Gianna, another win for you and people might think you work for ShutterPoint! Dear members, Gianna does not work for us - she is just an awesome photographer!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Mother’s Day Image Contest!

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 Mother’s Day Image Contest are:

Jennifer Ralston for “Mother & Daughter”

Jane Spencer for “Mother’s Day”

C Atkinson for “Fairy Mother’s Day Gift”

Bonnie Linahan-Rastatter for “A Mother’s Love”

Barbara Brown for “Waiting”

Congratulations to winners!

Thank you for contributing to the Earth Day Image Contest! This was a complex concept to portray. While many of you submitted wonderful images, we noticed that quite a few images were off topic.

The Earth Day topic is a good example of what an image buyer may actually need. Success in stock photography relates to successfully portraying concepts such as this one.

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 Earth Day Image Contest are:

Bob Snook for “Save the Oil”

Gianna Stadelmyer for “Conservation”

Michael Kaal for “Growth”

Dan Jesperson for “Global Warming”

Annika Strömgren for “Global warming”

Congratulations to winners!

Thanks to all contributers! We had many great images to choose from and so many of you took the idea to the next level. Photographers posted images depicting subjects standing out in a crowd, as well as images portraying uniqueness of a subject.

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 Individuality Image Contest are:

Vincent Couarraze for “Malaysia - Borneo - Head Hunters Iban Tribe”

Steve Ellis for “Famous Tartan sheep of Auchingarrick”

Momlee Bhattacharya for “Being different”

Charles Speakman for “Dare To Be Different”

Jackie Brothers for “Expression is Freedom”

Congratulations to winners!

What is the most crucial point of selling images online? Believe it or not, having an outstanding image is not the answer. That is because in order to sell online, your image must first be found by the image buyer and the most common way to find it is by searching. Therefore, the answer is keywording!

Keywording, or defining the keywords to describe your image, is key to attracting customers to your images.

Remember, the designer who is looking for an image is an intelligent human just like you. He/she has a specific idea of what kind of image is needed and to find it, will input just a few words into the search field. Your task is to figure out what these few words might be.

This is a photo of a young woman in a black swimming suit, coming out from being under water, flipping her hair back, and creating a big splash with water. Her setting is in a swimming pool.

The paragraph above should really be the description of this photo. It also contains information that can be used for keywords.

When defining keywords for your image, start naming exactly what is depicted in the photo. Lets start with this:

“woman in water, hair flip, woman in pool, wet woman, woman, female, girl, swimsuit, bikini, hair, flip, flipping, swimming, swim, pool, water, liquid, wet, splash, in”

Now we have keywords describing the visible attributes of the image. Notice that phrases are ok to use. If the image buyer will be looking for simply “woman in water,” we are covered for that in the basic list. But what if the image buyer has something else in mind. Lets think about what else might be happening in this photograph. How about we add these to our existing keywords:

“action, vacation, summer, play, cheerful, relaxation, relaxing, happy, sexy, fun, active”

By adding keywords that suggest the setting or mood of an image, we are opening up for more interpretations of the image, and thus more usage possibilities. Now if someone is looking for “relaxing vacation” photo or “fun in water” photo, this image will come up.

Try to order the keywords in order of relevance. Note that keyword “sexy” will trigger the adult content filter. If your images do not imply adult content, avoid keywords that suggest adult content and your images will always show up in search results, regardless of content filter settings.

Keywording guidelines

• Use commas as delimiters for words
• Use singular form, not plural (unless its an irregular noun: e.g. man/men; foot/feet)
• Include both singular and plural for irregular nouns
• Do not put a period at end of list (it will be used as part of last keyword)
• Avoid non-readable characters (!#$%, etc.)
• Use dash (-) only if it is part of the keyword
• Do not use name of the model unless it is a known celebrity
• Avoid unrelated keywords (e.g. stock photography, high resolution, portrait orientation)
• When including keywords in foreign language, make sure same set of keywords in English is added
• When using misspellings of words, make sure the correctly spelled keyword is present

ShutterPoint encourages the use of IPTC standards. When you submit image files containing IPTC profiles, the site will pre-fill the fields with the data extracted from the IPTC profiles - keywords, titles, descriptions, and copyright information.

Remember to always check your keyword lists after uploading images, just to be sure!

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.