10 Common Mistakes by New Stock Photographers on StockStudio's Blog

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10 Common Mistakes by New Stock Photographers
Posted on Tuesday, November 03, 2009 @ 1:51 PM by StockStudio

Found this very informative blog by Rasmus Rasmussen and enjoyed THIS POST in particular. Should be a must read for all new (and some not so new) stock photograpers.

Reader comments:

The3dStudio.com @ 11/3/2009 2:38 PM
Great tips in that one, especially: 1. Don’t Copy Other Photographers

The best way to sell Stock (or 3d, etc) is to be unique / different!

Specter Arts @ 11/4/2009 5:51 AM
Very nice find and excellent tips, I think we’ve all committed a few of those mistakes at some point in our careers.

Number 4 and 8 (Watch Your Filters & Text in Your Images) are two of the most common mistakes which I see so often being taught as being acceptable practice by ‘digital art instructors.’ Ie: Someone from a tech school / university who has a mail order degree in ‘digital media’ and little or no practical industry experience.

As filters and text go: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I’ve often seen many students apply a straight filter to the main image data and then save, only to discover that the effect is then irreversible. Thus, it is important that you treat the medium in the same manner as film. The Old school photographers I’ve worked with don’t mess with the original negatives; they make copies and then experiment with the copies. In the digital realm, it’s important to store the original shots and edit / save copies. As far as post shoot filters, I’ve always stressed the use of non destructive layers as much as possible, as you can always remove the filter layer. Correctly done, you should be able to open a particular source image, remove all the filter layers and be left with a clean copy of the original image.

Although you probably won’t be selling the original source image with all the layers, (.psd, .tiff ect.) it’s always nice to be able and modify a particular image to suit a client’s request. Such editing is often difficult or impossible, provided that you only have a flattened .jpg with all the filters applied directly.

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