Editorial Stock

Editorial stock photography is a retirement game that I play in my senior years. I don't do it for the money, although I welcome any money I earn for doing it. It's what I do instead of playing golf or tennis or watching daytime television. 

I work with a combination of three sets of rules—those of the marketplace, those of Alamy, my stock photo agency, and my own. Mostly, I stick to these rules. But rules are meant to be bent and sometimes broken. 

I'm a city boy. I don't have a car or a driving permit anymore, so I can't do landscapes. I don't do flowers or wildlife either. I see only pigeons and gulls and some other smaller birds where I am now. When I lived in Oxfordshire, I would sometimes see hedgehogs. There is something lovable about those little creatures. I had a family of them living in my badly tendered garden in Woodstock. There were voles, too. But I don't see these small mammals here in the center of Liverpool.  

I don't like to capture pictures of beggars or homeless people, although I sometimes do. It was impossible for me to resist snapping this man from Senegal with his dramatic posture. More often than not, I want my stock photos to have an upbeat, positive message. It's the message that makes it stock. If you can write a caption to an image, positive or negative, it's stock.

Instead of begging, this senior Chinese woman in Lower Manhattan collected cans for recycling. She was focused and hardworking with courage and a positive attitude. I used to say hello to her in Mandarin, and after a while, she gave me a little smile and a nod. I hope she's been okay in the lockdown. 

There are a lot of unexciting subjects that work well for editorial stock: signs, marquees, storefronts, statues, products, and people doing most anything. 

And then there are landmarks, of course. Landmarks can be tricky. Everybody snaps away at landmarks. Alamy has 125,039 images of the Manhattan Skyline, 71,792 of Big Ben. 

I do okay with stock sales of landmarks, with one frustrating, inexplicable exception: St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. I have what I consider some really good images of this most famous church on Earth, yet I've never had a sale or even a zoom. (A zoom is a closer look by a potential buyer.) 

It seems that I've repeated some things I've said in earlier blogs. I'm sorry about that.