Adobe Lightroom is a popular workflow tool for photographers, and our users have been asking for a PhotoShelter plug-in for a while to upload their images to PhotoShelter directly from Lightroom. But sometimes we have to pick and choose between development projects, so this one languished a bit. But one of the cool things about having a community of over 40,000 photographers is that there are bound to be a lot of smart and intrepid people.

PSC Contributor Paul Kamphuis from the Netherlands decided to take it upon himself to create his own plug-in using our API. Even though all the API documentation is Personal Archive-centric, he figured out how to get the images into the PhotoShelter Collection too. Like I said, we have some smart people...

• Get Paul's Lightroom plug-in here.
• Check out his work on the PhotoShelter Collection.

In between watching the Netherlands take the gold medal in the 4x100m freestyle women's relay, we sat down for a little chat.

You're obviously technical, what's your background?
Correct, I am MSc in computer engineering. I've work as a software developer for about 12 years now. For the past eight years, I've worked for a small company here in the Netherlands, where we develop measurement systems and sensors for our clients. Most of these are medical products and include measuring gas concentrations.

My main work is developing the internal software for the measurement devices, so nothing even remotely related to these Adobe Lightroom plugins.

You're a Lightroom user . Can you describe your typical workflow after you've taken a picture? What types of operations are you performing in Lightroom?
When I started doing photography more seriously last year I needed a tool to organize my workflow. Around the same time Lightroom was released and it just did everything that I needed. I have been using it ever since.

Yesterday was a whirlwind of activity here in New York as 20 photographers participated in our Shoot! On Location (SOL) event while another several hundred attended a half day Shoot! The Day symposium at Shoot Digital studios.

The 20 photographers started their day bright and early at 9am where they picked up their brand new Nikon D700s, and became the first group of users to use them en masse. Apple followed with an orientation of Aperture. And the MAC Group finished up with discussion of the Profoto lighting equipment and Pocket Wizards that were used on location.

I started my day by covering one of the SOL locations...

I like to photograph in three main areas: 1) photojournalism, 2) portraits, 3) motion with athletes and dancers. But the PhotoShelter Collection is about shooting stock, so like many of you, I'm going through a learning curve to shoot stock. This includes poring over the School of Stock, and paying attention to as many publications as possible to understand the contexts in which stock is used.

This is my on-going story to share my experiences primarily through showing you my failures. I'm assisted by the brutal criticism of our photo editors and sales team who have been around the block a few times, and know a thing or two about what sells.

I decided to pick a relatively mundane topic of "teens using technology" for the simple reason that it's something that nearly everyone has access to. Everyone knows someone with kids, and everyone reading this has access to some sort of technology, whether it is a camera, cellphone or laptop.

After reading the School of Stock, I decided that for my shoot I wanted to:

• Place the model in a more natural situation rather than shooting against seamless
• Try to use natural light, or at least give the appearance of natural light
• I wanted to minimize the appearance of shadows
  
• I wanted to cast models who were able to do their own make-up & hair (to save money)
  
• I was resigned to the fact that I would be doing some post-production retouching
  

I looked at some of Kareem Black's work with Verizon to get the juices flowing. I didn't want to copy him per se, but I did want to take note of his production values because his work is top notch.

TAKE 1:
Mallorie is studying fashion design and  is a modern dancer. I shot some dance photos with her during the afternoon, and then asked her to do some stock photos while pretending to talk on the phone. She was wearing jeans and a black tank top, and had a pretty mod haircut, which I figured would be good to convey her youthfulness. The only direction I gave her was to "pretend that you're talking to your friend."

There is a window to her right, and a white reflector to her left to fill in some of the shadows. I wanted a pretty even lighting ratio on her face as Joel indicated in his lighting tutorial.


Photo by Allen Murabayashi

There wasn't enough energy in the face for my tastes, so I asked her to smile.


Photo by Allen Murabayashi

She has a very pixie-ish face when she's smiling, which is very different from her non-smiling face. I thought the expression might be too much, so I had her dial back the smile.


Photo by  Allen Murabayashi

Up until this point, I'd only been looking at her expression. But then I started to notice things like the chain on the wall, and the orange paint on the post behind her. Then I started to get nervous about her hand position, and whether she was slouching or not. It's really hard to judge by yourself, which is often why produced shoots have an art director on set. The light also didn't seem perfectly white balanced, and I started to get frustrated.

I'm much more comfortable shooting with strobes in the studio, so I panicked, and shot her against seamless. The set-up is 4 lights on the background to ensure that the background is truly white from top to bottom, and a single beauty dish a foot above eye level and slightly to the left of center.


Photo by Allen Murabayashi

After only 20 frames, I threw the towel in. I had too many doubts about the posing, the haircut, the clothing, etc. I felt good about the light, but that was about it. It was my first lifestyle shoot, and I really felt like a fish out of water. It was a fallacy to believe that I could create good stock without practice.

TAKE 2
Four months later, I was ready to try again. But truth be told, I hadn't really thought about what would make the next shoot successful. Sonia showed up with her mom (who was needed to sign the model release) because she's a sophomore in high school.

We started around 7pm in the evening, so the light was much lower in the sky, but I tried to go natural light plus a white reflector again, and pushed my ISO to 400 (this is about the maximum I am comfortable shooting to guarantee a noise-free image for stock). I was shooting Sonia in the same corner that I shot Mallorie.

 
Photo by Allen Murabayashi

The light was way too dark. The white reflector wasn't kicking enough light back into her face because there simply wasn't enough light at that time of day, so I pulled out a strobe and a large softbox, and tried to balance out the ambient light.

We already told you that Nikon is going to be unveiling their brand-new D700 full-frame DSLR at Shoot! The Day on Sunday, July 20th in New York City. How many more reasons do you need to attend? Well, we've got a few more.

Rob Haggart from aphotoeditor.com (and former Director of Photography from a little magazine known as Men's Journal) will present his famous "Editorial Bootcamp" presentation, and then he's going to moderate an editorial buyer panel including:

• Leslie dela Vega, Photo Editor, TIME Magazine
• Whitney Lawson, Photo Editor, Travel+Leisure
• Michael Wichita, Photo Editor, AARP Bulletin
• Ryan Schick, Photo Editor, Conde Nast Portfolio

Yeah, that's right, just a few photo editors from some of the largest and most influential magazines in the world.

Angela Natividad from adrants.com is going to lead an ad agency panel with an equally stellar grouping including:

• Belinda Lopez, Senior Art Buyer, Strawberry Frog
• Wanda Lau, Senior Art Director, Greater Than One
• Jen Santiago, Managing Art Buyer, G2 Direct & Digital
• Molly Aaker, Art Buyer, Unit7

Then Rachel Rein, Art Buyer at Hill Holiday, New York,  is going to present "From Start to Finish: Finding the Perfect Stock Photos for a Major Campaign," which will highlight an agency project that employed stock photography for a major telecommunications provider.

But we're not done.

On the photographer side of the fence, we have:

• Jazz Mandair and Gautam Pai from JaincoTech who will be discussing strategies for effective keywording.
• PhotoShelter co-founder, Grover Sanschagrin, will take you through his very popular "Killer Websites for Photographers" presentation that he's given around the country
• Apple will be presenting a workflow seminar using Apple Aperture
• and Nikon's Sam Garcia will round it out with a discussion of photography in the digital era.

And in case you get bored, you can head on over to the tradeshow room where the following companies will be presenting their wares:

• Nikon
  
• Adorama Camera
• JPG Magazine
• Apple
• MAC Group (Profoto, Sekonic, Mamiya, Pocket Wizard, and more!)
  
• JaincoTech
• Regus
• Advertising Photographers of America
• Slideluck Potshow
• and of course, PhotoShelter
  

And then when it's all done, we'll pony up to the bar and raise our glass to the new wave of photography that you're helping to create.

If you were around for our City Tour in the Fall of 2007, you know we're not joking around. This is about giving you the information you need to succeed, so don't be shy! Make sure to register if you haven't already!

There's a lot of great things about St. Louis: the Arch, the Anheiser-Busch Anheiser-Busch InBev Brewery, and our very own Emily Hickey. And right up there is Drew Selman and his intrepid team of St. Louis Shooters who have counted out locations, cast models, and stuyding the School of Stock to get all the latest information on shooting stock photography.



Why'd you do it Drew?

"I started the group because I have been a Photoshelter user for some time and was excited about the concept of a one day group effort.  No one had started a St. Louis group.  It was easy today and has now snowballed.  We will end up with 4-6 locations in close proximity and we will rotate through each of them.  The models and shooters will get a good mixture.  It will also expose shooters (newbies and vets) to a lot of different variety.  We have a good mix of people, some who have never shot stock before and some other long time St. Louis folks whose work is pretty well known.  I probably fall in the middle.  I initially started recruiting by sending a note to the St. Louis Camera Club membership (I am the photojournalism chair this year) and by posting on the St. Louis Strobist group site.  Needless to say I'm delighted at the turnout.  My stock ranges between landscape and portrait most of the time.  We are going to try and cover as much of that as we can with this shoot also."

Yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a new recommendation to treat childhood obesity with statins -- the drugs used by millions of adults worldwide to reduce cholesterol. Irrespective of your feelings about whether this course of treatment is prudent or safe, the result has been a cascade of news articles with images of childhood obesity.

Production value continues to be the main problem with the images that we're seeing for the Research Request System. Before we get into the specifics, we encourage you to read our School of Stock article on production values, and then pay increasingly more attention to the way that images are used in the publications you read. Developing a critical eye to discern the differences between pro-quality images and amateur images is crucial.

The grades provided are for all the images we saw, not for the images that we're using as examples.


Doctor in an office setting
Grade: C-

With HIPPA laws and the problems of general accessibility to a doctor's office, the challenges of shooting medically-related imagery start before you even pick up the camera. Once you gain access, make the most of it by planning your shoot and ensuring that the production value of the images is high in every frame. This means paying attention to lighting, composition, styling, and casting (where applicable).

The PhotoShelter Research Request System (RRS) has been live for over a week, and we thought it might be helpful to give you feedback as to the types of images we're seeing and how we think they stack up against the actual requests. The images used in the examples are representative of all the images we received for a given request.

In general, we encourage you to pay more attention to the request details as some of you submitted images that had us scratching our heads given that they didn't match any of the criteria. Also, we can't emphasize "production value" enough. Exposure and composition go without saying, but things like making sure that hair and make-up look good (where appropriate) are essential for producing commercial level stock. We are providing both excellent and poor examples to help hone your eye for successful stock photography.

Beautiful landscapes of Mexico and surf towns
Grade: B+

We received a large number of images, and many of them were quite good. We did receive a number of generic sunsets and would encourage you to incorporate foreground elements that give the viewer even a little context of the location. Most of the images were well-composed and properly exposed. The locations were portrayed in a way that made them desirable to visit, which is arguably the most important aspect of travel photography. In addition, photographers sent us a wide range of images that covered various viewpoints from panoramic to detailed.


 

• Horizon and pool edge create a nice vanishing point
• Color and exposure are fantastic

 

• Great composition. Really gives a sense of the area.
• A shame that the diver is blurred. Use a faster shutter speed to stop the motion.

 

• Captures the local flavor effectively
• Good "straight on" shot, but not spectacular compositionally
  
• But there's No Caption! Always include captions in your meta data on your submitted travel images so the buyer can know what they're looking at

 

• Nice sunset, but fails as a Travel image because it doesn't give any context of location. This could literally be anywhere.

English captions are required on all images submitted to the PhotoShelter Collection. Captions help our editors contextualize the subject matter of your image during their review. But more importantly, captions provide a description for image buyers who often rely on the caption while browsing through thousands of images. A caption can actually affect the sale of an image, because explanatory detail is needed in certain cases (e.g. a textbook). Uniformity of captioning style is important to maintaining professionalism throughout the buying experience.

This is a brief primer on caption style that will help you avoid the dreaded soft-rejection from incomplete or poorly captioned images.

Captions & Soft Rejection
All images submitted to the PhotoShelter Collection require captions, but editors can "soft reject" images if they feel that the caption is not sufficient. Soft rejection reasons include, but are not limited to:

- Insufficient location information (e.g. "Pretty church")

Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence, Italy. Photo by David Baker

- Landmark name required ("A statue near a rainbow" vs. "Rainbow over Statue of Father Damien at St Joseph Church Molokai")

Rainbow over Statue of Father Damien at St Joseph Church Molokai. Photo by Reimar Gaertner.

- Keywords, not caption ("skyscraper, calatrava, malmo")

Turning Torso skyscraper by Santiago Calatrava, Malmo, Sweden, Europe, Scandinavia. Photo by Pawel Toczynski

- Caption not in English ("Una chica y un hombre en la playa")

Woman giving man a piggyback ride. Photo by Rob Howard

- Insufficient identification of people ("Radiohead in concert")

Radiohead play at Meadowbank stadium in Edinburgh. Radiohead are an English rock band formed in Oxfordshire in 1986. The band comprises Thom Yorke (lead vocals, rhythm guitar, piano, electronics), Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, other instruments), Ed O'Brien (guitar, backing vocals), Colin Greenwood (bass guitar, synthesisers) and Phil Selway (drums, percussion).Photo by Ross Gilmore

- All caps ("BARACK OBAMA CAMPAIGNS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE" vs. "Barack Obama campaigns during the New Hampshire Primaries")

United States Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) campaigns in the University of Nevada, Reno gymnasium on Friday, January 18, 2008, approximately 24 hours before the Nevada caucus. Photo by Geoffrey King

Sometimes people take the extreme opposite and provide multiple paragraphs of background information for an image. Although we won't soft reject these images, it is overkill for both our editors and the image buyer.

Image Sequences and Captions
We've reviewed and subsequently soft rejected many images where the photographer cut and pasted the same caption for many different images. If the images are so similar, they should be stacked. If they aren't that similar, then the captions should reflect the different subject matter, angles, lighting conditions, etc, that make the photo unique.