Ron Shoots

Shooting in front of the former KGB headquarters.

After the workshop on Saturday, I spent a wonderful Sunday walking around Moscow with Photographer Mikhail Lavrenov. We started before sunrise at Red Square, walked many miles and rode the Metro to even more destinations. Mikhail was also not just a great tour guide, but offered his perspective on the Russia he grew up in and the Russia today.

The colors in Moscow are brilliant. As we walked around and looked at the architecture, old and new, I could feel the energy of the colors. For whatever reason, my expectation of a gray Moscow was nowhere to be found. We stopped for a few moments at Red Square just to look at the scene. As a child, my first image of the Kremlin was during the Cold War… a black & white newspaper photo with hundreds of tanks and missiles parading through Red Square. This morning, there were only a few lucky photographers and a couple of people trying to find their way home from too much partying.

Thanks again to Stockxpert for a great opportunity… and to Mikhail, for an awesome day!

(Photo credit: Alex Khromushin)

Wow- what a great experience! I’m in Moscow, just finished teaching a stock photography workshop for Stockxpert. Over 140 photographers participated in an all day event with many flying in from the outlying cities in Russia.

(Two images of Anna from the workshop session.)

Only a very few of the workshop participants spoke English so fortunately there was an interpreter that could translate my words into Russian. The model only spoke Russian as well. (Of course, I have the world’s dumbest laugh that will make anyone smile…) In the afternoon, I photographed the model using just natural light and reflectors surrounded by the entire group. After each series of images, my camera would get passed around the room for everyone to see the what had been just shot. Photography is truly a global language.

Many thanks to all who came to the workshop, and to all my new friends in this beautiful city!

You really should wonder about me… seriously. I hang out with colorful winged faeries, cover people in mud, wrap others in string, and make ordinary strangers jump in the air. And Gray Mitchell, who also shoots for our studio, has a passion for taking pictures of strange-looking pets like this SnapVillage ad on the inside cover of HOW magazine.

One of my “Faery” images used by Photos.com on the back cover of the April 2008 issue of HOW magazine. (Yes, 2 full-page ads in one issue from our studio!)

We call these the “marketing” images, the photos that make people look twice, and if we’re lucky, three times. Will these images sell? Not necessarily, but what they do is to create a feeling for our studio, a sense of our creativity and if we’re really lucky, an interest in buying our images.

Plus shooting crazy photos is fun! There’s really too much seriousness in all of this stock business. Yes, its a business, but didn’t we all start taking pictures because we liked the process? If you have an idea for an image, just shoot it. Don’t filter every production with a “Will it Sell? question. The best images might be the ones you haven’t shot yet.

All About Balance

Shooting pictures that may not sell doesn’t sound like a good business model, but there’s room in every collection for a few fun photos. Our content strategy plan is to have about 10% of our image collection push the edge of acceptable (read sellable) stock photography.

Do they have to be edgy off-the-wall crazy fun images? Absolutely not, but what your “marketing” images need to have is a sense of passion, a reason for an art director to stop for just a few seconds… just long enough to look at the image, twice.

Sometimes I just need to do a few shoots for myself- one model, maybe lighting I haven’t tried in a while, or a new concept, or maybe something just super simple to remind me why I love photography!

Here’s an image from yesterday. This beautiful young woman had never modeled before. She spent 7 years in the military with a few of those years in the Middle East, and now she’s finishing up her biology degree at a local university.

Simple Lighting

The lighting was about as simple as it gets- one 30″ x 40″ soft box with a 1k hot light, a reflector board, and a blank white wall. I moved the model to the front edge of the soft box so most of the light would fall behind her.