Visiting a zoo

Visiting a zoo is always fun, but it is more rewarding if you can get some good animal stock photos there. Most of our first images, which were approved by some microstock agencies, are animal shots. It was at Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam. The name may not ring you a bell, but it is the same zoo where a gorilla called Bokito escaped from its cage, dragging an old woman for around 10 m and resulted of hundreds of bite wounds and bone fractures. Three other people were injured at that time. Luckily, it was not in our visiting time (or is it unlucky that otherwise we could get profitable editorial pictures for that event?). Instead, we got a cute vicuna staring at us (left), a prairie dog enjoying its lunch (left below) and an otter ready to jump (right below).

An interesting point from the Bokito news: never gives a smile to an ape. Apes consider human smile as a gesture of aggressiveness, according to some researchers. The old woman was a regular visitor (4 times a week) to the great apes enclosure and she always smiled to the apes and touching her palm onto the enclosure glass thinking that she had a bond with Bokito. Surely she has now.

Climbing rope faster

Microstock photography has been around at least since three years ago. The peak, I think, has been reached and the field has been saturated (each site contains 1-5 million photos). At the beginning of microstock photography, you could simply say: “oh dear, I just took a snapshot picture, but well … it may do sell in a microstock site”. But that’s over.

Today microstock photos are even comparable to major right-managed stock photos. Their quality, compositions and concepts are even better to RM photos. And we just started to contribute to microstock agents last month. Definitely, we need to climb the rope faster and here we need to learn from other well-established contributors.

Fortunately, some willingly want to share their expertise. This link contains very valuable and professional tips to be a good stock photographers. If you want to be a good stock photographer, then you should read those tips.

Springtime in Holland

If you have a plan to visit Holland in this spring, what would you buy or do? I guess it would be a canal trip in Amsterdam, a visit to van Gogh museum or Keukeunhof garden and buy some dutch iconic souvenirs: the dutch cheese, a bucket of tulip flowers (or even some seeds), wooden shoes, etc. That’s too classics and you’ll miss the biggest attraction.

Spring is the peak of the famous Dutch agricultural industry: the tulip and other flowers. In spring (usually between March to early May), flower fields bloom in the most colorful view your eyes can see. You can see the spectacular colorful boxes of white, red, orange and blue flower fields through windows of your airplane. But how about approaching the field yourself with a bicycle and take some beautiful pictures through lens of your camera?

Dark background

Marabou Stork : Canon EOS 350D + f/6.3 + 1/320s + 135mm + ISO 100 + flash off.

At one microstock agency, I was asked on how can I separate this marabou stork image with dark background. Do I need a special post-pro photoshopping technique?

No, I didn’t separate this image with software. It comes out directly from a camera. I don’t really know the theory behind this photographing technique, but maybe I have an idea. Make sure your external light comes from the back of your camera (or your body). Make sure there is no unwanted background objects that are close to the subject. You may want to include some blurry leafs for a flower, for instances.  Set high shutter speed with a middle size of aperture opening.

The reason of nicely lit subject with no background lies on the strong light that comes from the back of camera. It captures the subject enough, but not enough for the background because the shutter has already closed quickly.

Well, that’s my experimental explanation. I do have several images like this, but have not been uploaded in our portfolios. I selected some of the images at dreamstime that have dark background. Look how the light areas are suggesting sunlight from the back of the camera.