| Flying Money, My First Photoshop Stock Photo | | | | Finally, I had to deliver the image to Tony Stone |
| I noticed, when looking through my sales history, that | | | | Images (this was before Getty Images existed) as a |
| many of my images have a very long life. The above | | | | 4x5 transparency output from a film recorder. |
| image of flying money, which I named many years | | | | $15,000.00, Fifteen Years, and a Time Magazine |
| ago, Flight of the Greenbacks, is one of those | | | | Cover |
| long-lived pictures. It brought in just under $400.00 | | | | Though the earnings of this image have dropped |
| over the last year. | | | | considerably, way back in the day, it earned some |
| Now $400.00 in a year for a stock photo is hardly | | | | good money. I would guess my total returns for this |
| what one would call spectacular, hardly worth | | | | image is in the neighborhood of $15,000.00. |
| mentioning, I suppose. But the cool thing about this | | | | Another interesting point is that it took fifteen years |
| image earning that amount over the last year is that | | | | from the time I created it for it to show up on the |
| I created this image in 1990! This image was, I | | | | cover of Time Magazine. The people at Time isolated |
| believe, the first stock photo I ever created in | | | | the flying money and added in a face to illustrate an |
| Photoshop. | | | | article on what they called "The Great Retirement Rip |
| Hundred Dollar Bills and Wings of Egrets | | | | Off". |
| I photographed the money, a $100.00 bill, with a 4x5 | | | | Photoshop, Progress Bars and 3D Programs |
| Sinar camera using Ektachrome 4x5 transparency film. | | | | In the early nineties I was constantly being told that |
| The wings came from a 35mm slide of an Egret in | | | | you couldn't use Photoshop to do professional level |
| flight that I had photographed for part of a housing | | | | work. I just smiled and went back to watching that |
| project brochure. I photographed the Egret using | | | | progress bar. Actually, I should say several progress |
| either Ektachrome or Kodachrome slide film, I don't | | | | bars. |
| remember which. | | | | You could be much more efficient with two or three |
| The cloudy sky image was also from a 35mm slide. I | | | | machines. I remember once using the |
| had all the transparencies scanned on a drum scanner | | | | "radial>zoom>blur" filter on a |
| at a separation house. It cost me a hefty $110.00 a | | | | photograph in an operation that took 19+ hours to |
| scan, and each scan was transferred to me via | | | | finish, then it didn't look very good so I did the old |
| SyQuest disk. | | | | "command-z". I suppose there are those out there |
| Photoshop 1.0 and a Macintosh II | | | | (Colin Anderson, Shalom Ormsby and Phil Banko, for |
| I used Photoshop 1.0 for the digital work on a | | | | example?) who now experience those same |
| Macintosh II. My machine had a whopping 32 megs of | | | | situations doing high-end work with 3D programs. |
| Ram and a un-calibrated 13 inch monitor. In | | | | Income Producing Assets |
| Photoshop, back then, there were no layers, there | | | | Every time I set about to make a stock photo, I am |
| was no history, there were no layer masks and there | | | | trying to create an image with that kind of staying |
| wasn't even a pen tool to create clipping paths (at | | | | power. In the well-known investment book Rich Dad, |
| least at don't remember one). | | | | Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki advocates investing your |
| It took me two full days to create this image, and | | | | money in “income producing assets”. |
| probably a third day of just cleaning up edges. Trying | | | | That is how I view my stock photos, as income |
| to get things perfect was the difficult part. Well, that | | | | producing assets. I am investing my time, my money |
| and the fact that everything took forever to do! | | | | and my ideas in stock photo assets. I don’t |
| Rotating a 30 megabyte file took over half-an-hour, | | | | know about you, but I find it very reassuring that |
| and since all you could see during the duration was a | | | | those assets can still, even in these years of industry |
| bounding box, accuracy was non-existent! I don't | | | | turbulence, have a long and healthy life. |
| even like remembering it. | | | | |