“Strange times eh?” How often have you heard that phrase over the past few months? Too often I suspect. For the stock photos industry ‘disastrous times’ might be a better description. Certainly stock photos and Covid 19 do not go together. There is no doubt that the industry has received a major kick in the groin as
Can customers find your stock photos online?
Can customers find your stock photos online? It seems an obvious question, but at A4StockPhotos we still receive submissions which have no useful metadata attached, and in this context ‘useful’ means the keywords which will help potential customers find your photo. If the shots are good we will still take them, but it has to be
How to get your landscape photos approved by A4StockPhotos
It’s probably fair to say that about three of every five images submitted to A4StockPhotos is a landscape, and it’s long been accepted that landscape photography is the favourite genre of most amateur photographers. A lot of professional shooters would probably like to do far more landscape work too, but unfortunately most pros have
View from above – aerial photography shows a whole new world
We’re beginning to get some great aerial photography from the latest generation of high resolution drone cameras on the website now, many with stunning skies and cloud formations, images which simply cannot be captured by any other medium. It’s also a much more expansive view of our world and serves as a reminder of just
Royalty Free stock photos – the death spiral of micro stock and subscriptions?
Has the over-saturation of the royalty free stock photos market caused an unstoppable downward spiral which may eventually kill the whole industry, or is there more to it than that? It’s certainly true that the micro stock explosion has resulted in levels of market saturation previously unknown in the photographic industry, but looking at it from
DJI Inspire 1 Pro: A lot of drone for the money – once you get used to it
Those of you who read the previous article about our ill-fated DJI Inspire 1 Pro will be glad to know that the sorry saga was successfully resolved when the folks at DJI took the initiative and replaced the under-performing machine with a shiny new drone – which works perfectly! Having flown it, extensively tested the flight
DJI inspire 1 Pro (not) out of the box
This article should have been about how our latest acquisition, another DJI Inspire 1 Pro, has quickly become a valuable addition to our inventory, but instead it’s become just another disaster story of customer dissatisfaction and frustration. It all began with the first attempt to buy one of these drones, from a leading online UK
Freelance designers – how to get paid for stock photos
Getting reimbursed for the true cost of supplying stock photos and images has become a major headache for freelance designers and other creative professionals in recent years. Thankfully, the number of clients who pretend to believe that photos ‘downloaded from the internet are free’ has diminished these days, but that hasn’t removed all the convenient
DJI Phantom 3 Pro camera vs GoPro Hero Black
The 4K camera on the DJI Phantom 3 Pro has been the subject of a lot of comments and reviews since it was first released two years ago, some of them not very complimentary. We’ve been flying one around for some time now, mostly for the 4K video which seems to give excellent results once we
Stock photos of meerkats & other animals
Simple stock photos: This shot was taken with a 100-400mm lens at 250mm. The lens was easily capable of getting the subject larger in the frame, but this seemed the better composition. The camera was set to ISO 320 with a shutter speed of 1/250th. Stock photos like this will sell. Taking effective animal photos