Tag Archives: getty

5000 Images

Deer in Winter Wilderness

Saw this beautiful buck at the edge of the wilderness this morning. He was very cooperative in posing for a few captures 🙂 Also noticed this morning that somewhere along the line lately I blew through the 5000 accepted images at iStock / Getty! Two years ago I was looking forward to surpassing that mark but got so discouraged with the company that I stopped uploading. But a few days ago, much to my surprise I logged by best month there in a long time, enough payout to rethink my decision to ignore that portfolio. iStock / Getty was where my stock photography career began and it is my oldest portfolio, dating all the way back to 2006. It’s also a pretty good pictorial history of an entire decade of my life on this earth!

Zombies

I was thinking of naming this post Zombie Portfolios, but just plain Zombies had a better ring to it. Well anyway, morning for me came well before sunrise today with a quick check of my email on my phone, which also doubles as the first light I can reach when I wake up. For the second month in a row, the much anticipated payment from my formerly most profitable agency has not arrived 😦 Hard to believe it has come to this but I should probably just close that zombie port, it’s just competing with my own website anyway.

Alpenglow sunrise on the Sangre de Cristo

Thought about just going back to sleep, but Big Dog was wide awake and ready to go so I grudgingly got up, got dressed and turned on the coffee pot. A quick jaunt out the front door with the two dogs for their morning duties and I figured I was good for a few minutes for a cup of coffee. Soon however, the allure of another beautiful alpenglow sunrise urged me out of my chair and onto the trail. As we made our way through the woods in the pre dawn darkness I could see the telltale red band working it’s way down the sky towards the horizon and, it looked like my timing was going to be perfect if I just kept walking at the current pace.

Just as I had hoped, the beautiful red band of alpenglow effect converged upon the Sangre de Cristo just as Big Dog and I arrived at the overlook. It was a nice sunrise with beautiful color and very even contrast for a change. Fifteen minutes later the show was over and we were on our way home. The morning light was shining on the mountainside to the north and I spotted a herd of mule deer traversing the summit, way too far away for a good picture. But the barren aspen trees near the top were kind of cool so I’ll be taking a look at those captures for use on my stock site. I’m a bit slow today getting these images posted today, but please be sure to check my image site for recent arrivals!

Ebb and Flow

Totally resisting going out into the world this morning. Monday on the  job getting harder and harder to face… After three days off from my unfortunate necessary supplemental job, the old body feels mostly like I haven’t been run over by a  truck and I am not looking forward to the return of the pain.

Snowy RockiesSo while still basking in the good feelings I have from yesterday’s Donkey Derby in Cripple, I am working on these winter pictures from last year that I was not able to process at the time, hoping that if I stall long enough there will be some miracle and I won’t have to go to work. As far as the images, the camera got them right but my old version of Photoshop mostly turned them white and I was not able to pull the details out and make a decent image from the raw captures. However I now have the most recent version of the Photoshop Cloud with some new tools available and I am enjoying making something of these images that I took while snowshoeing in a snowstorm in the Pike National Forest high on a ridge north of Ute Pass Colorado.

The tool that has made the difference is in the special effects section of Camera Raw. The reduce haze tool is able to bring out the details from behind the falling snow and make some pretty cool looking art! Also, in the ebb and flow of the stock photography business, iStock / Getty seems to have turned the corner and is starting to make a comeback. I had sort of given up on them and turned my attention to Adobe, but despite having the worst commissions anywhere, iStock / Getty continues to be my biggest income earner and is showing signs of a significant pickup in sales. So just in time for uploading some fall and winter images to my agencies, it is a stroke of good fortune that I have been able to resurrect these snowy images.

They are also making a nice addition to my own website where I sell my collection of prints and gift items. I have put the winter images in the Rocky Mountain Winter gallery, so if you want to see the new ones, just click on the gallery links to open the contents.

Finally, my photography tip of the day… if the zipper on your camera bag is getting a bit sticky just pull the Chapstick out of your pocket and run it over the teeth. Chapstick is based on paraffin which is better than using a petroleum based product like Vaseline. Slide the zipper back and forth a few times, and it should be good as new!

 

Steve Krull is a prolific sports and nature photographer selling prints and stock images online as S.W. Krull Imaging at various sites and agencies. Click this link to view all the products and services offered by Steve Krull and S. W. Krull Imaging. Additional services include, wedding photography, portraiture and model portfolios, and event photography. Additional products include fine art stock imagery, prints and gift items

iStock Editorial

This whitewater shoot of the Numbers Rapids on the Arkansas River near Buena Vista, Colorado is apparently my first editorial shoot since the big iStock / Getty unification project. I’m sure everyone else has already figured out how to do it, but I was really tearing my hair out for a while there!

Kayaking the NumbersDeepMeta no longer has a check box for editorial so it was a bit difficult to figure out how to do it. Of course it would have been helpful to watch the tutorial for the new interface first, lol… but that’s not how I roll 🙂 Well anyway I finally did watch it and discovered that the editorial submission process has been included at the batch level with the new batch concept implemented by Getty Images.

So for those who operate like I do, the answer lies in the creating of  the batch. There is a tab on the batch creation window for an editorial batch. Mine haven’t been accepted yet, but the documentation I found indicates that the old rigid caption requirement has been eliminated and that now you just enter the data into the description field. Supposedly the rigid requirements for a format have been relaxed. We will soon find out!

 

Steve Krull is a prolific sports and nature photographer selling prints and stock images online as S.W. Krull Imaging at various sites and agencies. Click this link to view all the products and services offered by Steve Krull and S. W. Krull Imaging. Additional services include, wedding photography, portraiture and model portfolios, and event photography. Additional products include fine art stock imagery, prints and gift items

Nocturnal and First Snow

Two o’clock a.m. and I’m wide awake, too awake to sleep and too tired to do anything constructive. Starting to wonder if I’m becoming nocturnal! I hope not, hiking at night would be a real bummer! Guess I’ll write a blog. Nothing like throwing a bunch of random thoughts onto the virtual paper to bring it all together. LOL… not everything that comes together is good though! We’ll see how it turns out 🙂

Pikes Peak

First Snow on Pikes Peak

Now that I mention things that aren’t good coming together… I recently saw a position available for a sports writer / photographer, which sounded perfect for me! Wasn’t too sure if my writing experience would be the right fit for a CSU Rams reporter, but I was especially excited about having access to the press box for game photography. I’ve always wanted to be one of those cool guys with the big white lenses running up and down the sidelines and hanging out in the press box 🙂

Much to my surprise, within hours I was turning in my first article. The second article, however is proving to be more difficult. Don’t seem to have the attention span to analyze a pile of statistics and come up with a meaningful story out of it. I feel like I’m back in my cubicle in the dungeon at Raytheon, totally stressed out and beset with a completely blank mind. Just like it was at the last with Raytheon, all I can think of is running away from the desk, fleeing the dark caverns of the programmer basement and getting outside! I think today I’ll try to find another subject to write on. Perhaps today in the cold and the rain maybe I won’t be longing for the outdoors so much. Maybe there is a standout player who could use some ink. At any rate, looking forward to being in the press box on Halloween day when CSU takes on SDSU at home in sunny beautiful Fort Collins, Colorado.

There are some other statistics this fall that I find myself very interested in studying. A few months ago when this new chapter in my life began I was excited to set a goal of breaking the 3,000 approved image mark at my agency, iStock / Getty. It didn’t take me long to do that and now as I look at my account, the number 4,000 has come within striking distance. A few more sleepless nights and who knows, perhaps I will achieve 4,000 before year’s end.

Today the clouds parted for a bit and the big peak became visible and it is clearly sporting a new mantle of snow to remind me that this year is rapidly winding down. So right now, as long as I’m awake anyway, I’m going to load up the chip from yesterday’s trek up Bald Mountain so that I can mark the first day of significant snow on Pikes Peak with an image.