Don’t shoot clichés? We did…
Shooting clichés is considered to be out of bounds. Numerous blogs, forums and other websites providing tips for stock photographers, discuss this taboo on clichés. The evidence is out there – the stock sites, a PicNiche article, on Mystockphoto and the microstockdiaries views on Clichés. There’s even a website containing the 101 most frowned upon clichés for marketing a business.
Never the less, we deliberately decided to have a go at shooting clichés. Conciously, and of sound mind. Several of them. With one difference: we turned our weekly minishoot into an in-company competition, to stimulate creativity, train associative techniques in new concept generation based on existing themes, post-processing techniques, and evolve our understanding of commercial viability of images.
Help us: select your favourite image! (poll)
The image gallery is shown after the read more link, as well as a more in-depth analysis of our approach to clichés.
Please help us by picking the best of our cliché shoot. Select your favourite image from the list in our poll, and leave a comment! To show our gratitude for your help, the author of the most useful comment will receive a free (licensed) copy of one of these 16 images. If that’s you, we’ll contact you around 1 November 2009. Voting is anonymous, and if you leave a comment, your email address is safe with us. We don’t send out mass mailings, ever.
Select your favourite image!
We put ourselves the following challenge:
- Pick two of the most corny cliché concepts for microstock
- Develop that concept to give the cliche a new twist
- Create a story board and studio setup, planning the photoshoot.
- A shoot for a cliche should not exceed 20 minutes, producing two images per cliché for the competition.
After selecting and processing all 16 photos, we uploaded them Shutterstock.
After the images have been online for sale on Shutterstock for one month, we’ll evaluate the commercial value of the “clichés with a twist” by comparing the number of downloads.
- The photographer of the single most downloaded image will receive a bottle of champagne
- The photographer of the most downloaded cliché (the two images per cliché combined) will be awarded one bottle of wine
- The photographer, whose images are downloaded most (all four images) will win a bottle of lemonade.
[polldaddy poll="2047627"]
[...] The White collar criminal. I believe this is a well-executed, strong conceptual image. The grim look, the blatant display of the cash, and the rugged jail door work well together. The idea behind this image was to take a (micro)stock cliche, and take it out of the ordinary. The stereotype image of hands, clasping rods of a jail came to mind, and we mixed it with a contemporary issue of white collar criminality. [...]
[...] To spice up the challenge, we turned this minishoot into a small competition, to see which cliché would sell best. In addition to the buyers side, we also included a small poll for photographers, to complete the information – whether the photographer’s views match with customer’s demands. [read more here] [...]
[...] Stock Photography currently features an article about Corepics, the way we work, and our current cliché challenge. With special thanks to Roberto for providing this opportunity! And what a great title! [...]
[...] “Don’t shoot clichés? We did…“ [...]
[...] Don’t shoot clichés? We did…, an interesting experiment by Corepics; they prepared 16 cliché photos and after a poll session they will upload the images at Shutterstock analyzing the selling trend for a month. <<Please help us by picking the best of our cliché shoot. Select your favourite three images from the list in our poll, and leave a comment!>> [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Corepics VOF. Corepics VOF said: Shooting clichés is out of bounds. Experiment: http://bit.ly/17V3bd. Poll here: http://bit.ly/18wazm. [...]