Clichés

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.

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.