The Cliché competition – the first 10 days

Your option of choice. Vote Now!

With roughly 10 days into our cliché competition, its about time for a short update on how we’re doing.

The task we set ourselves:

Despite the general consensus that shooting cliches for microstock (more info after the read more link) isn’t the most sensible thing to do, we set ourselves the challenge to come up with some blatant clichés, and think of a novel way to shoot them. Our goal: to stimulate the creative processes and come up with something out of the ordinary.

The Challenge:

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]

As we’ve only have 1/3rd of the time we set ourselves behind us, it’s still way premature to draw any conclusions, so I’ll refrain from commenting, and just state the intermediate results.

You can still cast your vote – we appreciate it! By entering a comment too, you are eligible for one of these 16 images in high res for FREE, if you leave the most valuable reaction!

Top three most sold images on shutterstock:

Currently most sold: “Blind Leap”	Current runner-up: “White Collar Criminal”	Currently third: “Climbing up”

Top three photographer’s choice images:

Leader Photographer’s choice: “White Collar Criminal”	Photographer’s runner-up: “Spicing-up a presentation”	Trailing in third place: “Telephone Power”

We’ll keep you posted on the outcome, as well as our conclusions!

Everybody seems to have an opinion about shooting clichés. Some see it as copying the ideas of others, others see it as an “off-limits” subject for relatively new contributors, like us. This is mainly because the subjects and concepts are already very well covered – in abundance – on the microstock sites. Various forums and forums have discussed this at length.

Mystockphoto

Microstock diaries

PicNiche

Mac World and Computerworld

Likewise, there are as many photographers as there are opinions on what to shoot, and in most cases, Clichés are not one of them…

Even on the buyer’s side, Clichés are taboo from a marketing point of view:

101 clichés

As mentioned before, this minishoot isn’t intended to make us rich. Its primarily intended to get the creative juices flowing – trying to grab an image concept that’s already abundant, and give it a novel swing. This line of thoughts actively helps us to maximise productivity of our regular shoots. On a different level, the information gathered throughout this process is also of significant importance: Is shooting  cliches really to be avoided? How well do we – photographers – understand the buyers demands? Is there still room left within the overflow in submitted images depicting archetypal concepts to achieve a return on investments for such a shoot?

Soon after our competition closes on 28 October 2009, we’ll share our findings. So please help us, and fill in the poll!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 21:55 and is filed under What's new? and tagged with business, cliche, competition, corepics, microstock, minishoot, poll, prize, Shutterstock, studio, taboo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.