I was using one of my hours to shoot some stock photos of some simple construction photos. A drill screwing in a screw, a hammer driving in a nail, and honestly they weren’t living up to my expectations.

Now granted I was trying out some new modifiers, a boom for a light stand, so I was able to put an Alien Bee AB800 in a soft box directly overhead. I was also using my slightly modified 22″ Beauty Dish. After using a couple of different props and a few different angles, I switched off the over heard AB in an attempt to get something that jumped at me and said pow.

So now I was shooting with just the Beauty Dish at the same height as the subject. And I still wasn’t overly satisfied with it, that is until I moved 180 degrees onto the dark side of the moon, and then my images started Popping.

I really liked what I was seeing on the back of my LCD the images, too me, had life and made me smile, I had Changed a simple thing as a toy hammer hitting a roofing nail into a photograph. But is it right for stock images?

I think it was Nicolsey that said you should look at photos used for advertising products and strive for your images to look like that in order to get good selling images for microstock. So does commercial advertising photography make good stock photos? Do I have too much fine art in my stock images?