Forgive a few choruses of the Editorial Department blues.

The Editorial Department blues are easy to learn and comforting in times of trouble. They're liable to strike on deadline day. They attack particularly when the typing is done and illustration time rolls around. After all, nothing drives home a point like the right picture.

If you edit a newsletter for an online stock photography house, man, you've got it made, haven't you? Hundreds of thousands of doubleplusgood pictures of just about anything, all right at your fingers. You'd be hard pressed to come up with any idea so stupid or vague that the perfect image wasn't waiting, somewhere in that vast keyword bank, to illuminate. Right?

Which brings us to the Painfully Ironic Editorial Department blues.

iStock has a huge range of concepts completely nailed. Your headline is Freedom? Success? Security? Inspiration? You won't even need to write anything. There are thousands of images that say it all. Just press a few buttons, change a few sizes, and presto, instant understanding. Exactly what stock photography is all about.

However, economic natural selection has had a unique effect on the iStock gene pool. Economics suggest that the world is full of people who need thousands of pictures of men and women in business suits, rapturously glued to laptop screens. They live in a world where everyone has one hand on a cell phone, with the other vigorously "closing the deal". Lines on graphs always go up, boardroom tables are six miles long, and something really interesting is always going on just up and to the left of the frame.
Elaborate sight gags for newsletter editorial isn't as big a market. A few times an hour an idea strikes. I shut off Strong Bad Sings for a second, head to iStock (ed. note: no really, I'm here all the time) and enter some lucid, carefully chosen nouns and verbs. But "pirate AND orangutan AND arm-wrestle" doesn't turn up a single result. Not even an inappropriately-keyworded sunset. Back to the drawing board.

I recently came down with a case of the Editorial Department blues so bad I had to crawl under my desk. This attack came on after searching "big", "large", "extra large", "biggest", "gigantic", and every other synonym available. You get bushels of fantastic photographs, but I just couldn't find exactly what I wanted. No bikers trying to fit their pinkies into teacups. No elephants riding bicycles. No walruses in bathtubs. Then this happy little character came to the rescue:

Contrast is the key to concepts. If you want to illustrate an adjective, like "big", including the opposite can really drive home the point.

Even more crucial than simple adjectives, though, are verbs. Nothing makes for better editorial than people doing things. Put a model in a costume and give them a job; the action comes to life. Nothing is more identifiable than people working. But considering the massive glut of power-colored ties in the collection, we have relatively few garbage men, gauchos, radio announcers, cartographers, or underwater welders. Are those a little too specific? More general categories also turn up a limited amount of results; we have a few guys in hardhats, the occasional lab coat (often with wacky hair), and a couple dozen chefs. These rare multi-practitioners must sure be tired, doing every non-office job in the world. I hope they have a good union.

When I think of "work", the last thing that comes to mind is a guy in an Armani suit, isolated on a white background, conspicuously NOT DOING ANYTHING.

Not digging ditches, gutting fish, programming a VCR, planting geraniums, figuring out his longitude with a watch, making a soufflé, cutting down a tree, harpooning a whale, baling hay, or otherwise working. Zoom in on the fingers in some of those handshake shots: not a callous in sight.
Maybe in a drastic and unforeseen market shift, schtick and slapstick will replace "Corporate Imagery" as the top seller. Suddenly, photographers across the world will dash out to shoot bears on unicycles, delivery men carrying panes of glass down the sidewalk, dozens of clowns piling out of tiny cars, flying nuns, or even pirates arm-wrestling orangutans. In gray-scale. From different angles. With clipping paths. Maybe. Sigh.

The buying power of attention-deficient on-line newsletter scribblers is limited. But good, vivid concepts will sell. Forget the orangutans maybe, but stretch out those ideas. Find models and make them do things. Exciting things, with props and costumes to show and illustrate new stories.

Don't be afraid of maxims, truisms, and old-chestnuts, not to mention non-sequitors and puns. Editors are viciously, unhealthily addicted to puns, in a pawning the wedding ring for one more fix kind of way. We're just waiting for you to come along and "enable" us.

The Editorial Department blues are thankfully easily remedied. They vanish at the first sight of that special, remarkable image. Like a freshly opened can of worms, a Viking smoking a cigar, or some jerk in an Uncle Sam hat. Meanwhile, if anyone can track down a punchy orangutan...

Metaphors for Stock: by Kelly Cline

This PDF document is packed with over 200 metaphors for kick start your stock photography shooting brain.

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About Kelly Cline

Kelly Cline is a Seattle native with a background in the fine arts with a sidestep into the world of printing and graphic design. Photography has always been a passion and is now her main focus. Kelly also takes pleasure in creating culinary delights and combines her love of photography with her love of cuisine to specialize in food styling and photography.

Her well fed friends and family do not complain about these passions of hers. At all.