I have been hunkering down in my office this past week with no real photography plans. When I find myself in these idle modes, I normally go to my photo archives and look for good potential stock photos. A cup of coffee, some music and I can kill an afternoon doing something productive. The catalog I’m working in at the moment is my bird photographs, so I thought I’d share a few of my recent stock photo submissions featuring our feathered friends.

My best success with bird photographs is to select images that give good perspectives, in good light, with a clear depictive view of the bird and with good resolution. One wouldn’t automatically think they are anything special, but I do sell quite a few bird images. They turn up in publications on the internet and in print. It’s not like I’m selling dozens of them a week, but I generally get a couple of sales per week. Interestingly, ducks do well, as do sandhill cranes, pelicans, eagles and hawks, so I try to keep photographing those birds at every opportunity.

From time to time, I’ve jokingly stated to my friends and colleagues, “if you aren’t selling your images, they are worthless.” I do believe that statement too. I have about 60,500 bird images on my hard drive. Most of those shots are bursts which may contain one frame that stands out above the others, I have several hundred bird photos in the stock catalogs. If you add it up over time, each of these photos could earn me some cash, when they would otherwise sit unnoticed and basically useless. It’s the long game I’m interested in. I suppose that over time, I’ll make a few hundred dollars off just these images, and that’s income that would have been wasted if I hadn’t pulled these images out of the archives.

Some of these photos go way back as far as 2007, some are more recent. I tend to start at the beginning date of the catalog and work my way forward in time. I can almost always find shots that I’ve missed.

For today’s blog entry, I’ll be a bird brain.