Behind the Scenes of a Stock Photography Photo Shoot – Day 317 of 365

These are some photos that were taken by me and by my good friend Nicolesy. They are behind the scene photos of Rich Legg’s courtroom themed photo shoot for his stock photography. Rich is an exclusive photographer for iStockPhoto.com and he is a full time stock photographer.

The first photograph is a panorama I created in Adobe Photoshop CS5. This thing took FOREVER for Photoshop to stitch together. In the shot you can see that Rich is using about 6 strobe lights. I think there were up to 10 lights set up and available for the photo shoot. Most of them are set up as optical slaves and one of them was set up with a Pocketwizard to trigger the lights.

And a number of photographers were volunteer models for this photo shoot. The orange prison jumper actually comes with a warning that you might be arrested and treated as a felon if you wear this costume outside.

And the other model had some amazing makeup applied to make it look like a black eye. It looked wickedly good – nice and real. These photo shoots can be a lot of fun, especially when make up is involved.

And for everyone who appears in the photo shoot there has to be a model release. You cannot use a person’s likeness in advertising without a model release – you can get your wallet taken from you in court if you do.

My role was to play a lawyer. I broke out one of my suits and put my hair in a very conservative hairstyle. My mom would have been proud and Rich Legg didn’t recognize me! He was about to introduce himself to me and then he realized who I was. It was a lot of fun. Although next time I will try to reign in my humor. I had some photos that needed me to be serious and I would say something funny and everyone would laugh (or blush).

Stock photography is a really challenging and potentially rewarding career. I am an iStockPhotographer although I have only uploaded 4 images about 4 years ago. I have played with the idea of getting into stock photography – if only as a way to challenge myself. I would create a photo submit it and then potentially have my image accepted or rejected. Sort of similar to portrait and wedding photography but on a much more intense level.