Crashing Against Cold Reality

My ideas about doing stock photography crashing against cold hard reality.

The problem is with me.

The Microstock world is driven by a marketing paradigm. A marketer wants to take images out of their context for use in creating a new context.

I am much more interest in seeing photography develop as an educational tool that can help people understand the world around them. In other words I am much more interested in developing photographic methods that help people understand the context of a photo.

Looking through Microstock sites, I will find pictures of mountains, but the site doesn't tell me the name of the mountain. They show pictures of flowers, with info on the flower. One judges the quality of a flower photo by how the light hits the flower.

I am interested in showing both the flower and its environment. So, I will go on a hike. The photos will say where I am, the time of year and (when I feel comfortable with the identification) the family, genus and species of the plant. The Mysteriacea family is the largest family of plants. It includes all the plants that I can't identify).

The kite picture in this post is of interest to me simply because I found a crashed kite on while taking a dog for a walk. A stock photographer would spend some time arranging the kite in different ways, or he might take the kite home to shine some artificial light on it to make a compelling image for a marketer.

I wanted to show the downed kite surrounded by footprints as I found it in the field.

I probably should have brushed smooth the snow around the kite as there were footprints around it.

The interesting thing about this kite is that it somehow escaped from the kite flyer and ended up crashed in the snow. I don't have the mindset for figuring out how to use an image like this in marketing material. BTW, I left the kite in the field thinking that others will enjoy coming across it.