Stock photography of extremely boring things

How it works

Step by step

1. 1Study best-seller feeds on Getty, Adobe Stock and Shutterstock for 2 weeks. Note the themes that recur weekly: contracts, warehouses, cybersecurity, remote work, healthcare admin, small manufacturing.
2. 2Shoot one boring theme per weekend — invoices on a desk, forklifts in a warehouse, laptops in a break room. Get model and property releases signed on every shoot involving people or private property.
3. 3Use natural light and one bounce card for the first year. Overproduced stock reads as stock and sells worse than plausible-real photos.
4. 4Shoot horizontal, vertical and square crops of every scene. Buyers filter by orientation and need copy space for text overlays.
5. 5Edit in Lightroom to a neutral, slightly-desaturated style. Match your look across the whole library — buyers who like one image will buy 10.
6. 6Upload 30 images per week for 52 weeks straight. Consistency, not brilliance, moves the needle.
7. 7Keyword aggressively and honestly: 30-50 tags per image, first 10 must be the strongest. Use Adobe Stock's tag suggester as a starting point, then prune irrelevant ones.
8. 8Watch your sold analytics monthly. Double down on the themes that sell in your first 100 sales; drop themes that produce nothing after 90 days.
9. 9Diversify to at least 3 agencies (Adobe Stock, Getty via iStock, Shutterstock). Uploading is once; income streams multiply.
10. 10Reinvest first year's earnings into better lighting (2 continuous LED panels), a wider lens (24-70 f/2.8), and one weekend workshop on release paperwork.

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