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Flying Money: History of a Best Selling Stock Photo

Flying Money, My First Photoshop Stock Photo

I noticed, when looking through my sales history, that many of my images have a very long life. The above image of flying money, which I named many years ago, Flight of the Greenbacks, is one of those long-lived pictures. It brought in just under $400.00 over the last year.

Now $400.00 in a year for a stock photo is hardly what one would call spectacular, hardly worth mentioning, I suppose. But the cool thing about this image earning that amount over the last year is that I created this image in 1990! This image was, I believe, the first stock photo I ever created in Photoshop.

Hundred Dollar Bills and Wings of Egrets

I photographed the money, a $100.00 bill, with a 4x5 Sinar camera using Ektachrome 4x5 transparency film. The wings came from a 35mm slide of an Egret in flight that I had photographed for part of a housing project brochure. I photographed the Egret using either Ektachrome or Kodachrome slide film, I don't remember which.

The cloudy sky image was also from a 35mm slide. I had all the transparencies scanned on a drum scanner at a separation house. It cost me a hefty $110.00 a scan, and each scan was transferred to me via SyQuest disk.

Photoshop 1.0 and a Macintosh II

I used Photoshop 1.0 for the digital work on a Macintosh II. My machine had a whopping 32 megs of Ram and a un-calibrated 13 inch monitor. In Photoshop, back then, there were no layers, there was no history, there were no layer masks and there wasn't even a pen tool to create clipping paths (at least at don't remember one).

It took me two full days to create this image, and probably a third day of just cleaning up edges. Trying to get things perfect was the difficult part. Well, that and the fact that everything took forever to do! Rotating a 30 megabyte file took over half-an-hour, and since all you could see during the duration was a bounding box, accuracy was non-existent! I don't even like remembering it.

Finally, I had to deliver the image to Tony Stone Images (this was before Getty Images existed) as a 4x5 transparency output from a film recorder.

$15,000.00, Fifteen Years, and a Time Magazine Cover

Though the earnings of this image have dropped considerably, way back in the day, it earned some good money. I would guess my total returns for this image is in the neighborhood of $15,000.00.

Another interesting point is that it took fifteen years from the time I created it for it to show up on the cover of Time Magazine. The people at Time isolated the flying money and added in a face to illustrate an article on what they called "The Great Retirement Rip Off".

Photoshop, Progress Bars and 3D Programs

In the early nineties I was constantly being told that you couldn't use Photoshop to do professional level work. I just smiled and went back to watching that progress bar. Actually, I should say several progress bars.

You could be much more efficient with two or three machines. I remember once using the "radial>zoom>blur" filter on a photograph in an operation that took 19+ hours to finish, then it didn't look very good so I did the old "command-z". I suppose there are those out there (Colin Anderson, Shalom Ormsby and Phil Banko, for example?) who now experience those same situations doing high-end work with 3D programs.

Income Producing Assets

Every time I set about to make a stock photo, I am trying to create an image with that kind of staying power. In the well-known investment book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki advocates investing your money in “income producing assets”.

That is how I view my stock photos, as income producing assets. I am investing my time, my money and my ideas in stock photo assets. I don’t know about you, but I find it very reassuring that those assets can still, even in these years of industry turbulence, have a long and healthy life.

About the Author

John Lund Stock Photos: Picture of money flying out a window

John Lund’s Funny Animal Pics: city made of circuit boards

Concept Stock Photos & Funny Pictures: wolf dressed in sheeps clothing

I have two different windows open on my Mac, and now they are sliding around and really annoying me!?

I am taking a quiz on Firefox, and then typing up the questions I got wrong in Pages. I have the two windows opened up at the same time, obviously so its easier to see them both. This was working great for about an hour, until I accidentally did something weird (I don't know what) and now every time I open up the Firefox window the Pages window slides away. And if I try to open up the Pages window, the Firefox slides away! THIS WILL NOT SUFFICE!!! How do I fix this crazy madness? It's really annoying and I will never get my work done.

your on spaces, go to the spotlight and type spaces and drag pages and firefox to the same window

Lenovo ThinkPad W510 Review
The ThinkPad W510 is Lenovo's 15.6-inch workstation notebook offering an Intel Core i7 processor and NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics. New to this years model is an optional 1080P multi-touch screen with a 95% color gamut and built-in huey PRO color calibration system. In this review, we take an in-depth look at the ThinkPad W510 to gauge its performance as a mobile workstation.

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