Piles of Money - My Vision

This iconic photo of piles and stacks of cash (US dollars and coins) has been one of my best "conceptual" stock photography sellers. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Although it looks like a ton of money, there is only $10,000.00 dollars here in real money. (Even so, we were happy to get this much cash safely back into the bank when the shot was over!). Those are real money bags (with coins) from the Denver Mint and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. And those are real $100 bills (before the recent design change). We were able to style this shot using only 10 grand because many of the stacks of $100 bills have ones underneath. It takes a couple of hours to style a shot like this, but the stock photo revenue it produces is worth the effort.

This is my third image in this "money series".

You are invited to see my "Most Interesting" images on Flickr (based on popularity stats).

Stack of $1000 Dollar Bills - My Vision

This is a real stack of U.S. $1,000 bills, with a little wide-angle distortion added for impact. Well, sort of...

Full Disclosure: The top bill really is genuine (and as a collector's item, is worth much more than $1000); however the bills underneath are $1 bills -- they were added just for effect. A friend lent the bill for this still life (and stood by while I photographed his little treasure). This has been a great conceptual stock photo seller.

Lighting & Post-production: The stack was lighted by one large (48"x48") softbox strobe, about three feet from the pile of money. The white seamless paper worked as its own reflector "fill" for the soft shadow effect. (This type of product lighting allows graphic designers to easily "float" the image anywhere on a page. In post-production, you have the responsibility to select any of the not-so-white background and clip it to pure white within Photoshop's "Levels" -- being careful to feather the selection around the shadow area.)

Interesting tidbits: The $1000 bill featured a portrait of Grover Cleveland from 1928 to 1946. Today, the U.S. Treasury Department no longer prints large denominations. In 1929, a $1,000 bill would have been equal to $12,440.55 in our current purchasing power!

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

You are invited to see my "Most Interesting" images on Flickr (based on popularity stats).

Red Rose with Helen Keller Quote - My Vision

I recently made a gift of one of my rose close-ups to a young women religious group. We made about 100 4x6 prints, and ended up giving them out to a lot of friends as well.

My wife suggested a quote to overlay on the image by the late Helen Keller, "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart."

We may decide to do this more often with our images. It was very satisfying to share something that causes people to pause and reflect on their lives and how they interact with others.

(You can view it LARGER or see it without the quote.)

You may freely download and use the image with the embedded quote if you give copyright credit to "Royce Bair" and give a link to "www.RoyceBair.com" - no commercial use without permission (This Creative Commons License is called an "Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives" license.)

You can also view my Flickr Photostream to see more of "My Vision."