We just spent a week in July out on Martha’s Vineyard … our favorite vacation place in the Northeast and thought I’d do a post with some of the photos.   

We rented a house in Aquinnah (formerly Gayhead) which is great with young kids. 

This will definitely be remembered as the summer of Jude eating sand…and here he is with a shell in his mouth!

Sebbie on the oldest carousel in the U.S., The Flying Horses in Oak Bluffs:

Soaking up the artsy streets of Edgartown:

Early morning beachcombing (since our children wake up at 5:30 on vacation!!!)…I loved this shot…Sebbie looks just like my Dad in it!

We stumbled onto the finals of the 17th Annual Monster Shark Fishing Tournament in Oak Bluffs.  (Side fact:  "Jaws" was filmed on the Vineyard.)  If you are not too squeamish, you can see the guy holding the shark’s tail in the boat, and the shark head near the motor.

Jude’s only been walking for about a month, so this is the first pic I have of them running together as brothers!

I know I’m a mess in this picture that Mike took, but I really love it – it just has some intimacy in it that I like:

Sebbie is totally naked in this shot as he decided to take off all his clothes on the crowded Oak Bluffs beach – they actually do have a nude beach on the island…but we weren’t there…

Carly Simon’s next door neighbor (who we met on the beach) took this photo of us.  We kept having Carly sightings as she drove her red convertible
Mercedes "up  island".  She is part-owner in a cool store called
Midnight Farm which is in Vineyard Haven- it’s part Anthopology, part a home furnishings store.

Besides wedding and portrait photography, I also have a passion for
editorial (magazine) and stock photography.  So I definitely wanted to
capture some stock shots for my stock agency, www.alamy.com and to submit some to some magazines/papers.   I
went out early one morning and expected to take pretty shots of the boats and flowers but here’s what
I was actually drawn to…do you think anyone will ever buy a set of
cards with my pictures on them?  🙂

We had my birthday (the big 39 – ouch!) at the sunset in Menemsha.  It’s tradition that every night people gather on the beach to watch the sunset.  It was fantastic and such a great way to celebrate!

These are my favorite two stock shots and I took them that night- I can’t wait to print them on metallic photo paper (photo geek, I know).  I love all things Americana and this is a totally vintage Texaco station right in Menemsha and the light was just amazing right before sunset.  Carly Simon filmed a concert here for HBO in 1987:

I wanted to just say a few things about stock too, for amateur photographers that are interested.  Stock, if you don’t know, is when you shoot whatever you want, submit it to an agency that has agreed to rep your photos and then they sell them on your behalf to magazines, ad agencies, book publishers, etc.  Editors will use stock when they know there’s a picture out there already because it’s a lot less expensive to buy an existing picture than to pay a photographer to go out and shoot it.  For instance, there are a zillion pictures of an apple.  No one is going to pay a photographer to go out an shoot a generic picture of a n apple.

Anyway, if you are an amateur and want to try to sell your pictures, "microstock" agencies like istockphoto.com will rep your photos and sell them for you.  Microstock is known for selling pics cheap for $1-$10/piece and you get a portion, but you can sell more volume than with a regular agency and you don’t have to have a professional camera or gigantic files. 

Or, if you have the equipment, software and quality, you can apply to the big agencies like alamy.com, gettyimages.com, corbis.com,  jupiterimages.com, etc. and get your photos rep’d where they can sell from $50-$20,000/use…but I believe the average sale is about $300-400 for an image…so don’t quit your day job yet! 

Travel and concepts are big sellers.  Concepts are photos illustrating an idea like "working from home", "traveling with children", etc.  But you never know what will sell…I was just telling a bride that I’ll be shooting in a few weeks that of all the people shots I took on my last trip to Portugal, what has sold … a portrait of a goat!!!  It’s sold three times!!!  And last month I sold a picture of a tray of chocolate doughnuts with sprinkles!   

Tying this back to the Vineyard pictures… I think the following kind of regular picture will actually be the best seller of all the stock photos I took on this trip…it’s our dog, Rupert, wiped out at the end of our trip on the ferry home.  It will sell because it represents multiple concepts (travelling with pets, being road weary, etc.)…picture or no picture…Rup, it was great having you with us!  It felt like what a summer vacation should be!