Photographing Bitcoin

Part One
Since I decided to take the dive and invest real money into cryptocurrency, I have been spending far too long reading, watching, and learning about all things crypto. The more I immersed myself into the crypto world, the more I discovered how much was happening. The learning curve was steep, as I was introduced to new words and acronyms everyday. It wasn't long before I realized there was a real demand for photos portraying bitcoin. Nearly every photo I came across showed bitcoin as a gold coin with the ₿ symbol. I wanted to create photos that represented bitcoin, but didn't want to follow the cliche and use one of those fake gold bitcoins off Amazon, that takes two weeks to be delivered from China. I actually inwardly vowed to never photograph bitcoin in this way. So with plenty of motivation and the belief I could manufacture some inspiration, I borrowed a projector, pulled up some binary code on my laptop, and projected it on to things. (See a couple of the photos in this Steemit post.) While a few of the photos turned out okay and were accepted into my Stocksy portfolio, the others really didn't work and were either too abstract, or too narrow to be useful in most applications. I received fabulous feedback from my Stocksy editor saying, "The thing about concept photography is that it either needs to be general enough to be applicable to many uses, like the binary shots, or when its more specific, the concept has to be visually understandable very quickly to the viewer." So long story short, is that the images I created when trying to avoid the cliche of a metal coin, were not really viable, at least so far.

Part Two
This brings us to the images below. Perhaps you skipped ahead and have already looked at them. If you have, then you can see each one of them contains a fake, metal, gold colored, Bitcoin straight from China. I've uploaded these photos to my Stocksy portfolio, and am crossing my fingers that they'll get accepted. I'm not too worried though, because when Google the word Bitcoin, you're almost certain to find at least a few articles with a cover image containing a fake metal bitcoin. There's a demand for these images. While they really don't do a great job at conceptualizing cryptocurrency, they are instantly recognizable, and serve their purpose in a news article or blog post. Now without wasting any more of your time, I'm here to admit that I broke my vow, followed the cliche, and put a stupid metal coin in front of my camera for the purpose of portraying this awesome new technology we lovingly refer to as Bitcoin.

Have an awesome idea on how to portray bitcoin without using one of these coins? Let me know in the comments below!

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Intro Post | Last Post (Medium Format Film - First Impressions) | Instagram

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