The Wild and Wondrous World of the Zamurovic Brothers

Ivan and Bojan Zamurovic are brothers and creative partners whose Adobe Stock portfolio is full of marvelous, surreal images. Their punchy color palette and whimsical take on still-life photography have made them best sellers in their field. We spoke with Ivan to find out more about their collaborative efforts, and their path to stock success.

Image source: Zamurovic / Adobe Stock.

Can you tell us about yourself and how you discovered photography?

First of all, we work as a team. We both started using cameras even before the digital age. Since the first time we picked up a camera, we always collaborated and worked together. Our father is a photographer also, so his passion for photography led us into a career as photographers. A big milestone in our career was the moment our father bought his first digital camera. That was a Sony Mavica with a floppy drive. From that moment on we knew that digital photography is our future.

How did you get started in stock?

When we were just starting, we were doing wedding photography. We were inspired by human nature and emotions, mostly in portraits. Our success as wedding photographers is defined by our determination to implement art photography into wedding photography. The same determination to implement art elements into everything we do influences our style today. Stock photography was always a dream job, but only in recent years, we found a way to make a living out of it. We thought if we could make art out of wedding photography, we could do the same with stock photography.

Image source: Zamurovic / Adobe Stock.

What are the benefits of selling your images on Adobe Stock?

Definitely, the biggest advantage of contributing to Adobe Stock is customers’ ability to license our work directly within Adobe Creative Cloud applications, as well as Microsoft PowerPoint. Also one of the things we like about Adobe Stock is that our content is available for sale on Fotolia as well as on Adobe Stock.

What’s one thing you wish you knew about stock before you got started?

The main challenge was — and still is — how to make commercial photography less commercial and more artistic. Also, one of the biggest challenges is waiting for results to come after you put so much time and effort into creating images.

Image source: Zamurovic / Adobe Stock.

Your photographs have a fantastical, surreal, and magical quality. How do you come up with the ideas for your shoots?

We push ourselves to put as much art elements in our photos as possible. This way we try to create stock photos that yet don’t exist in the market. For us, it is very important to escape from usual content found on stock sites. Even everyday objects can be inspirational photo subjects — we find it very interesting when images with surreal and magical quality include everyday objects because we expect them to appear in everyday scenarios.

What is your photo editing process?

Our editing process is very simple. After capturing images, we import them into Lightroom and usually apply some of our custom-made presets. Then images are exported as JPEGs and opened in Photoshop. Sometimes we only use healing and crop, but often we create a completely new composition with layers from different JPEGS.

Image source: Zamurovic / Adobe Stock.

Our signature style is a kind of new minimalism. Minimalism is a current trend and, for us, it is a good way to bring out a great idea. This style of photography lets us bring the bare essential idea to the surface. People are overloaded with information and content, so they don’t have enough time on their hands to fully and extensively transfer that information. This is what we think our audience is looking for in a stock photo because, today, people appreciate quality more than ever before.

Do you have any advice for people who want to become stock contributors?

Concentrate on creating more, and don’t bother too much with the results. Results will come, but, as in any other profession, getting started is often the most difficult part.

Image source: Zamurovic / Adobe Stock.

See more images from the Zamurovic brothers on Adobe Stock, and find more other-worldly inspiration in our curated Creative Reality gallery.