Need Photo Critigue

[hjaphotography]

Hello everyone,

My Name is Heather and I just started shooting about a year ago. My family and frinds say I need to sell my photos..but I'm not sure if there good enough ???I have made a portfolio to send out and was wondering if anyone would mind looking at them and leting me know what you think...good or bad...thank you all very much!

http://www.impactfolios.com/HJAPhotography/index.htm [nofollow]

(there are 4 portfolios of mine at that site)

[MarkFGD]

Hello Heather

I think your eye for composition and composition is great and wish I'd taken some of your photographs myself. If entering into the stock photography market (and there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't) there are two bits of advice I can give you.

First, nature-based imagery can be a fairly specialised area. Therefore, it may be worth considering placing some of work of this type with the higher-priced stock agencies (www.sciencephotolibrary.com is the first one that comes to mind). On these sites you'll sell royalty-free images at a much higher price per download than you would on the microstock sites and with images of this type you're going to be catering to a rather limited audience. Whereas, pictures of children are likely to do well on microstock. For example, 'Friends forever' is good subject matter for general stock (but take the lettering of and consider taking the sepia effect off for some libraries).

Secondly, you will get images rejected and these rejections will be quite frequent with your first batches of submissions. Don't be disheartened. We all go through this. I can see evidence of noise/artifacts on some of the images on your website which will lead to images being rejected at most photolibraries. Just keep going and treat the rejections as part of your learning curve. You will learn much faster this way and by doing what you're doing here -- showing images and asking for advice.

I hope the above helps in some way and look forward to seeing your images on the stock libraries soon.

[hjaphotography]

Thank you so much for your kind words and advice! I really appreciate you taking the time to review my photo's I was told no one would review portfolio links so I went and pasted a few of my photo's on another post. So I really would like to thank you for taking time to go through my photos.

Thank You,

Heather

[MicrostockExp]

Humm quite interesting this bank image, science is certainly a good niche .
Do u have sales there ?

They are not afraid about copyright infringement...





Very poor watermark as well....

[leaf]

Yeah, I would agree with Mark that your composition and technical skills are probably good enough to have a good shot a stock photography.  There is a few things that especially stock photography reviewers are picky about though, that you perhaps haven't had to think about before.  These things wouldn't be hard to fix though, and it is just a matter of knowing what they want.

Your landscapes for example, with the lake, are nicely exposed and have a good punch - but I think would be rejected for a very crooked horizon.  Very easy to fix!

Some of your insect and nature photography is also quite decent in regards to lighting and composition - however I can see there is significant noise in the image.  That is harder to fix and photos allready taken, but I am sure you could figure out how to get fix it on future shots.

So basically I am saying, yeah give it a shot, I think you can definitely be successful at this if you give it a little work.  Pick 5 photos for example that you think are the best and submit them and see how it goes.  Alternatively first post the 5 photos here and get a quick bit of feedback before sending them in.

And yes, nature can sell quite well on microstock sites.  Some of my best sellers are nature shots.