MicrostockGroup

Good morning from Australia.

Well I got accepted by iStock on my second attempt.  Now got to start uploading and getting used to the different keywording, disambiguation requirements etc.  Will be interesting.

Whatever the inconvenience, iStock does appear to have the customers - looking at the top downloads shows images that attract up to 1,000 downloads in a month, and over 2,000 in three months.  The absolute top selling images are above 4,000 downloads.  I have not seen anything like those numbers elsewhere.

As a newbie I am limited in uploads to '15 in each 168 hour period'.  Hmmm... that's very restrictive and pales beside the accommodating attitude of Fotolia.  But then I don't believe FT's image numbers, and I don't think they get anything like the sales...... it's chicken and egg stuff.

Here's thre welcome note from iStock: "Welcome to iStockphoto.com, the designer's dirty little secret. Congratulations, the iStockphoto administrators have determined that your images are commercially and technically ready for iStockphoto.com. Please begin uploading at your convenience. There is currently a limit of 15 uploads per 168 hour period."

Still, I'm glad to be on board at iStock.  Now got to make it work...... doh.....

Hi Hatman,

Congragulations.... from my side.

I still need to get on board. Once got rejected. Trying for second time

The initial rejection at iStock concerned and confused me.  Okay, my photo history is travel, people, friends etc, and I do not consider most of my existing stuff to be stock.  But I have always been pleased with the quality and composition.  The first three submitted to iStock were taken from existing photos, and were rejected.

I spent a couple of weeks reviewing and analysing, and then took specific shots for the submission process.  I discovered many things in those two weeks.  The most important one was the noise issue; experiments showed me that spot on accurate exposure with my D200 eliminated all noise, whereas even slight underexposure introduced noise.  I suspect I have had a habit of slightly underexposing over the years (impression of colour depth, saturation etc).  The three new shots that were accepted were all exposed very accurately, shot in RAW then converted to jpeg at highest quality.  What also suprised me was that in addition to noise being eliminated, the shots were also tack sharp and didn't need any sharpening at all apart from the standard default +25 in ACR.

So important lessons have been learned.  I now know I can produce top quality tack sharp and noise free images straight from the camera - whereas in the past I found everything very acceptable, I can now see a huge difference.

I have never bracketed exposures in my life, but I can now see why professionals would want to do that and I will probably bracket in half stops myself in future.

Congrats!  You will look back in a while and amaze yourself over what you have learned by this experience.

Don't forget to have fun too. Don't let the whole "stock" thing suck the life out of what you do!

i agree with you that a site that does not produce is not worth submitting too - if the submission process if labourous.  If it takes little or no effort to upload images, then I can't see it hurting anything... and provides another 2-10% of my overall microstock income.

I would put lucky oliver, shutterstock, and stockxpert in the catagory of taking little or no time to upload.

never i realy mean NEVER get exclusiv there!

sorry i dont now the answer.. i dont understand you-- but this cult be why my english is soo bad

One week is a normal waiting time for submission review at IS.  Sometimes even more, though not often.

Regards,
Adelaide