MicrostockGroup

ROFLMAO

But there is.  Tyler pays me a nickel a post, as the mere mention of my username drives google crazy.

Have you ran out of downloads to count? ;-)

I'm trying to poke you into moving in the right direction faster, for I fear that your reticence to move forward conceptually will cost you the goodwill of the others who have generously given of their time so greatly.  Yea, thou it seemst as if mine words have fallen upon deaf ears.

And I am poking you because people will be drawn to the thread to offer their viewpoint just because of the heat from the thread.

Who needs another unanswered post amongst hundreds...

Mark, let me offer a suggestion on how to come to understand stock. I do this knowing full well that you won't accept my suggestion, because no one else I've offered this to has taken it up.

One catchphrase that used to be common around the traps is that a stock photographer needs to 'think like a designer'. One way for a non-designer to do this is to engage in battles (Photoshop compositing competitions) in the istock Steel Cage. Once you start trying to put together a photocomposite design, you start to see how all those shadows in the wrong direction, the images that have such strong character that they don't fit with anything else in the design, often the sheer impossibility of finding the right image among millions, etc etc make life so difficult. And sometimes how a single image can inspire a theme. Most importantly no single image works on its own, everything is a part of a larger whole. This is where stock photography is so different from other forms of photography.

Left or  right doesn't matter too much, one can always flip an image. Fairly flat lighting is preferred though (think beauty lighting) because it's much easier to paint in shading that isn't there than to remove shading that is there. Check out this battle - they restricted themselves to variations on the one head image (same head for all the designs)

By flat I mean like this rather than, say, Rembrandt lighting.