I don't see any sales reported today on Istock - last sale I see is from yesterday. I usually have around 10 sales per day... Did sales stop or reporting is broken? Anyone else seeing this?

Did anyone have any experience with submitting and selling food images on Stockfood.com?
Thanks in advance for any info.

I thought FAA let you set your own prices for prints and didn't add anything on top apart from printing/framing and shipping charges. Am I mistaken? It looks like they are adding anywhere from 12 to 20% on top of my markup!
Here is what I see (FAA's markup on top my markup in brackets):
My markup   FAA "print price"
8"  - $30           35  (5)
10" - $40          45  (5)
12" - $50          60  (10)
14" - $75          87  (12)
16" - $100      115 (15)
20" - $125      142 (17)
24" - $150      170 (20)
30" - $175      197 (22)
36" - $225       252 (27)
40" - $250       280 (30)

So, while they advertise that they are being "fair" to artists and pay 100% of print price, they sneak up they own percentage on top of the price they present to the customer. And here is silly me thinking that I charge $250 for a 40" print when in fact it's $280. Not amused. Do they explain this additional markup anywhere - why it is there? Seriously, you want to get extra money - increase my annual fee, but don't burden my customers with additional mysterious charges!

Apparently it's ok to take any instagram photo and sell it as your own "artwork"! I guess we've been missing out ... <sarcasm>

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2015/06/01/richard-princes-use-of-her-instagram-image-angers-toronto-woman.html

From the article: "... these works are posted on the Internet and therefore they�re not a purely private image" - WHAAAAT???

I often get emails from people asking if they can use one or few of my images for free on their web sites, blogs, their future company logos, and so on. Usually what's offered in return is "credit" - they promise to put my name next to the photo, or put a link to my website.
It really puzzles me. You can buy a small size image for a price of a coffee these days. No one walks into a coffee shop and asks for a cup of coffee for free and in return just offers to tell their friends that they got a coffee from that shop. It doesn't even occur to people. Why do they think they can use the product of my work for free? I don't understand. I don't care about credit  - if I wanted to be famous, I wouldn't be shooting stock, plus I doubt very much that my name on their webpage would make any difference whatsoever. If I was begging on the street, they'd drop a few coins into my cup - but they wouldn't pay the same few coins for the image they like!
How did this attitude even come into existence??

While browsing some files on stock agencies, especially on Shutterstock, I noticed that many contributors have "Sample text" or "Your text here" text in their images... which I presume means that I am supposed to be able to modify that text after downloading the file. But I am downloading a JPEG - how does the text layer get preserved there?? I thought JPEGs were supposed to be flat... Can someone please enlighten me? :-)

I just read John Lund's newest blog post here: http://blog.johnlund.com/2013/04/choosing-stock-photo-agency.html
Apart from other things, he is saying:
"With Blend my images not only get a wider audience with both RF and RM content on Getty, Corbis, Masterfile, Superstock and God knows how many other distributors, but I also get my images up on Microstock sites at macro prices. How cool is that? The eyeballs appear to be migrating to places like Shutterstock, Fotolia and others. With Blend Images, without any additional work, I get representation on Shutterstock, Fotolia, iStockphoto and others."

I didn't know Blend was selling through micros - anybody knows how to find their files on Shutter or Fotolia? I would presume they would be in some kind of "special" collections?

Cool... in the company of Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg:-)

Shutterstock CEO Jon Oringer featured in Forbes - America's Most Powerful CEOs 40 And Under
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/02/14/americas-most-powerful-ceos-40-and-under/

I know I am avoiding work and procrastinating, but hey it's the end of the year, so join me:) Found this browsing though Getty collection:

Wanna come up with some titles for this one? 

Hi everyone,
I have added some free images to my site: http://www.elenaphoto.com/gallery_free.php
They are "exclusive" to my site and have the same license as my regular stuff (you can't re-sell them), but are free of charge.
I will be adding more, this is just a start.
Feel free to visit and enjoy:)

Hmmm... for a few days now every time I go to "My uploads" page and try to sort by "Last DL" it shows me the same page ending with 01/11/2011. My total shows there's been many sales since then, but they don't show on the page! Anyone else is seeing this?

I got Nikkor 50 and 85 mm 1.4 lenses and the stupid things don't focus properly when wide open - focus is in the front by 2-3 inches at least! Took them to the Nikon service center with my D3X, they adjusted the AF on the camera a bit and told me there are no problem with lenses. I take it home, try again - same crap! My 24-70 mm focuses just fine open at 2.8 on the same camera body. I tried AF fine-tune, but even that is not enough to compensate for the front-focusing. You focus on person's eye and get a tip of their nose if you're lucky, but most of the time something in the front, like folds of clothes, etc...
Anyone else seen problems like that?

I don't think I'll ever complain about a stock agency again. Now that I am selling images from my own site I understand how much time and pain in the ass it takes to deal with clients' special requests, questions, legal considerations, technical problems and so on. Not mentioning time and money needed to attract those customers to the site in the first place. You know, the cut that a good-selling agency takes is very well-deserved. We are lucky we can get money for our creative work and not be bothered with all that stuff. Seriously.
I think it was worth it getting my own site going just to realize that:)