Are you participating in this contest? It has 3 days left I guess. Who will win?


If I win, o boy, I will buy a new lens. Canon L 200mm f2.8. and maybe new camera - eos 40D, I will sell my 400D.

If not, well... I gues I have those images for sale.... nobody will loose.

I dont know, they dont want family photos, casual outdoor.... that is not stock photography. They want hi quality smiling models and isolated images, because it sells well. Beautiful landscapes, no matter how beautiful it is will not sell better than for example isolated apple. They accept what they sell the best. They dont want images that wont sell well, whether they are beautiful or not.

Stock photo is not about art, it is about money and commerce, marketing, etc...

 As sooner photographers realize that, they will become successfull at stock market. If they dont realize that, well, than, go to some art galery and show off your beautiful images of landscapes, and people will say "whow, that image is beautiful", but I will continue to sell my poor little isolated apple that is not so beautiful as your landscape...


*your and mine terms are just example, I didnt mean on you or me literary!

As an example, I tried with a shot of a stone lantern in a japanese garden, great shot, really screams relaxation in the way it was shot and processed.   They have some roughly similar shots in their database, 11 to be exact,  presented similar with regards to setting, though comp, angle, and style is different for each, mine would have stood out among them.  All but 2 have sold at least once.  Yet they have more than 1000 images of an isolated apple, less than half have sold once.  In fact a search for "isolated apple" yields more than 4x as many hits as "dahlia."  Seems that they don't need any more isolated apples.

I know I'd never get a Dahlia accepted, but they lack a single tagged shot of a semi-cactus Dahlia (flower shape), an "Arabian Nights" Dahlia, or a "Karma Sangria" Dahlia, well known cultivars.  If I was a designer and wanted a Dahlia shot (typically the people that would use them know their flowers), these are things that I would search for, not just generic Dahlia and waste hours hunting for the one I wanted.

Not that I'm a big flower shooter, just proving a point.  My fave topic is even more useless, abstract architecture.  Architects and architecture magazines take their own pictures.

But still, by only accepting certain types, they are not making themselves better, they are limiting their scope to only what sells the best, in essence saying "we don't have the server space for slower selling topics, instead we allocate every bit of it to better selling topics, though the chance that a shot actually sells once is actually less with the better selling topics than the slower selling topics because of overabundance."    With that buisiness mind, they are shutting out new markets of clients, if they become interested in browsing Fotolia's shots and aren't looking for their best selling stuff, they'll be skunked because Fotolia denied away all the photos because of type.  The wooden deck one at request at DT is a funny one.  No way Fotolia will accept some photos of a wooden deck on a house in the means they want it presented, they have 0 in their database and I'm sure that it will stay that way.