Read the comments there.  I agree, taking a vacation and shooting a few pictures for iStock doesn't qualify as a tax write off.

Gosh, I hate these "easy to make money" articles.

Read the comments there.  I agree, taking a vacation and shooting a few pictures for iStock doesn't qualify as a tax write off.

Gosh, I hate these "easy to make money" articles.

Illustrator writing off photo vacations kind of jumped out at me. I don't even try to write off weekends where I have to drive 6-8 hours and spend three days shooting, Sunrise to Sunset, doing nothing else. Maybe next year?

Easy money is right. Problem is it does say the amount is very small. It's easy to make less than enough for a payout at seven sites at once, in a year. 

In these times it's going to take about a year and a half or hard work, to start getting that "easy money" and regular returns. People here on MSG are mostly the examples of hard work and steady efforts. Lets say for example a site has 30,000 contributors. Most people from this forum are likely to be in the top 1000, many are in the top 500. (I'm ignoring three or four IS exclusives in the top 12 that frequent here)

When someone does a survey of photos in portfolios, RPI, or site earnings, using this selective population, it's going to skew the results to look much better than they are. On average this forum membership represents the top 4% of Microstock contributors. I'm not one of that group, I'm more of a slacker in the top 25%. That means that roughly 75% of the people who sign up to sell on microstock either give up, go away or never make a payout. Let them put that in the "easy money" article.