Hi All,

 Are we looking at the same photographer. The guy I looked at has 10,000 files and 37,000 downloads not 100,000. I am not so surprised by the photo being accepted I have seen much worse at Istock or any Micro agency for that matter. The thing that jumps out at me is his sales to image ratio and the quality of his work is pretty good ( maybe not that image but he has some good stuff ).
 This guy has made probably about $5 dollars an image over 5 years. One dollar an image per year. 10,000 images as an exclusive! I know he could have made more money at the local quickie mart for the time he has invested let alone the money for equipment. It shows me that that even someone with 10,000 images and exclusive is not necessarily making big bucks but he still produces. That is a tough business model to compete with.
 He says he is quitting his full time corporate job to become a full time photographer and I commend him for that. I just don't know how someone leaves a corporate job to make 7,000 maybe 15,000 dollars a year. That will barely cover expenses when he has to get the proper insurance and invest in his growing company. I checked the chart and yesterday he had 57 downloads off his 10,000 images. I hope he has great success and his sales start to grow but I also hope you all do the math really well before you tell your boss to piss off.

Best,
AVAVA

I think Jonathan brings up some really interesting points here.   I'm not comfortable speculating on the income of individual photographers, but as a phenomenon, as more people lose their corporate jobs (because I can't imagine many would choose to quit a secure job in these uncertain economic  times) we will probably find the ranks of FT microstock photographers swelling considerably.

And as these FT photographers scramble to make a living wage in microstock, which is next to impossible for all but a very few, will we see contributors uploading more images that are mediocre to subpar just to swell their portfolio numbers? 

Not saying that is what has happened with this particular photographer, whose work I generally admire, and not commenting on the quality of the image in question. 

The gatekeepers at the agencies may find themselves flooded even more than they already are and I am guessing blanket rejections or acceptances may get more common as the workload on reviewers intensifies.

Interesting times we are living in...

Quote from: Pixart on November 21, 2008, 11:07

Yes, there is a double standard, but at the same time I would expect that someone with 37,000 dls should have a much lower bar to hop over and would have a stronger urge to self-edit.  Many times I see IOTW and I think I wouldn't have even dared to submit that.  I can't get anything approved that I think is pretty good, let alone stuff that I think is exposed wrong or fringed or just ugly.

It really should have been rejected for keywords

Tree:  there is no tree in the photo, only 2 branches and some leaves
Maple tree:  above
baby girls and Little girls:  there is only one child
baby girls, little girls, female :  redundant, the sex of the child is unidentifyable
cute:  what is cute?  The leaves?  There is no cuteness in this photo
offspring:  no relevance to photo

There, now my karma is all screwed up for being mean, but seriously....   anyhow, the shot has been killed with the views to dls we have artificially caused by looking at it.

In my opinion, keywords are correct.

Mapple tree: there's a mapple tree in the photo, as told by the leaves; to leave "tree" and "mapple tree" just for root to peak trees wouldn't be make sense.

baby girls and little girls disambiguate the same with singular that with plural.

The "redundant terms" are not incorrect at all. One buyer looks with "little girls", another with "children" and "female". Redundancy is not bad keywording, if the term reflect what is in the photo.

The kid is cute. Tha't's subjective and  is my opinion, although yours is different.

"offspring" maybe is stretched, but then again, if a buyer is looking for a tree with green leaves, or for a child in spring/summers clothes can easely use this word.


 

I'd like to direct you to the Dreamstime blog on keywording.

The kid may be cute, but you can't see the kid at all.  So unless you can see through foliage in a photograph, it probably shouldn't be there, like the photo in the database

 Hello jeancliclac,

 I think yo make a very valid point. Without the consent of the photographer it really isn't appropriate behavior to critique his work. He has some wonderful shots in his portfolio. All of our portfolios have some pretty awful stuff shot over the years. I know mine does. Maybe we should try to use our own work when pointing out some of the crap they let up in Micro.

Best,
AVAVA

Maybe we should try to use our own work when pointing out some of the crap they let up in Micro.

I agree

I think we had enough of this thread.  Shall we move on?

Regards,
Adelaide