I know this was brought up in another thread, but I really think it deserves its own thread. 

I am really shocked that after years of telling us all to improve our standards and produce more professional images, Istock is now telling its contributors its okay to shoot with cellphones.

It appears from examples posted that some of the folks submitting cellphone pics are eligible to bypass the normal inspection process.  I seriously doubt the average contributor could get them accepted.

More to the point, is this what we want to be offering buyers?  After so many years of trying to convince them that microstock shooters are not just a bunch of amateur hacks???

I read quite a lot here from people who claim Istock has the highest standards and has lifted the industry by example.  What does this do to that reputation?  Is image quality yet one more thing Istock was known for that Getty is willing to throw out the window? 

I feel obliged to point out that the Flickr aesthetic is a bit of a misnomer. Many of the photos in my Flickr groups are fantastic.

looks like poopy is the new not poopy. I can't keep up with all these trends.

looks like poopy is the new not poopy. I can't keep up with all these trends.

Kind of like all the images that are getting posted from Instagram on FB...they all have that "retro" feel. The new not poopy.

I'm not seeing this as such a big deal.  Isn't the cell phone/iPad/ whatever else has a camera being constantly improved -- increased pixel count, larger sensors?
At some point, I think the cell phone images will match a point and shoot, maybe?
I have several P&S images selling at several sites.

Progress!   

IMO, it isn't the technology, it's some of the images produced and accepted that is the real issue.
http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/is-the-new-istock-standard-of-picture-quality/msg249996/?topicseen#new
And regarding the images referenced in that thread, I don't find Kelvin's answer remotely relevant:
"...it is important to offer the clients strong imagery and sometimes the demand for technical levels of perfection are matched or outweighed by the power of the picture to get a message across."

Agreed ... the images suck.  I doubt, however, that it was caused by the equipment.

One of my Favorite Photographers out there for creativity is Chase jarvis. I bought his book on Iphoneography Called "The best camera is the one with you" In my view about 90% of the Images in that book were Great and if I was still reviewing I would have accepted them  because there fresh, Great concepts of just stuff he sees. That 99% of all of us don't and one of the reasons he has the best clients going. His eye. This all has to change soon , This BS 100% Perfection rule in exchange for solid Unique work that tells a story. And he has that part nailed down IMHO. I think all the folks with there perfect Little overblown fake composites and stuff is way Old school very soon. Welcome back creativity....Best way I know to cull the herd. LOL

Really interesting thoughts in this thread so far.  Maybe I do have a prejudice.  If so, it's one that has been beaten into me for 7 years by the level of technical excellence that has been demanded (imo quite correctly) by the agencies up to this point. 

I agree with Liz that the quality of the accepted images (that we've seen) doesn't justify the policy at all. 

Here's the thing.  If buyers want crappy spontaneous looking photos shot with cellphones, can't they do them for themselves?  Why pay for a stock image?  Isn't the big advantage of the stock agencies that they offer higher quality than the average joe can get for himself? 

Mike, yes, absolutely, the compositional and conceptual aspects should still be there, ESPECIALLY if the technical quality isn't.

I just worry that if crappy cellphone shots start filling up the searches it's going to take buyer perception right back to the early days where microstock was seen as poor quality trash.  Having watched for years as the agencies and we contributors have worked to change that perception, it's very disheartening to watch things going back the other direction. 

Yes, I am sure that you can get a creative, well composed, even well lighted shot with a cellphone.  But you can get that with a DSLR too, along with technical quality. 

Rapideye probably got to the heart of it here:

...I have a theory. It's got to do with the Apple cult. The iPhone is so cool (because it's an Apple product) that whatever comes out of it has to be perfumed like angel's urine.

They will zoom at 10% for inspection

they don�t know? thats a great one sorry to tell you but that is an awesome statement, what are they selling everyday? sure agencies have tons of crap.. we all have pictures that have never sold, not even once but saying agencies don�t know the usefulness of a pic its quite too much.. beside that happy birthday, seen the topic at SS

They will zoom at 10% for inspection

LOL

"Take a very good photographer that has a commercial Mind far greater than most and let him or her go to town with a cellphone camera. "

... And they'll still likely be snapshots.  Limiting people to what is essentially a point and shoot is no way to free the creativity within.  It's aim and snap and you get whatever was in front of you.  Might as well hire a monkey.

Lisa....Your forgetting the most important aspect. Yes the one posted was crap But, you Take a very good photographer that has a commercial Mind far greater than most and let him or her go to town with a cellphone camera. All the rest is moot. He will sell and the clients and buyers will buy.. In my 50+ years of taking Pics and teaching the past 12, I've seen people with $500 cameras that would blow away most of us with there Natural talent of seeing and....I've had students with $45,000 Hasselblads That couldn't shoot a flower in focus. It's the eye girlfriend and the commercial Mind. You wait and see. Give it a year. We ALL get hooked into the more the better when in reality it's not. it's the usefulness of an image and none of Us..NONE OF US including the sites know what that is.

Yes, for sure there are geniuses who could shoot us all into a cocked hat with a camera obscura, a pencil and some tracing paper.

But, in general, the microstock revolution can be put down to one thing -- the rise of the cheap DSLR with spectacular image quality. And in fact the improvement began nearing an asymptote about eight years ago: my old 20D puts out a file that, resolution aside, is not markedly inferior to one from a 5D Mark II.

So, for all this time, you've been getting a great bedrock image. Later, you can warp the colour balance, contrast etc to suit your tastes. You can even do a fake cross-process and add a vignetta. You can be "artistic" (if that's what artistic means), but at the end you still have a file of very high quality that will not behave badly on a printing press.

Sometimes, it's true, art is served by working under constraints, i.e. with lousy equipment. Here are some of the constraints on phone photography, which are so extreme that true art must be guaranteed:

1. Low-light shooting is impossible because the tiny sensor erupts in a fireworks display of chroma noise.

2. You can't sync a flash to your phone, so you're stuck with whatever light you have. See above.

3. Action shots (loosely defined) are difficult because of abysmal shutter lag.

4. Depth of field is practically infinite because of the very short focal length of the lens. Goodbye to subject isolation with background blur.

5. No manual control of aperture and shutter speed on any phone I've heard of. Okay, never mind aperture because of (4) above, but it is useful to know what shutter speed you're dealing with.

6. Handholding a cellphone is challenging because, like a P&S, it has no viewfinder and must be held out at arms length. This exacerbates the problems raised in (3) and (5) above.

7. The lens is not very good. Flare and particularly veiling flare are ever-present dangers in cellphone photography because the plastic lenses aren't properly coated (that would be expensive. But any minute now, some enterprising Gary Fong type will be offering stick-on lens hoods for cellphones. Imagine.) Sharpness is actually not too bad, but that's because the tiny sensor (see (1) above) can be in the sweet spot of a not-quite-so-tiny lens.

8. The sensor in a cellphone is pretty poor quite apart from its pigmy dimensions. Dynamic range is seriously lacking and, moreover, you can't shoot RAW.