Hello all, I have been doing  microstock since about the end of september, and have now got images on 9 sites  including the top 4, with some sites having more images than others...If any of you have a couple of mins to spare could you click on this link to my portfolio on one of the sites and give me a honest opinion  to wether I am going in the right direction or not..  http://en.fotolia.com/p/202780381    I feel that my more recent images are getting better..i am trying to vary things and are looking forward too the good weather returning so as I can get some more outside shots done and uploaded..

Also I have been selling a few images of late but find that if I try to search them on a couple of sites they don't show up.

thanks for looking at this post and I would appreciate any advice..

Steve.

The isolations look reasonable - and there are no red peppers, apples or tomatoes, which is good I do think that you should consider your staging and groupings more carefully, however, as I believe you're limiting the usefulness of your images by putting odd combinations in a shot.

So why is a woman holding a pen and her glasses at a desk captioned (with colored blocks) "growth"? What suggests growth in her expression or setting? You have a USB drive with a USB stick on it with a background saying Data Storage - who puts a stick on a drive like that? How could someone use an image staged that way?

I think if you look at some ads (web, magazine, newspaper) and brochures, annual reports, etc. you might get a better idea of how to stage things to be most useful to designers.

Cheers for the replies, I have taken on board your suggestions and will act on them... I am fairly new to this as you can probably tell, up till now I have always been a wildlife / motorsport photographer and soon worked out that they are not good genres for stock... I have made my mind up to put 18 months into this to see if I can get somewhere, so will continue to research as much as I can..

A quick question for lagereek..I thought that isolations were a good thing to have in my portfolio should I be giving up on isolations or just trying to find something new ?   funnily enough this http://en.fotolia.com/id/37120950 is probably my best selling image to date not much but I think it's sold 8 times between all the sites that it's on..I didn't expect that, maybe I should take that gearbox apart again and take a few more shots of it   once again thanks for all your replies...I am a pretty determined guy so hopefully should get there in the end.

steve.

Your images seem reasonably good to me.  Certainly better than what a lot of us started with

I like your photos of the model.  She is attractive and the right age and general appearance that you could do a lot more with her.  However you do need to make sure her hair is neat and tidy looking.  It looks a bit disheveled.  That's great if you're trying to communicate that she is overworked or stressed, but not for concepts like "growth" and "success". 

Little details like stray hairs, the way a collar is lying, or if a piece of jewelry is turned around the wrong way seem nitpicky.  Those details were really hard for me to learn to notice, particularly as I was more focused on the expressions, but they make a big difference in how professional your images will look. 

I think your images look really good, but some of them seem a bit dark. If I were you I think I'd try to make them brighter. You've got a lot of images with many colors in them, but none of the colors really shine through.

This could also be partly due to the way fotolia handles processing thumbnails. I found that on some sites the conversion from Adobe RGB created flat looking previews - obviously this is going to hurt your sales. Try to work out whether its just that you're not processing the photos with enough vibrance or whether its the conversion thats at fault & if so switch to sRGB.

Thanks for all of the replies they are very usefull.. I have just checked the colour space on my camera is  in sRGB and I always shoot in raw, I have just had a look in CS5 and it looks like it is set at sRGB  by default.

I have just compared some of my images that are on my PC against the same images that are upload to stock sites and the uploaded pictures are definately not as vibrant ( I checked a image of the union flag and after looking at it for a while there is quite a difference ), so should i be proccesing them so  as they look a bit too vibrant on my machine and will then have a bit more punch once uploaded..

once again thanks for all of your help...Steve.