Sorry, but I couldn't disagree more.

Before I decided to enter the Microstock market I was lucky enough to share a coffee with hidesy, who is the second most successful contributor to IS (nearly 300,000 downloads).  She gave me lots of advice, one of which was to resist the temptation to create compositionally pleasing images.  As an example, she warned me not to cut off the top of heads in portraits and to leave plenty of space to one side or both.  Now today's 'pleasing to the eye' portraits tend to focus in close and cut off the top of the head, so her advice would be going completely against my own inclination.

When I looked at her portfolio I saw that she was indeed correct - most of her best sellers of people have lots of space, and preferably three corners of the picture left empty to allow the designer to resize the canvas at will.

In Microstock, there is a HUGE difference between a great picture and a picture that SELLS.  And if we want to succeed, we have to create pictures that SELL.

No offence, rjmiz, but given that hidesy has 300,000 downloads, I'll take her advice rather than yours.

...
Remember, you are an amateur photographer. You have been taught to fill the frame with your subject. (if not you are now)
Composition, framing, and balance are our credos.
...

Please don't assume that all of us here are amateurs - I'm a bit put off by that.

As far as framing/cropiing/whitespace goes, I think there are two distinct microstock buyers: those who want as close to a raw image as possible, and those who want a completely finished image.

And thanks for sharing the hidesy advice, hatman12!

Other advice from hidesy was:

"Get the highest resolution camera you can (she uses 16mp) and ALWAYS upload the largest possible image size; you will be surprised at how many of these largest sizes you will sell; designers can crop large images and still end up with excellent quality."

"Having a professional camera (16mp) sends an important message to potential buyers - I am a serious player and I am prepared to invest in the best equipment in order to produce the finest quality."

"NEVER believe that you know the market; only the market knows the market, and the market will decide for itself which images it likes and wants to buy and which ones it doesn't; if you try to second guess the market you will fail; have a high quality, varied portfolio, and let the market decide."

...
"Get the highest resolution camera you can (she uses 16mp) and ALWAYS upload the largest possible image size ...

Shooting with a 16MP camera also allows you to generously downsize, which significantly improves perceived sharpness and virtually eliminates noise on shots that would otherwise be commercially worthless. It probably affects how reviewers see the image as well, since only very serious (or well-heeled) photographers can afford one. I always upload a high res version of the shot first, then downsize to 8MP or 4MP if it gets rejected for technical reasons.

I am also of the opinion that stock images have a different look than "regular" photography.  Copy-space, angles, isolations. 

Yeah, they sure do. My mother was recently looking at one of my portfolios and commented that most of the images don't look "real" or "normal". She can't believe that I earn my living doing this, and is concerned that I'll be left high and dry when "the bottom falls out".

as a buyer, croped heads are a very annoying thing. when you find the perfect one, but the head is cropped, you just can't use it (most of the time). the same thing with objects. there are very few opportunities when you can use a cropped image.

Can use for your avatar! 

You better change your email address to something like

 hilcher (at) gmail dot com

if not you'll drown in spam very soon! Not from forum members but from nasty little programmes that crawl the web and harvest them. SY

And maybe you should rub out the quoted e-mail address in your post SY   

Because even if litifeta changes the address in the original post, it'll still be there on yours for those horrid things to harvest.

(Why doesn't someone write a program that crawls the net and fries spammers computers?    Or, better still, fries the spammers themselves.)