Hey guys,

It's nice that this subject has raised so much discussion

In fact, please get us right - it is not that we don't want to do anything about our site or our images - yes, we are very passionate about doing the both things. And we do work by ourselves on the both.

However, so far it is not what we make our living with and I don't think it will be in near future. We have our other commitments, full-time office job being one and the main of them, which limits the time we can spend on our hobbies dramatically. We have only a few hours a week left 'for ourselves'.  So outsourcing some stuff seems the only alternative to us to keep our 'hobby business' running at a pace a bit faster than 1 article  + 10 images a week. What is bad in giving part of a job to a third-party? We are all in Micrstocks forum after all, which means, at least to some extent, we are all thinking of photography not only as pure arts, but as business as well...

Well, finally, we've written up our offer on image preparation, you may check it on our site: http://www.stockforfood.com/we-need-help/

P.S. And please be sure that we do invest our mind and soul into these things. Everything what has been created so far is made 100% by ourselves, without hiring anyone to help us. But now we feel like the only way for us to grow (we are not ready to give up our jobs!) is to outsource some stuff. And we hope many people will find it usefull after all: both our offers, our site and our photography...


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Best Regards,
Vitaly and Maria
www.stockforfood.com

Hello,

We are thinking of inviting photo retouchers/editors to help us prepare pictures from our quite big back-log for sending to microstocks. We end up having very little time recently to devote to those image adjustments, but we'd still like to get some use of our images, which keep growing in quantity much faster than we can handle them... So, we decided to outsource part of the process.

In short, we are going to provide pre-selected (only images we consider worth sending to microstocks) unedited RAW (Nikon NEF) files. We expect to get back our images decently adjusted to micro stock quality standards (levels, wb, color tweakings, some minor retouching like dust spots and logos, etc) with the Meta Data (name, description, keywords) filled in. We'd like to get back layered Psd files, so that we could perform some minor fine-tunings if we feel the need to. Conversion to Jpeg and sending to microstocks remains on our side.

I would like to get advice from those who has experience with such a practice on the following points:

- What's the decent price on per-image basis for such manipulations?
- Are there any tools (online or software) which may help simplify the process of sharing input files and results? Or just regular FTP is normally used?

We would be grateful for your feedback.

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Best Regards,
Vitaly and Maria
http://www.stockforfood.com

It's nice there's such a discussion of my offer out there 

I'm not going to defend my price. It's only what I feel like offering as an incentive to attract authors to my site, which is not a set up business. I think I'll find a few people interested (and I already did).

If you've read the rules, I'm not asking for exclusivity, except for 7-days of keeping from posting the articles elsewhere. After that, you may post or even sell the article elsewhere. I'm also letting people write about themselves, their case-studies, linking their portfolios, etc. So it could be means of promotion for them too.

I do try to fill the site in with as much my own content as I can, but I know that at my speed of 2-3 articles a week (my time allows no more), it will take me a lifetime to fill it with the content. And I also like to have other people's views on my site, not only mine.

There's a lot of bloggers out there, who write stuff just for fun and absolutely for free. What's bad if I offer a bit of incentive to attract such people to my site? 

Greeting to everyone!

Recently we have launched our own site related to Microstock photography and photography in general: http://www.stockforfood.com

Although we have a lot of ideas to write about on this site ourselves, unfortunately our time is very limited by our full-time jobs and crazy lifestyle of our home city. However, we would like to make this site useful as soon as possible, so as a startup investment initiative, we offer you to become an author on this site. Not only it will help us build up the content faster, but we think it's also benefitical to have different people's view and experiences. And we are sure there's much we and our visitors could learn from you !

So we are looking for authors/copywriters ! We'll pay 5$-15$ per accepted article.

What we need

We'll be glad to publish unique (i.e. written by you and unpublished before) and interesting articles on different subjects, which could be valuable for Microstock contributors and buyers. It could be anything of the following:

- General discussions on anything related to Microstock photography, photographers, problem matters, lifestyle, etc;
- Reviews of any related products or services (including, but not limited to photography equipment, photo editing and organising software, stock agencies, online services, etc.), describing how a stock photographer or buyer may benefit from them

- Tutorials, step-by-step guides and hints on things you know well
- Forum discussion topics on any related topic put in a format of an article
- Case Studies - stories of success or failures of any image or endevador that you or somebody you know had experienced. You may also post your progress reports. Interviews with other stock contributors or buyers are also always welcome
- Commenting and analysing news or rumors you heard of (not rewriting press-releases, but expressing your own ideas and opinions)
- Publishing links and screenshots of where your images from Microstocks were used, with little stories and commentaries may also qualify as an article
- Other ways of getting income of use on photographs, or just photography arts - in comparison with Microstocks
- Any specifics of Microstock business in your country
- Anything else you think may be interesting for the microstock community

Below are the most-demanded topics - surely interesting subjects, but things we know very little about ourselves. We'll pay 2$ extra, i.e. 7$ per article if it falls into any of these categories:

- Microstocks from buyers perspective - if you are experienced with buying and using pictures from Microstock, we are interested to hear your opinions, know better your requirements, etc
- 'Insiders' stories - if you are or used to be on the staff (inspector, developer, customer service, etc) of any Microstock agency, we are interested to hear how it works 'from the inside'
-Selling vectors, illustration and video footage at microstocks. We have no experience with any of these, while it is a huge part of the pie - so it's interesting to know and details and specifics

Should we find your article interesting enough to be posted in "Featured" articles, we'll pay you a bonus of another 5$.

We are also planning to translate most articles in Russian for our mirror site in Russian to be launched soon. If you are a native Russian speaker and could provide your article in both languages, we'll pay another 3$ extra.

That means, the maximum you may earn per article you send to us is 15$ (an article in both Russian and English, on a "most-demanded topic", which we chose to put in "Featured" category).

If you are interested, please read the details of the offer and our requirements at http://www.stockforfood.com/become-an-author

In any case, you are always welcome to visit our site.

Best Regards,
Vitaly and Maria
http://www.stockforfood.com