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1051
« on: January 06, 2009, 11:50 »
I knew it, I knew it. The Mac is a religion. If the Mac is that super, why does it have a tiny market share, why Mac users are such zealots everywhere, and why do they feel that constant itch all the time to preach their superior gospel to the inferior PC infidels? Insecurity? Enjoy your Macs, but I don't care for them. Next! 
1052
« on: January 06, 2009, 01:22 »
Yes, I did notice a some more rejections than usual. But to be honest, I was lazy with my submissions, and actually I got some nice justifications on them, such as a new one: "please correct skin tone"... ;-) I went down from 100% acceptance to 70%. The only note I got was from a reviewer telling me I should make my descriptions shorter. Well what the heck, they allow 200 characters and if they don't like long descriptions, they should take the title, like all other agencies. The worst is that this reviewer changed a series of my descriptions very quickly to rubbish, not even looking at the title. For instance he changed the title of a portrait of a " Muslim girl with headscarf in typical bangsomoro outfit" to " Asian teenager".
1054
« on: January 05, 2009, 20:45 »
If you have other ideas for what we can do to attract more buyers I would LOVE to hear them. Offering genuine 16-bit TIFFs (from RAW). SS offers TIFFs from JPG which is kinda funny, like making eggs out of omelet. DT offers RAWs but except in very controlled studio situations, there is always some cloning done as to logos etc. TIFFs are unbeatable for the crispness of illustrations and isolations since the JPG algorithm is not really suited to this kind of material, even at quality 12.
1055
« on: January 05, 2009, 20:20 »
Is that's whats happening? I still can't get IS to read the metadata.. it makes a painful upload process even worse... Use deepmeta.
1056
« on: January 05, 2009, 20:10 »
I need to now if i can use photos from NASA of the Earth (the globe) in stock! NASA states that its globe pictures are in the public domain. I never had any problem with any site accepting images where a NASA globe is part of it.
1057
« on: January 05, 2009, 19:54 »
Every time somebody on any forum (I'm obviously much more on IT forums than on photography forums) starts to rant about what PC users are missing like the unique Mac experience, I have this Jehova witnesses feeling. They used to come on knock on your door trying to convince you that you're worshiping the wrong God.  It just got me allergic to all that starts with an "i". iGod, iPod, iPhone, and... iStock 
1058
« on: January 05, 2009, 19:33 »
That canon it's just a way of protecting authors from piracy. While it's awkard, because it doesn't tell about storage media used to pirate copies from the ones used to store own content, it is the only effective way of giving back to the authors and the industry a tiny perercentage of what they lose everyday through PSP nets. Yeah right, so I demand a tax on the internet of which a percentage is given to me since my pictures are probably stolen by the internet. If the tax on empty media is intended to compensate the musicians for their losses through Torrents (P2P is outdated), they steal in fact from me since I used DVDs for backing up my own data. Not that it really matters since I live part-time in this tiny country bordering to Germany and France (the Netherlands have the same tax) which don't apply the tax. Sales of empty media went down drastically here. As to piracy, well, stolen pictures, software, music would probably never been bought by the pirates anyways. And as to my other part-time place of living in SE Asia, well, I think I never saw a legal version of anything. And that's an understatement.
1059
« on: January 05, 2009, 04:56 »
CD and DVD are completly different when longevity is in question. DVD last 10 or more times longer than CD because of different material used as medium. Average life of CD is 2-10 years depending on disk quality, and DVD lasts at least 20 years, and sometimes up to 300 years. Did you check your DVDs after 300 years yet? That's what the manufacturers told about CDs too, 10 years ago.
1060
« on: January 05, 2009, 04:32 »
What about using solid state for those with smaller ports? I know that flash drives and cards have a limited number of writes / rewrites but as far as long term storage life are they any good? Should also be easy to store them in a fire proof box. For smaller ports all options are open. Writing on DVD is fine too, as long as you write 2 copies every time, and you rewrite them every 2 years. If it's just for backup, USB sticks are overkill since they are intended as transportable rewritable medium and their price is too high per Gig for just backup. You could backup your stuff on an Ipod too  . If you just have few Gigs to backup, consider free unlimited online storage like Gmail or Yahoo mail. You can simply mail the images to yourself on another account, so you have them twice per provider: as sender (in your outbox) and as receiver (in your inbox). There are aps around that treat Gmail and Ymail as a netdrive, but I think it's against the TOS of Yahoo and Google. Normal mail should do. For larger ports, the real problem with DVDs is their limited storage and the number of manipulations required to backup. For 100 Gig for instance, you will have to insert/remove 50 (25 x 2) DVDs. The last 3 months of 2008 I shot about 30 Gig. That corresponds with roughly 3,000 photos. Far from all is stock of course. Most is travel, just personal, or (especially) assignements like band shoots, events and commissioned portraiture. There are also the bloopers but I hate to delete them since they can be a goldmine for cloning in case you missed the tip of an elbow of in a good model shot. Customers of commissioned shoots also expect you to keep a backup since it's incredible how many dogs there are around that eat the DVDs you give their masters. I keep all the versions: NEF and JPG out of the cam, and for the processed shots also the 16-bit TIFF. The TIFF stands for editing time, and time is money. The TIFF is lossless and you can always fall back on it for tweaking. An 8-bit JPG is lossy and every time you open/modify/save it again, it degrades. So that gives roughly 60 MB per processed shot: 8 MB NEF, 3 MB JPG out of cam, 35 MB TIFF (zipped or it's 60), 8 MB JPG for Alamy, 3 MB JPG (6MP) for SS, 5MB JPG (10 MP) for the rest. So for an average shooter, count on 100 Gig per year, at least. Volume shooters (the guys with studios) might have a multiple of that. There is simply no other way to back up this volume of data in a productive way (time is money) than on HD and price is not an excuse since 1 Terra USB HDs will be around 140 $/110 euro in the post NewYear's sale. Four notes: - It makes sense to distinguish between shots with an emotional value (personal, family, travel) and shots without, like a model studio shoot. The first ones you'd backup always, the second you can discard largely and just keep the production images once the best are processed. - When you backuped on an external HD, check the freshly made thumbs there quickly by a program that doesn't cache thumbs (Windows does) like Irfanview. Disks can fail... - I'm worried for the time 24 MP cams will be the standard. - I wonder how Yuri Arcurs backs up.
1061
« on: January 03, 2009, 14:03 »
I really enjoy the quest for perfection. You're bad! You make me feel like a snapshooter.  What a great portfolio! Congrats!
1062
« on: January 03, 2009, 03:05 »
I'd be very surprised if the media was so degraded after such a short period, even with the crappiest Taiwan import brands. If that doesn't work, try a CD/DVD drive from a different brand. I'm afraid the OP is right. It's not actually 1-3 years but 4-7. In my case it's not the brand since we used top CDs then in a corporate environment. My copied audio done in 2000-2001 mostly died when I checked in 2006. My data (images) of 2002-2004 now are unreadable in 50% of the cases. When I found out 2 years ago CDs actually have a life span 40x lower than the manufacturers claimed at the time, I switched to USB HDs (4 Iomega and 1 Hp for now). Moreover, the stupid socialist tax-horny Belgian government puts a tax of 0.12 eurocent on empty CDs and 0.59 eurocent on empty DVDs in behalf of the maffia of music and film companies to compensate them for the loss by illegal copying. Even if you put your own data and photos on the DVDs, you are bound to pay this tax of almost 1$ on a DVD, which goes then entirely to RIAA and IFPI maffiosi. No wonder sales of empty (and also music) CDs went down and that of HDs (untaxed till now) goes up ( the ever-inventive politicians are thinking now about a tax on HDs and PCs, on behalf of the music and movie industry). With a capacity of 4Gig per DVD, it costs you 225$ on tax alone to back up 1T, while a Iomega 1T USB HD costs here 140 euro now (included 21% VAT tax and 10% import tax). That means you can buy almost 2 HDs from the tax alone you save burning DVDs. In short, it's a bit stupid to burn backups on DVD. - It takes much longer to write and change disks - It's basically read-only - It takes a lot of storage and management for just 4Gig per unit if you include raws and processed TIFFs - It's unsafe in the long term - Included taxes and media, it's 3x the price of a HD
1063
« on: January 01, 2009, 20:38 »
lISTEN..you had something to say and i read it well and found it interesting.I feel for any person who is the victim of theft. nb The givers who have donated and find it rewarding..well done and please keep it up if it helps people who are less fortunate than ourselves. The theft issue weakened my point. The main point was about what I have witnessed about charity, both gov and nongov money, on the terrain. And I ended with a positive note that there are nevertheless people around that make it their own way cent by cent with no charity involved at all. But once again, this issue, just like the religious issue some time ago, has nothing to do with photography. Nor have kiva-loans. So I rest my case.
1064
« on: January 01, 2009, 11:24 »
I wonder how all my loans so far have been paid back if the drunks just ran off with the money and evaporated into the slums. Hmm... You are probably right. I'm totally biased since I can see what happens in real, unlike people far away that see the truth and the broader picture on a website. I sinned against my own rule, never mix business (photography) with politics and I will remove my rant in 24 hrs. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.
1065
« on: January 01, 2009, 11:15 »
I've never had problems with IS reading my IPTC data. I enter it in Photoshop and have been uploading keywords for 2+ years. Until last month. I still have an intermittant problem. Exactly. Adobe uses the IPTC in an "extended" way, while programs like Irfanview stick to the IPTC rules. Part of the problem is that Adobe, just like Microsoft with IE and the W3C standards, tries to enforce its own standards. I'm sortof familiar with the issue since I coworked on the IPTC module of the Open Software Coppermine project a couple of years ago. LO had that problem too but all new sites like CC and YAY handle it very well. That Istk refuses to put time into that issue and also in adding features like FTP is just part of the larger impression that Istk seems to treat its (non-exclusive) contributors as disposable serfs. Not that I complain, it's their site and they do as they please. The only way to upload in a stable way is through 3-d party software like Imagemanager (paying) and Deepmeta (free till now).
1066
« on: January 01, 2009, 10:39 »
Charities are breeding throughout our modern day society like a cancer. [deleted] Ali, you are right.
1067
« on: January 01, 2009, 03:20 »
I am willing to give any microstock agency an honest try. I'm doing it with CC, YAY and VIVO. But one thing these starters should realize is that they rely on large uploads in a short time, and that their submission pages should be fast and productive. On established portfolios all metainfo is in the IPTC so that's not a big deal. What matters for the submission workflow is how fast model releases can be attached, and preferably in bulk. Since I had a couple of gigs upload to spare for 2008, I FTP-ed a few 100 to the three sites and then tried to figure out how fast the submit could be done (attaching MRFs). The best and fastest is YAY. Then there is CC but the only problem is the limited size of the Models and Thumbs window, which makes it like 10 times slower than YAY, but still OK. The worst is VIVO. When you click on a thumb, it takes about 10 seconds before the MRF window pops up, and in that window are pages in which it takes about 5 sec to navigate from page to page. What's more, you can't tick several models at once. If you sort the models alphabetically in that window, the next time it pops up the default order (upload date) is there again, so it is really too time consuming to attach MRF's this way, thumb by thumb, for a beginning site. They can't attract the big guys like Arcurs with such a slow procedure. I guess I have about 300 images in queue now at VIVIzoom but I'll wait to submit them till they have a decent and fast bulk MRF attach module ready. Beginning sites should realize that their submit software should be mature before asking to bulk upload.
1068
« on: January 01, 2009, 01:00 »
" No MS site will make it after 2005" All those who started in 2004-2005 are now a rolling snowball gathering momentum and snow by the day and millions of pictures per year. LO and FP started in 2006 and they are dead or almost. You can't break into a market that has been taken by more of the same (pictures). What we can expect is hostile acquisitions and mergers by those with deep pockets. Like Getty that bought STX to kill the competition for Istk. That has always been the Microsoft strategy. Can't wait the day that DT buys Getty.
1069
« on: December 31, 2008, 00:39 »
It is a database issue and the problem is understood It is always a database problem in cases of server load and scaling. I wouldn't like to be in your shoes ;-) Quite unnoticed on the DT forums: a DT tech guy explained why they had to remove some features for the comfort of the contributor (like contributor's name) on the popup thumbs because of the additional load of it, and they preferred to have a snappier experience for the buyer. On the ZYM forum I already questioned the practice of exporting the keywords database to the full submission overview page, per thumb. Every time you tick a box next to the thumb to be submitted, all keywords are presented in a table. Imagine the database load of doing that. You could do this on a separate "edit keywords" page for that thumb and keep the general submission page lean and clean. Volume uploaders in general have their keywords right and all that has to be done is attaching a MRF (and picking a category, which we all hate) et voil. Good luck spending your New Year crawling through code ;-)
1070
« on: December 30, 2008, 13:14 »
Who cares aout ZYM rejections, as at the moment it is just impossible to upload anything in volume because all those fancy scripts crawl at the speed of a lame snail backwards? I didn't upload in months since it became worse. A year ago, the good old ZYM days, you could FTP and forget. Now, adding one MRF costs me 5 minutes and I have to restart the site from the top menu ...
1071
« on: December 30, 2008, 11:24 »
Camera bodies like computers are a mere commodity, not an investment, since technology advances so rapidly. Today's nec plus ultra is obsolete tomorrow. Often the price of a repair after two years is higher than the price of a new body with the same performance.
I, for me, would refuse to pay more than 1,000 Euro for a body that is worth 3-400 two years later. After all, it's the stock agencies that push us forward to the best technical quality and with 33 cents per sold subscription image, images that often end up in a 150px wide sidebar, that is just ridiculous. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
A D3X for 8000$? Come on, only a few can afford that from their stock income, and then, what about the other costs like insuring a capital like that? The D3X doesn't even have video like the D90 and no IS on sensor. The trend in microstock is to keep production costs low per image. A D3X won't help. That can be different if you're Yuri Arcurs or you're commissioned to do the centerfold of Vogue.
I would rather invest in top glass and good strobes, business wise spoken.
1072
« on: December 30, 2008, 09:45 »
I stared at this for 10 minutes before I got the joke! I still didn't but English isn't my mother thong which obviously is Flemish. Always eager to learn I googled for hungry thong and my my, I discovered a totally unknown side of the Internet with keywords like blonde bikini lesbian girls teen bl*wj*b.
1073
« on: December 30, 2008, 09:26 »
FlemishDreams.. the password is restricted to 13 characters in length at this time. As a result of your earlier correspondence, I have a work-item outstanding to:
1. Increase the limit to 20 characters
2. Indicate on the choose-password field that the limit is a length of 20 Actually the notice for password too short (min 6) or not alphanumeric works fine. It would be very simple to just indicate that on the "forgot password" page: password 6-13, alphanumerics both required. A password of 13 is fine for me, and actually I used only 12. Nevertheless it failed. Try to check it out yourself (make a fake test-uploader) and use a password of 12... the change password page will accept it but you can't log on with on the main login page. I should add that all worked fine in the very beginning when I registered with a 12 character password. I managed to log in now with a password of only 9 characters, so obviously it's a bug.
1074
« on: December 29, 2008, 16:18 »
Nice new contributor login page. Is the site going live soon?
Wish I could see that contributor page. My password is not accepted, and when I change it successfully... it doesn't work at the next logon. Last October I found out that the password has to be very short, but there is no hint whatsoever how long or short exactly... VZ promised this issue would be solved then but it's apparently still there. So sorry but I don't have time any more to help debug a site. Once bitten by LuckyOliver, twice shy. Too many sites, too little time
1075
« on: December 21, 2008, 17:32 »
what I do sometime is post a screen capture of my microstock image with the agency watermark but without any links, I am pretty sure Flickr refuse that I had my PAID Flickr subscription canceled without notification probably because of links in the picture description to RF sites. 25$ down the drains. Just avoid Flickr. I had about a thousand free geotagged travel/landmark photos there, all gone. Since then, I even avoid Yahoo, except to drain their free services like email with unlimited net storage.
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