I would recommend the Sigma 18-200 OS ($359 with rebate on B&H).  I have one that I keep on my 40D all the time.  It is quite sharp, fairly light (1.35 lbs), and takes excellent pictures.

What about the purple fringe? I have the Sigma 18-125 as allround lens and it still has a lot of purple fringe at 18 and in high-contrast shots. I backed off the 18-200 since I felt it was too daring. There are not many situations where you need the 125-200 range, and if you do (wildlife for instance) you would want a lens that goes up to 300. I bet you don't do your excellent studio work with this zoom?

The lip print is what is in question here, and whether a royalty free stock image can be incorporated into a logo, which as we all know, violates the TOS on nearly every site.

I agree about the logo, but what about the word itself? Of course agencies won't run the risk to accept a "mwah" photo since it's a waste of time to litigate the company for using a common dictionary word. But if the company would want to sue the "mwah" greeting card printers, I wish them a lot of success.

I had tried to get information directly from the agent for the fragrance - because I'm pretty reasonable and figured we could discuss matters before getting lawyers involved - but I've been getting the run around.

I thought common dictionary words were not copyrightable. Mwah is the Tagalog (Filipino) word for kiss, and it's used all over here on greeting cards and in conversations.

organization: Pixmac s.r.o.
address: Jiraskova 1275
city: Pardubice
postal-code: 53002
country: CZ

Look here, a brand new poster registers and starts to yell Hail <New Agency>. He even sold 100 pictures there. No, he has no portfolio on the other sites (or doesn't mention it). Isn't that astonishing? They even do free keywording (as does Snapvillage for almost 2 years). It's even Eastern European and as we all know, their English is as perfect as a native speaker.

Spam-alert.

I'm setup my own... www.shock.co.ba  ... in background joomla CMS and zoom gallery. Wish to install some shopping cart system do allow people to download and pay images or orfer prints.

I use Joomla too for FlemishDreams. There are quite a few shopping cart plugins for Joomla. If you want to sell pictures, you can merge Joomla with Coppermine which has good plugins for photo download/sales.

For those wanting their own website as a pure showcase, you can use a free multiply account. The advantage is that it is partly a social site where you can team up with fellow photogs. I use it for my local Mindanao operation. If you want a real domain, make sure to separate hosting from domain registration so the hoster can't take you hostage. For domains, namecheap.com and godaddy.com are cool, and for hosting I use hostgator.com as it allows multiple domains so you can sell hosting yourself. I currently carry 8 domains on the same account, so the 9$ fee per month is totally covered.

What's it gonna cost?

An arm and a leg.

God just created Adam in the Garden of Eden and after a while, Adam complained to his Maker that he felt so lonely in paradise. After some pondering God told him, well... I could make you a female companion out of your spare body parts, that is most desirable, very intelligent but with an obedient and down to earth attitude. She will be ready always to satisfy all your wishes. She will cook and clean for you, she will be terribly sexy and be your soulmate too. And of course, she will never have headaches.

Yeah, said Adam, that sounds really cool, but where's the catch. What's it gonna cost?

Now look here guy, replied God, things like that don't come cheap and they are in fact very hard to create. I need at least one of your arms and one of your legs to do it properly, I'm sorry.

Not really thrilled about that prospect, Adam had to think hard for a while. Then he said, err... look here God, what could you make out of a rib?

The rest is history. 

Why isn't this thread deleted yet??? 
I guess it was started by an iStock exclusive to mock us 
Anyways, can this message be deleted too?

I'm not exclusive:



1 - IStk is at position #4, under BigStock.
2 - Totally different pictures sell than on other sites. This is probably due to search engine differences.

I think it is really offensive to mock and dismiss everything an exclusive says merely because they are exclusive. It is getting beyond ridiculous.

"Offensive", "ridiculous", "mock".  Do these keywords really apply? Hmm... Well as far as I read this thread, nobody attacked or questioned the exclusives themselves, nor their decision to go exclusive on iStock. The only thing that has been well probably documented is the double standards on iStock. Now it's their site and they do as they please, but given this preferential treatment, exclusives can hardly answer the complaints remarks that non-exclusives have.

The trend here among the most vocal complainers is to portray istock as elitist

After disambiguation of "elitist", it is, for non-exclusives. For exclusives it is apparently not. Maybe a thread like this should be exclusively for non-exclusives 

I was wondering when the Dutch thing would come up. You know, one of those D countries. Was that Deutschland?

Well at least Denmark starts with a D too, it is flat, the language is based on Saxon, it borders to Germany too, it's on a sea, and they have problems with some of their muslim immigrants, like Holland, and there is something rotten in both states. The statement is quite accurate considering that there are rumors that a recent vice-presidential candidate thought that Africa was a country 

But you said it better and sraght to the point :-)

Maybe but your portfolio is much better. Did your drink all those champaign bottles yourself first?  Whatever, great portfolio of overwhites of models and objects and in a very comfortable position too

Most of their new policies were well accepted, but the subscriptions raised a lot of problems, and DT deleted posts against them, or even suggestions to limit size, etc.  In that respect, I think StockXpert is the best site to deal it, they let people discuss more freely, and they listen more.

They listened and Achilles made a quite elaborate post about the issue in the Yahoo microstock group when the debate was at its azimuth. The point was that they did market simulations that showed that in general, subs would not eat into SPP but rather synergically provide sales that otherwise wouldn't happen.
Now you can have doubts about the business attitude of sites like SV, MP, LO, and others, but not about that of DT.
Apart from SS, it's clearly the best site business wise, and it proves it by its results. We aren't there to be pampered but to make money. DT is clearly homing in on its main competitor iStk and though DT can be tough sometimes to deal with, they don't employ Attila class reviewers and they don't look down apparently on (non exclusive) contributors like iStk seems to do.

Apart from my "law" #1 of microstock that no new site after 2005 will make it, I have a tentative law #2 (my 2 cents) that after the creative destruction in the arena of the microstock free market (currently in a fast acceleration phase), there will be only 2 main players left: SS for the bulk model, and DT for the mixed model.

As to forums, well, iStk is still the champion in stifling posts, in so far it has been ages since I checked that forum, let alone contribute. Buyers read forums too, and a site forum is one of the fronts of the enterprise. Disgruntled posts might turn off buyers or make them worried for instance about the sustainability of the subs model or policies in general. If we want to let off steam, we have our independent forum here, right? What do you prefer: a site with a frank forum like YAY and no sales, or a site with sales but a tightly monitored forum?

DT always made it quite clear that they have two parties to deal with, contributors and buyers. Buyers have wishes too, and as to the subs model, it would be quite confusing that some images can be purchased as sub and some can't. It would piss off buyers, and without happy buyers, less sales for contributors.

The main point was in fact if subs would eat into SPP. At Crestock it certainly does, but I still trust the DT policy for now, since subs in my case still aren't the majority. That might differ for the large contributors or for contributors with limited themes. A look at yesterday's sales at DT as a sample (3 subs, 5 SPP). Even 50/50 or 40/60 would do, a ratio that SS doesn't attain with its On Demand (3% for me this month).



Just as a side remark here: I have dry spells too, like one or two days without any sales at all at DT. Why sometimes there are spells of sales? It might have to do with occasional buyers wandering off into your portfolio and deciding purely based on visual search. This is suggested by the "n/a" in the table above (in fact half of all sales! Keywords alone are not the full story).
DT is the best in presenting both "More images from <your>'s portfolio" and "Similar images" from other contributors. It's a presentation that facilitates visual search enormously, both for yourself and for others.

Another remark: portfolio diversity seems to be very important to make visual search work properly, and also for the fashionable themes of the moment. I can imagine that a portfolio with only landscapes, cheering girls with headset and successful businessmen striking fabulous deals will be less in demand now at the start of the recession. In the above table 6 images are about the economy, China, greed and money. You just have to have them all I guess to have a sustainable sales profile and to avoid too many dry spells.

Just my 2 cents. Experiences and opinions might differ and mileage may vary too

Well this new league of Atillas is certainly still in training. A real Atillish rejection notice of "2009" would look like this:

+ Framing, cropping or lack of composition. Consider portrait, rather than landscape, thank you.
+ Copyright issues; can you please file a Font Release Form?
+ The focus is not there where we feel it should be, and we're having a bad hair month anyways.
+ Distorted pixels, oversampling, white balance issues. Chromatic aberration visible on "9".
+ We don't need this type of images at the moment, thank you. Please reupload end of 2009. Your images are competitive with mine.