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Messages - bunhill
Pages: 1 ... 39 40 41 42 43 [44] 45 46 47 48 49 ... 62
1076
« on: October 13, 2013, 14:04 »
Ron - maybe you can find a way to pass the gig to someone with more experience in exchange for having them use you as their assistant - carrying the kit, metering the lights, setting up the softboxes, feeding the parking meter (!) etc. That would be a great way of benefiting from this opportunity.
1077
« on: October 11, 2013, 06:26 »
I am on the UK English site.
I search for 'iceberg' in UK English and I get a lot of alpine mountains in among the icebergs, glaciers, lettuces and cocktails.
I have slightly lost track of this argument. Are you deliberately searching by newest which, as we know, is flawed ? Because when I search for iceberg by best match I get page after page of icebergs and iceflows in general. Sea and ice, lots of blue - pretty much what I would expect. And, to the credit of the photographers, there are some great pictures. Too many if anything. Fresh match is pretty good too to be fair. Yes there are lots of things which are deeply frustrating and which we probably all wish were different at this point. But we also have to be objective or else it all just turns to whine. And those search results look okay to me. They look like the sort of results we should expect to see.
1078
« on: October 11, 2013, 03:07 »
The people who are with Stocksy are making a considerable personal investment. They are putting their best work there exclusively. That's a big investment already.
On the other hand they are also clearly getting a good deal out of it. I sometimes look at the portfolios of people who used to be at iStock and some who do or used to post here - Stocksy seems to be inspiring them to produce really fantastic contemporary work. I am going to guess that something about that community is inspiring them. Or maybe they just all got really good at the same time.
1079
« on: October 09, 2013, 14:39 »
Hang on a sec - don't some cameras have the ability to write between two cards. Wouldn't that be the best option ?
1080
« on: October 09, 2013, 14:08 »
I don't know where you live Pete - but one thing to remember is that most European short flights have a max cabin luggage limit defined not only be weight (now typically standardizing at 10kg) but also by volume. I have no idea about flights in the empire  We are talking about a small backpack - probably something like 50x40x20 cm. So all of that messing around with additional items and their power adapters, batteries etc is going to be a practical issue. Especially if you also need to carry surge protection, extra batteries and regional adapters. And you also want to carry your actual cameras and lenses. And the regulations now also restrict the number of lithium ion batteries which can be packed. No spare batteries basically. Which brings us back to the MacBook Air. It is a netbook. It is small and light. It uses a switching power adapter - you can buy a cheap pin adapter at the airport wherever you land because voltage is not an issue. And when you come to sell it 2 years later you will get a significant chunk of your money back - the non Apple tablet or another brand of netbook will have very little value. A thing which quickly loses resale value is more expensive than buying the better thing to begin with.
1081
« on: October 09, 2013, 10:17 »
Silicon Alley's First Billionaire Aims To Dominate Images On WebThis story appears in the October 28, 2013 issue of Forbes Jon Oringer marches along the gutted 21st floor of the Empire State Building and ducks out a window onto a deck to pose for a magazine shoot, snapping his own photos as the photographer snaps photos of him. Starting this winter, the entire floor (and an identical one below it) will play home to Shutterstock ... to turn Shutterstock into the worlds largest marketplace for buying and selling images. Right now that title belongs to the Carlyle Group-owned Getty Images
1082
« on: October 08, 2013, 19:45 »
That's not true at all Sharpshot had a good solution a couple posts up, with new technology too! It does seem to be invented just for my needs
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-98243-MediaShare-Wireless/dp/B00CZ0P0PS
If you couple that with USB sticks then I think that you will almost certainly end up with an incredibly slow solution. WiFi + USB stick = set the thing transferring and hope it is done before the morning (and hope the connection is not lost, run out of battery or timed out before it completes). I might be wrong but I have the impression that what you are looking at is not suitable for backing up big chunks of data in any sort of practical way. Before you consider using USB sticks at all try transferring the full contents of, say, a 16GB card to a USB stick directly (ie not by first saving to a computer drive). That should give you an idea just how slow writing to sticks is. AFAIK the slow write times for flash sticks is down to the interface itself. SSDs work completely differently. I think. I might be wrong.
1083
« on: October 08, 2013, 07:44 »
Replying to the topic.. Istock has jumped way back up into the the 200's in alexa traffic rank. But I don't see anything on here talking about that stat.
Shutterstock and Dreamstime stats jump sharpely at the same time point. Therefore I think it is reasonably to conclude that we are looking at a change in the way the stats are collected or recorded. I could speculate that it might be something to do with Facebook but I won't. Or maybe I just did
1084
« on: October 07, 2013, 14:50 »
I had an image rejected for softness and missed focus the other day from Shutterstock for an image shot with my 50mm at f8 on a tripod with mirror up shot with shutter delay. ISO 100 and 1/125 and strobes. There was NOTHING soft about the image. But still got rejected for softness.. Go figure.
You could put it full sized on Dropbox with a watermark and post a link. Someone here might spot what the issue with it is.
1085
« on: October 07, 2013, 14:36 »
in LR, I add just a touch of basic sharpening in the develop module's "details" brick. Then, I add output sharpening on export. it's the output sharpening that I've turned off. I've left the "Details" brick sharpening on.
That, so called, detail sharpening you are leaving turned on defaults to 25. That is enough to get you rejections for visible sharpening. Received wisdom is that anything more than 12 is too much. Personally I normally use 0. I do not think that there is a definitive answer but export sharpening is definitely a no for stock IMO. If the image seems a little soft I would downsize it. Are you using primes or zooms ? I think zooms often tend to seem a bit soft but that might be a generalization.
1086
« on: October 07, 2013, 05:25 »
but i'm seeing lots of and lots of newspapers displaying images and especially slideshows using ... Flash.
Lol. Flash ! Good one. I remember it though. And the Real Player too. Only time I ever enable is for uploading to Alamy.
1087
« on: October 06, 2013, 14:33 »
I get a lot of calls from investors wanting help in understanding the stock photo industry. It is clear to them that when Getty talks about Midstock they are talking about the iStock brand and not Premium RF.
What would they be basing that on. At best it's an assumption, right ? I take it that those actually invested in Getty are not talking to you about it. I don't see that the 9% = iStock leap of logic in your article has been explained. It might be true but is has not been shown. And clearly, iStock is both midstock and microstock.
1088
« on: October 06, 2013, 10:34 »
I have seen plenty of photos there with identical lighting to that which I and many others had rejected from iStock in the past. I have indicated them in previous posts.
Could you please point me to one of those previous posts? My sense is that flat lighting has to be used appropriately. Like any other technique. It surely has to be stylistically intentional. The look of Hilla and Bernd Becher's best known work is partly all about the flat lighting. Their work and teaching has been a very major influence on where we are now.
1089
« on: October 06, 2013, 09:16 »
Ah ok. So it was the processing which was rejected.
I have not seen any work on Stocksy which has out of context flat lighting. Have you ?
1090
« on: October 06, 2013, 08:31 »
I find it amusing ahnd ironic to find that my local natural light, which was an automatic rejection on iStock in the old days, is now applauded by the very same people who used to tell me how evil it was, over on Stocksy.
Can we please see an example of the sort of rejected picture which you are talking about here ? I have never heard of iStock ever rejecting a picture because it was naturally lit.
1091
« on: October 05, 2013, 08:56 »
"Getty Images is finally declaring iStock a Midstock brand given how high they have pushed the prices of iStocks exclusive imagery."
Are you saying they've slapped a label on it somewhere?
Getty has $2.6 billion in debt and that debt is traded. Getty is telling Debt Investors that iStock is "Midstock" and they are trying to make an argument that it is aimed at a different customer from those who buy Premium stock (Getty's name for what they call the higher quality stock that can be found on Gettyimages.com -- their characterization, not mine).
What you are saying here (along with the rest of this item) seems to be based entirely on the summary of Moody's Sept 03 report and the reporting of that summary eg - Bloomberg / Businessweek item. I would like to specifically ask whether you have another source for your statement that "Getty is telling Debt Investors that iStock is "Midstock" ". And I would like to ask from what you are concluding that iStock is down 9%. Let me explain my question: The Moodys summary does not say that iStock is midstock. iStock is not mentioned. The Bloomberg Businessweek item pads out the summary with various related factoids including, for example, that Getty's midstock business has been challenged by Shutterstock etc - but it does not define the midstock business as being specifically iStock. That could equally mean that midstock (as a price point) has been challenged by microstock. As we know. Word association maybe makes us think they mean iStock specifically. And - even if iStock is "midstock" - from what are you concluding that iStock is all of their midstock and therefore that iStock is down 9%. The Bloomberg piece talks about midstock being down 9%. Unless there is specific evidence to the contary I would take Getty midstock to mean mid priced RF in general across all sites. I would take premium to largely mean RM. So - what makes you say that iStock is down 9% ?
1092
« on: October 04, 2013, 17:08 »
Personally I think it is extremely feasible that the top 200 contributors were responsible for 20% of total sales ... I'm almost surprised that it's not higher.
How can you tell who the top 200 contributors are today when so much of the best quality content is from collections which were not represented even 18 months ago ? Either way, it's feasible. But it's a guess. As is more or less everything else here. There is no data. Building a calculation out of guesses is pointless because anything multiplied by guess = an unknown. And the unknown gets bigger at every iteration. Also - there is nothing here about strategy.
1093
« on: October 04, 2013, 16:53 »
looked at thumb drives before but I must have missed the one I'm seeing now, 128gb for $50. Four of those might work.
Thumb drives typically have incredibly slow data transfer rates. Be sure to test it for practicality first - see how long it takes you to copy a typical day's worth of pictures to one. Don't forget to report back with your solution and on how it goes
1094
« on: October 04, 2013, 16:30 »
1. In Q2 2013 iStock revenue was down 9% compared to the revenue in Q2 2012. The Bloomberg report said that mid stock revenue was down 9% - is anyone else saying that specifically means that iStock is down 9%. 2. Based on my analysis of the downloads of 192 of iStocks leading contributors with almost 33 million total download (about 20% of iStocks total downloads since its founding) I am very dubious of this metric as a starting point because I believe that imported exclusive content (much of it very high quality) now likely accounts for a very significant proportion of sales. I do not believe that the time-served leading contributors and iStock members are taking nearly such a big share of the total. That is not to say that they are not still doing very well - only that much of the work in the imported collections is probably doing very well also. I do not believe that you can extrapolate from 192 accounts. 3. I am not convinced that it is possible to draw a useful picture from a calculation put together from so many guesstimates, ifs and maybes - the uncertainty compounded and the possible accuracy diminished at every if ?
1095
« on: October 04, 2013, 14:49 »
If you really wan't a tablet, you could use a Surface Pro. It has USB ports etc. and is under the hood actually a laptop (just without the keyboard)
It might be a great product but the Surface Pro has failed in the market. On the up side you can now get one much cheaper than previously because Microsoft have slashed the price. On the down side it will quickly lose any resale value. In 2 years time you will almost certainly be able to trade in your MacBook Air for more than half what it costs you to buy it tomorrow. That has certainly been the pattern on eBay over the past decade. Android is great too but the devices also quickly lose their resale value.
1096
« on: October 04, 2013, 13:42 »
I know that you say that you don't want to take a laptop. But if you would be carrying a tablet and and hard drive anyhow then you might just as well take an 11 inch Macbook Air. It's going to be a much less squirly solution and it will be slim and light enough such that it will probably end up taking up less room slipped in your carry-on bag. And an extra USB3 drive will fit in your shirt pocket.
Plus you can also use it to run Lightroom or Photo Mechanic if you suddenly find that you need to keyword and upload something along the way.
ETA: and when you have finished with it in a couple of years the Macbook will have retained much more of its value than anything else you could get.
1097
« on: October 04, 2013, 07:51 »
Being a Luddite, I'm going to walk three minutes to my physical bank and ask the nice clerkess who was at school with my husband and even sweetly warns us off bank 'deals' (that she's supposed to be 'pushing') that wouldn't be good for us.
She won't know any more than you do already however.
1098
« on: October 04, 2013, 07:49 »
Oh, I win the prize for rejections.
I had one editorial rejected for IP, which unless the square foot of apparently public street in the middle of a city that I was standing on at the time I took the photo happens to be private (!) is a nonsense.
http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=939There are many works of art that are rights protected for editorial as well as commercial photography. Sometimes they cannot be photographed as the main subject matter of an image, but are acceptable in context of a larger composition where they are not the main focus. .... Bear in mind that we err on the side of caution Nothing to be surprised about. There have been quite a few threads on the editorial forum about this. Street art is often rejected even for editorial. Which is perfectly understandable if you consider it intelligently. The more you think about it, the more you realise what a minefield street art is especially over who owns it, for example. The closer cropped the shot of street art is (ie the less context, the less that it is incidental to the scene) - the more likely it is to be rejected - would be my best guess. Especially in the case of something which the artist might, perhaps, frequently repeat as a motif. An inspector cannot be expected to know what it is that you have photographed. Remeber that it is not about what can perhaps be permitted for certain uses given careful consideration (for that there is RM) - it is about what is definitely okay everywhere and which can hence be sold self service.
1099
« on: October 04, 2013, 06:26 »
what a pr nightmare for them. how can we trust them with ongoing cc subs payments? they need a paypal option.
Google PayPal Security issues.
Nothing is 100% safe. The crooks will always be one step ahead. 
From a customer perspective, the good thing about using a credit card via Paypal (rather than using the credit card directly) is that it offers a good alternative to trusting your details to multiple different systems.
1100
« on: October 04, 2013, 05:46 »
Their subscription model depends upon people trusting the security of the payment information.
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