Congrats on the DLs, ason, and welcome aboard!

Yes, this was printed on the full front page of a prominent newspaper. Another version of it is also used on the 'last minute flight deals' on the Priceline website.

The sweet spot on a zoom lens is typically around 2 stops from fully open. This would be around f/8 for your lens.

You should never be shooting at an aperture greater than f/16 unless you have a very superior lens.

My best is currently at 84.5. It shows up fairly low (63rd place) on a generic Best Match search, where I have five images ahead of it, so it may soon be usurped. I hope.

Yep.

Ditto.

Forget Amvona, go for the Alien Bees.
Also, 300 Ws is not nearly enough power.

I had a look at some of the images for sale in the Jupiter collection.  Frankly I think the overall quality and creativity isn't any better than a lot of the work submitted to the microstock agencies; in fact, I've seen much better work in microstock.
...

I've noticed this too. Last summer I had an enlightening conversation with a photographer who was in town on an assignment for Getty - he got the job because a good friend of his has an influential position there, not because of his skill with a camera. Like most professions, success in traditional photography markets is more closely tied to who you know than what you know. Vive la revolution!

Congrats, and welcome aboard!

Consider buying a used tripod on eBay. I bought two very nice Gitzo units  this way. They're each about 30 years old, but you wouldn't know it to look at them - these things are built to last!

And too many 25c subcription sales...

Regards,
Adelaide

My average on Crestock is $0.47 per DL - only SS is lower than this amount, but at least I've got thousands upon thousands of DLs there versus the pitiful 92 that I have on Crestock.

Combining their low DL price together with their high payout ($100) means that the vast majority of contributors there will never see their money. Only sell images on Crestock if you're absolutely sure you can sell at least 100 per month - that way you'll at least get some money from them every few months.

...
Sharply, I'm intrigued by your comment about XXL sales.  If I recall correctly you were using a 20D or something up until a few months ago, then it appears you jumped up to a 16mp thing.  Are you implying that having XXL has a positive impact on earnings?  And will the investment in the 16mp thing in effect pay for itself and more?

That's not correct - I've been shooting with a 1Ds MKII for 2+ years now. Before that I used a 1D MkII (8MP) for about 1.1/2 years, and various prosumer Canon bodies before that (D60, 10D & 20D).

It's sad to say, but I don't have very many XXL images on IS. I got into a bad habit of downsizing everything to "L" size in order to quickly build my portfolio, and have only recently realized what a mistake this was. I now use "XXL" or "XL" for my images if possible.

Does it pay to have XXL images? A breakdown of 20 XXL images shows the following: 780 total DLs, 24 XXL DLs, and 37 XL DLs. Assuming that each XXL & XL DL would have been an L DL, this means I earned an $80, or about 15% by supplying an XXL image instead of an L image. Extrapolating to my current IS sales rate of $10k/year shows that I could earn an extra $1500 by uploading only XXL images. Given the additional cost of the camera over a Canon 5D ($7000 v $2500), and assuming that my income from IS will be $20k next year, the camera will have paid itself off in those two years from the additional IS income alone. So I'd have to say yes, shooting with a 17MP camera is worth it.

Perhaps the best reason to have a 17MP camera is that messy images can be downsized to IS L size. I rarely shoot in my studio anymore, and being able to heavily downsize dramatically increases the conditions in which I can shoot and still produce commercial quality images at fairly high resolution. Shooting with a pro-grade camera also eliminates problems experienced with "lesser" cameras (poor focus, slow focus, incorrect white balance, poor battery life, ...).

My experience is that it's a lot harder to get XXL images accepted than even XL ones. My theory is that because so few people use such a high resolution camera, most reviewers aren't accustomed to seeing images in such detail and reject them for having artifacts, when in fact the "artifacts" may just be normal detail that wouldn't be seen if the same scene was shot with an 8 or 10MP camera.

I started this microstock thing in june, so that's umm.. 4 months ago and i'm allready in the 2-3k group 

Needless to say i'm really, really, really happy about that 

That's outstanding, silverfox - way to go!