- The eternal beta takes much too long. Many news sites like Geckostock and MostPhotos had their software running in two to four months. Buyers will lose interest. If Bill's own SV can't get things programmed well fast, that tells a lot about Bill.
It took SV months to come up with a decent watermark. I could do that as a kid on my Commodore 64. Maybe Bill can't spare extra money at the moment since he wants to buy Yahoo.

- I wish they would stay away from my keywords. I can't find my images back because some clever editor always removes some essential ones and adds irrelevant ones.

- Every time I go back, I see the view count unchanged at a very low level. Of course, views aren't everything, but in order to be bought, a shot has to be viewed first.

- I'll keep my account there for a while, but only with 3 shots. I deleted the rest after begging for 6 weeks for a watermark, any watermark. Maybe the site takes off, but probably not. Sometimes, miracles happen.

- Hatman makes it sound that CrapHamlet wants to degrade Microstock on purpose. He might be very right. Anything MicroSoft touched meant the kiss of death. MS wants to buy Yahoo and thereby ruin it, like it did with hotmail and everything that it acquired. I hope it won't ruin my beloved Flickr (see however, this blogpost of Dan Heller).

As for bandwidth, use imageshack or flickr to showcase: they are free. Apart from the hand (bad angle, shallow DOF, grossly deformed) the other shots look fine to me. White balance might be a bit off, but that's easy to remedy by CTRL-M > auto. What I mostly do now is make shadows a bit more transparent by a soft-light white-filled layer at 20%, then compensate for lost vibrance. Stock apparently doesn't like heavy shadows like used in artsy shots, but I might be wrong.

Apart from the first flower (but there are so many already on Stock) I would say your shots are a bit uninspired. Take the strawberries for instance. Well... they are strawberries like you can find at any market. They are not STRAWBERRIES! WOW. Stock needs to be a bit bigger than life and overdone. Stock needs to draw attention immediately among the noise of competing visual stimuli.

But... this is very subjective and I don't know if it's even worth 2 cents.

It would be helpful if you posted a link to those shots. How else can anybody judge here? 

I read it too. If you don't register with the US tax office as a non-US resident/citizen, they withhold 30%. That's a bit crazy and it's even against their own constitution: no taxation without representation.

I submitted 10 images a while ago out of my last months' batches, that were accepted everywhere (DT,SS,etc...): 5 models and 5 nature/urban shots. I took the occasion to check what happened and all model shots were rejected because the poses and the expressions were unnatural. Have to add those were isolated, so the PSC doesn't want isolated shots.

My waterfall shots were soft rejected because they belong to the news and not the creative category. Well, those waterfalls have been around for some thousands of years I figure, so I can't see what news value they have. Also, PSC doesn't like vibrant colors, so slide that saturation slider in PS way down to B&W.

One shot was accepted, a bunch of guitars on a street sale. But it wasn't live yet since I needed to fill in first a bunch of things I don't understand. If you need to fill out that stuff for every photo, it's even more time than Istock.

Then I did a search on "Asia Waterfall" to see how my competition was doing, since I regularly get EL's on my Asian waterfall shots. Just 23 matches, and in one third, the waterfall was not really visible. Came across a plain women with her back in the sun and blown-out highlights in a jungle scene that was totally shadowy but popped up clearly with a shadow-recovery procedure. She was feeding the ducks in a pond. The waterfall obviously was 1km down the road. A mediocre snapshot.

I asked for the license price of that shot in one European country for one year and it was above 2,000$. But what a bargain! Incorporate it in a corporate presentation and showing it once was only 200$. Boink.

Finally I checked their watermark. One small line on top and on the bottom, and a giant clean "thumb".

Can't see who's going to buy there, and who's going to upload. Me thinks its an undercover operation of the American IRS to get money in ;-)

In short, I deleted my one approved shot, and will just keep my account in case the site takes off. Sometimes, miracles happen.

I think you are overreacting FlemishDreams as  i said i don't know the legal status but its certainly not spam it is an announcement.

The legal status seems questionable. Let's wait what DT has to say later. They are investigating it.

I have one spare room painted white all over, included the ceiling for bouncing. If it gets dirty at some point, just paint it over there.

Of course it's well programmed, but the idea is not new at all. The reason it never took off is that it's a breach of copyright. The sites can not decide on this since it's a violation of the right of the submitters. When FeaturePics introduced its free blogging license of thumbs, they presented an opt-in option to each and every contributor first.

Yuri Arcurs is working on a similar program but he did it the legal way, getting hold of the database of a major stock agency and he will not present thumbs, just anonymous keywords. This guy is leeching DT and SS for thumbs he has no rights for. A quick look on Alexa learns he's spamming the Net all over on all possible forms (for instance post #1 at Talkmicro), and he hides his identity well, according to whois.

By the way photographers borrowed that technique from army snipers , that were using their gun straps in same way.

I belong to the generation that still was drafted for the army in Belgium. Our first month training in the infantry was with a long range automatic rifle. Of course, as a sniper you had to master it at one shot. I always used this technique instinctively when "shooting" with a cam.

That is, take the first resistance of the trigger, aim again, then hold your breath and steadily but calmly pull the trigger.
Fix your arms, elbows, head wherever you can: a wall, the floor, a doorway, anything stable. The only difference with shooting a rifle and shooting a cam is that a cam doesn't produce a vigorous rebound, so you don't have to brace.

I chose the Nikon D200 over the newer D80 a year ago because of it being heavier. More weight adds inertia hence less vibration. I hold the cam firmly on 3 points on my face: right lower eyelid bone, upper cheek bone, right side of nose bone. Right hand on the trigger... err... release button. Left hand supports the lens far in front, left elbow against my lower ribs. If possible fix my head against a wall or doorway. Legs wide spread, no slippers or socks (studio) but boots with rubber soles.
Sorry if I offend anyone with the obvious, but some people might not know.

I have a monopod but a cheap one without swivel. So I can't do portrait orientation easily. Moreover, the point at the bottom slips away on a hard floor when I bend over. With action shots, the telescopic monopod takes some time to deploy too and you can miss the moment.

So this rope trick is superfast (no deployment and you can leave the screw in place) and usable in any orientation and tilt on a hard slippery floor. Imagine your model moves 5cm forward a split second before the shot. With this rope you can easily go back 5cm without refocusing since the cam can move 360 degrees. With a monopod, your cam will tilt upwards and you get a lot of free copyspace on top ;-)

Credits for this link go to Duncan on the CanStockPhoto forum. I just dumped it here ;-)

Lose your tripod.

The 1$ image stabilizer

Hat tip: Duncan, CanStockPhoto forum

Great shot but please isolate on white if you have dark clothes! How can a designer isolate your shots with black on black??? Think! ;-) Isolation works on contrast.
As a side note: I would never use black since all texture and folds drown in there, and if you want to pop it up... there comes the noise devil

Use gray! (it goes with any color scheme on a web page or folder, and the skin as only colored area gets the focus - think designer!).

There is a spot (under my account at the bottom) where it says "delete my account".  Problem is that you have to take all your pictures off, one by one, before you can do it.

That is just ridiculous. Or, reading Duncan's post on the CanStockPhoto forum that he is on high troll alert and that whoever posts things there he doesn't like, will see his account vanish "suddenly", maybe you should troll around a bit there ;-)

Ideally you should be making adjustments in a RAW editor like Nikon Capture, Canon's equivalent, Lightroom (and then finally export your finished file in JPG)

I partly agree but not totally. I do some minor tweaking in the RAW Nikon convertor, like exposure, light and vibrance. Sometimes I develop the RAW twice, once optimized for highlights, then optmized for shadows.
The result goes in a 16-bit TIFF (with layers for 2-3 developments) to Photoshop.

Whatever you do there on the TIFF is lossless. I do some final tweaking, especially the pop-up and the brand-cloning (you can't clone in the RAW editor). I save that 16-bit TIFF, because that's my master copy.

After that, I convert to 8-bit and save as JPG-12. If ever I need to redo something on the shot, I always start from the TIFF. I don't trust Lightroom really. I felt it's a quick fix for things you have better control on in the real Photoshop, something for a snapshooter that wants predigested tweaks with no worries for noise and cloning.