June is looking to be a good month at IS for me, but my SS sales are taking a beating - my SS sales are down so much that IS is outperforming SS by 15%! Nuts.

The numbers are definitely skewed towards macro stock, especially for the total income. Total micro income was just under $4000 but almost 60% earned less then $1000. It would have been interesting to see what the other %40 averaged.

This easy to estimate: 40% of the microstock respondents averaged about $8500.

Overall, I found the analysis incredibly shallow - almost to the point of being meaningless. I'm not a statistician, but I think that any mention of average is fairly meaningless without mentioning standard deviation.

I'm in a GMT-8 time zone, so it's pretty easy for me to use it when hardly anyone from Europe and the eastern part of North America aren't (i.e. 1am or 2am east coast time, 7am or 8am european time).

Hey Sharply.  I hardly ever go to the actual SS site, but your most pop airplane was there on the welcome page a minute ago - big and bold (and with no watermark!).  A pretty darned impressive photo.  Hopefully good for a couple of downloads if it's the first thing they see! 

Edit:  Sorry gang, I thought this was a shutterstock thread.  Oh well.

Thanks for noticing, Pixart!

They rotate the top 50 sellers of the week through that slot. My shot has been there for about a week or so ... the in-your-face placement sure helps with sales.

I'd sure love to get some free publicity like that on IS!

I got in there early and nabbed a half-dozen or so of the easy ones - a pretty easy way to earn a couple of bucks. After ten minutes it began to get tedious and repetitive, so I dropped out.

My iStockRoyalties spreadsheet is forecasting a 12% sales drop for next month. Am I the only one?

Wow, that's disastrous.

I hope things pick up for you ... promptly!

No problems here: my sales are up.
The summer slump is about to hit though - I'm holding my breath that things will be strong for another week or two.

There are many people who enjoy looking at and critiquing photographs who cannot, no matter how hard they try or how many courses they take, make a 'nice' image. Just because this reviewer is a member of that crowd doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't know what he's doing.

To put it more succinctly "Those who can't do, teach."

It's easiest to meter for the entire scene and use those settings for each individual shot. Doing this makes it a snap to manually stitch the images together. If you don't have a light meter, you can take a sample shot using a wide angle lens and use those settings when you switch to a different lens. Having a levelling head is very helpful as well.

Although the convention is to keep the same focus distance for each shot in the pano, you might get some interesting results by varying the focus distance as you pan - particularly if there are two points of interest in the shot.

As an alternative to manually stitching, you may want to try some automated software.

Regarding your 'high enough aperture' statement: you should learn about hyperfocal distance, as well as limits of acceptable sharpness. If, for example, you shoot a scene using 35mm at f/8 focused at 20m, everything from 4m to infinity will be in focus. Just because your lens can be stopped down to f/22 doesn't mean that you need to (or should ever) go there. Lenses are typically at their sharpest when stopped down 2 or 3 stops - by using this knowledge together with the above to strategically select the focus distance, you will have the sharpest and in-focus image possible.

I have two accounts at Fotolia (like all the sites except IS who won't allow it)

It's probably been asked before, but I'll ask anyway: Why do you have two accounts?

Congratulations!

How about giving us a practical and 'hands-on' review once you've used it for a week or so?

I started uploading to FT in early January of this year. FT has always been my lowest earner (currently at $120+/month).

7 day: 437
All time: 1046
Sales: 426
Portfolio: 940