Quote from: HughStoneIan on December 29, 2007, 04:17

Quote from: CCK on December 29, 2007, 04:01
I see even Yuri gets rejections, certainly makes me feel better about the 40% rejections I get at IS!

HA HA!  Yeah!!

However, now IStock can have no excuse for rejecting his Hassy photos for noise, pixelation, or artifacting, I think.  They'll have to come up with something more creative.  Perhaps "This photo is much too clear, sharp, and noise-free for our library."

How about "no camera can produce this clear photos, it must be computor generated"!

I see even Yuri gets rejections, certainly makes me feel better about the 40% rejections I get at IS!

The way submissions are accepted or rejected often don't make sense, and that goes for all the agencies. I recently submitted a batch of 35 to StockXpert, only 23 were accepted. Rejected photos were accepted by SS (that means no noise), IS (they accept only perfect photos), DT, FT, 123, BS CS and FP as well as some smaller agencies. As we deal with different reviewers, we can really not expect absolute consistency, even at the same agency. An example, the photos I used to get accepted at IS were rejected a week later. This is just something we have to live with.

We should remember that the reviewers make mistakes. On two occasions I was given the same reason for rejections, in both instances I shot in Jpeg and send the file as shot, with no post processing whatsoever. I just let it go.

Quote from: rimglow on December 20, 2007, 15:08
I love Featurepics. I had an inquiry about buying one of my photos listed on pBase. I said it would cost $150, and they replied that was fine, but could they use a credit card. I loaded it to Featurepics, priced it at $150, and it sold that afternoon. Smooth as silk!

http://www.featurepics.com/Authors/Images.aspx?id=445

This is one of the great advantages of FP. I sold one photo there since my last post, but whenever someone want to buy a photo, you can do it through FP. I upload to 10 different agencies, and FP is one of only four that have never rejected anything I uploaded.

I use metadata templates and Adobe Bridge to ad metadata to hundreds of photos at once. I have metadata templates for almost every topic I use in photography. In Bridge you don't have to open the file and you add the keywords to a whole batch of photos. Have a look at this tutorial:
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/metatemplate.html

One of my images at SS had 11 downloads since Saturday, while another was downloaded 27 times in the last month. No other site comes close to that in numbers or in revenue. If only all my images sold at that rate!

My tips for getting past that initial 7/10 hurdle with SS:
Forget about picking images you think will be good sellers, rather go for photos that are technically good. I'm not sure if they are stricter with the first ten - I got 10/10 accepted and later a lot of photos rejected, but you will have lots of opportunity to upload good sellers later. Look for something with natural lighting because it lessens the possibility of problems with white balance. Even if you are satisfied with lighting of the photo, make sure the histogram also tells you its good. I sometimes get the impression some reviewers look at the histogram rather than the photo itself. Make sure the light source was behind you, reviewers tend to find more noise in shadows or back lit images. Don't sharpen photos at all. With SS I never make any adjustments in Photoshop, except for levels and selective noise reduction. Look at every part of the photo at 100% view, and if anything looks just remotely like there could be noise or jpeg artifacts, enlarge that part to 200% and get rid of the problem, or don't submit.

I've also had some rather strange rejections at IS. With a batch I send last week I have a 50% acceptance rate with some photos still pending. I send the same batch to the 7 other agencies where I submit, and with all the others I got 100% accepted. I don't have a problem with high standards, because that is what draws the buyers to an agency, but to me the reasons given doesn't make sense. They say artifacts at full view and I can resubmit after fixing the problem, but how can I fix the artifacts if I can't find it?

I have more than 130 photos with them, prices between $3.50 and $0.75 depending on size and quality. Never sells anything. At SS I have just over 50 photos, selling more than 20 per day.

99% of my submissions rejected by SS is because of noise - I certainly can't see that noise at 100% view (and I know what noise looks like!) Yet I have a higher rejection rate at FT where all my rejected photos were accepted by all the other major agencies where I submit.