For me its simple - castles were build centuries ago. NO current owner has rights to limit shooting the castle from public place as they didnt build it, designed it or anything else. Many castles in Europe are owned by the state itself and as long as there is no PR need for shooting castles in law, no bureau or office is allowed to sign a PR for you! This is simply insane. In almost every country is allowed to shoot even private modern buildings from public. 90% of current MR and PR crap requirements were made by agencies and not by the law. This is just another step in creating paranoia...

There are just few points for me:

1) Monopoly is very bad. Getty and IS already showed us how their "value" their contributors.

2) SS is earning me far more then IS and if I include other agencies, IS share on earnings drops to 15-20%.

3) I dont trust agency which screwed their contributors each month for 11 months in a row during 2011...

4) Even if nothing else happens, IS upload limits and often quite ridiculous rejections prevent you from growing your portfolio fast enough.

I have the same experience - some yes, some no. Its absolutely random. The most funny is the fact that my best sellers are travel shots from Norway.

All micro has "no travel" disease and often reject such pictures as "low commercial value", while they proudly accept isolated apple - aproximately 120.000 in their collection... kinda weird thinking. Recently Ive decided to invest much more effort in Alamy and personal marketing regarding travel shots.

I see huge problem especially for "western folks". You are used to your comfort (no offense), eating out, having beer in pub (doesnt matter how much it costs), renting car instead of going by bus etc. Ppl from for example post communist countries like me can live even in wester Europe for $1200 a month without much problems. And living costs in rest of the world outside EU, USA, Canada and Australia are usually much much cheaper. You can live in many countries for just few hundred $$ a month. You can do that even with micro only.

You dont have to stay in hotel or B&B - just go to cheap off season hostel or share with other travellers. Cook instead eating out. Avoid pubs as they are extremely pricy. Hitchhike if you must or travel by last minute super cheap flights. Share car, buy railroad passes etc. In summer sleep in camps or in remote areas camp outdoors...
There are dozens of ways how to save money. Ive been 3 weeks in Norway from south to Lofoten and back - all including food and camps was $800.

Travel photography is not so good on microstock. But microstock is just a tiny part of agency photography and agencies are just a tiny part of total photography business. And demand for travel pictures is higher then it ever was. There are still ways how to get in the business. But it is not easy of course    

Overall travel photos on microstock are very very weak. So its definitely crap that they are saturated with travel pictures. Of course I do not mean snaps but there are thousands and thousands of places very poorly or not at all offered by microstock.
The things not mentioned and really saturated are: businesmen shaking hands, zillions of ppl on white in every existing position, isolated fruit, flowers and other common crap, abstract backgrounds, details of PC, cellphone etc...

Perry: wildlife doesnt sell well on MICROSTOCK. It doesnt mean it doesnt sell well at all. Microstock is very very small, cliche and snapshit oriented market. ALWAYS keep that in mind! Any creative or unusual photo will be very likely rejected and ANY tight niche pics will NOT sell well on micro. Or better say tight niche pics could earn 100x more on more pricy markets...

I see one huge problem with all micros, Zazzle, Cafepress etc. - they expect US to advertise. Even microstock gets huge revenue from free links and advertisement of its contributors, they provide "great tools" to promote not "your portfolio" but them.

I expect agency which gets 70-80% from my sale to do advertising on their behalf. Same with Zazzle, Cafepress, FAA - why . would I join them, pay them comission or store maintanance fee and then do ALL advertising myself? I can build my own website which is much much easily developed regarding SEO and it will be great place for my customers and Im safe about suddently changed fees, policies, webdesign and other nasty things. Im such case, I would definitely rather invest a little more to set up my own business rather then doing this.

Im a bit more gearhead that most microstockers. My opinion is that both Canon and Nikon offer bad value in their cheapest models - but its wise to invest into them because of further growth of equipment. Canon 18-55 is significantly worse then Nikon, actually Canon kit lens is amongst the worst available on the market.

Sensors in all C/N bodies are quality overkill but most lenses under $500 truggle to deliver enough quality to fullfill the sensor needs. In the cheap lenses only Nikon 18-105 is good one or you must check other manufacturers like Sigma, Tamron or Tokina.

Canon has huge problem with basic zoom, all of them are crap and heavily overpriced 17-55/2,8 IS USM is very very big, heavy and results are ...well not really impressive. But Canon has very good 70-200/4.
Nikon has enough good zooms in basic range from cheap 18-105 thru 16-85 up to 17-55 but they lack good zoom in mid tele range, you either have 70-300 or 70-200/2,8 and nothing in between.

I would go for either Canon with Sigma 17-70/2,8-4,0 or Tamron 17-50/2,8 or Nikon with 18-105 or Tamron 17-50/2,8. Forget 50/1,8 - its not bad lens but its much wiser to buy one good and versatile zoom instead of one crappy 18-55 and one good but not very versatile 50/1,8.

Al-qaeda was founded in 80s by CIA in Afghanistan to fight against russian invasion. So there is no real terrorist organisation like Al-qaeda - its just all media crap. Most so called terorrist are logic result of the US invasions and takeover of independent business and countries. Regarding results - US pays several times more for "war against terrorism" then it pays for cancer or heart-attack problems research, while "terorrist" kill less ppl then are killed in cars every day in US only... isn't it silly? There are more ppl killed by heart atack from obesity, overfeeding and bad lifestyle every DAY in US then "terorrists" kill in the whole year worldwide...

There was exactly NO terorrism in Iraq before US invasion and Taliban in Afghanistan banned nearly all opium production - after US invasion, Iraq became extremely dangerous country and Afghanistan is producing most of worlds heroine. What a coincidence...

Bin Laden was not seen for at least decade and they suddenly kill him and bury the body into the sea. And they suppose ppl will trust this story? OMG!

I would go for D7000 - its pretty advanced camera, solidly build and weather sealed. D3100/D5100 are plastic crappy things with (silently) omitted basic things. For snapshooters it doesnt matter but you might discover within few weeks that there is some very important functions missing. Other thing is that they are not build for serious use and using them on every day basis will destroy them pretty soon - I mean traveling, walking etc. with camera, studio shooting is of course ok.

There will be problem with proper lens though. Up to 300mm (eq.) you are fine but then you are in trouble asap unless you are willing to spent very serious cash.

90% of pictures could be properly described with less then 15 keywords. Just Cutting keywords from 50 to 20 could solve most of the problem. There will be simply too tight space for serious spamming and everyone will be forced to think about keywords instead of blindly copying from other images.

Second, inspectors should check for keyword spam and use temporary bans, search penalisations etc. without hesitation. This could also help alot. On the other hand using "controlled vocabulary" and other crap like IS is the way to hell for sure.

All images with resultion under 4Mpix should be deleted from any agency ASAP, selling or not. And why? Because most search algorithms prefer selling pictures but especially on IS there are TONS of old crap uploaded in 2005-2006 with horrible quality but with good selling history from early years of MS. Such pictures are killing much better new pictures. Thats why I have 300 pics online on IS and 200 sales in 3 years and there are 100 pictures portfolios from 2005-2006 with thousands or even tenths of thousands of sales.

We contributors behave really silly in some ways. I know everyone needs money so its hard to quit IS. But I dont think telling pure truth about IS is badmouthing. In my opinion, agencies SHOULD NOT change agreements as they like - we do business together and try to change just one side of agreements in "normal" business - you will be broken ASAP! Clear example is Fotolia, where I still have in my agreement with them 30% commision but in fact they pay me much less. what?!

I do not recommend IS to both customers and photographers. I also wrote on my blog I dont think they are fair partner and why.

I also have very good insight on small stock agency and anything over 60% for agency is simply greed. Old stock agencies had to print catalogues, send them to customers, send all invoices, slides etc. via normal slow-mail and their share was 50%. Microstock DOES NOT have these costs and they told us 20% commision is too high?! OMG!

I do submit to IS but as said, I do not give a * about creating IS friendly photos. I simply send 18 pictures per week and dont care about how many they reject.

I do not understand badmouthing Dreamstime - they lowered commision only 5% for level 0 images - ALL other images are level up and same commision as before! In fact level 0 behaves as level 1 before, just the commison was cut 5%, which is pretty insignificant compared to raise of the rest. More problematic are weekly subscription packages but we should judge it after month or two and not 5 days after they announced it. I think noone can really predict the result of this subs and credit changes TOGETHER.

On the other hand I see really idiotic rejections on FT all the time (70% rejected compared to 70% accepted everywhere else including IS), their silent commision cuts and very nasty baheviour of IS. In fact DT overcome IS last month about 2x - it didnt happen anytime before.

I would vote for something between 20-30% depending on your level. I saw also some estimation bellow 20% but I think leafs is right aout this.

Always keep in mind that most microstock photographer never upload over 100 photos or reach payout - between 80-90% of them based on DT and IS stats. Only about 5-8% of contributors have more then 250 pictures online. Most contributors sell for 25c and only few for 38c. However it is hard to say how many pictures are sold for 25c or 38c - based on pareto's law, it could be 80% of all pictures submitted by 20% of top contributors - so it well might be that most pictures are 33c and 38c to the contributor.

That is NOT interview but PR article!

This is wrong question. Better is "how badly needs client my picture?" and "how much competition on the same topic is out there?" - if client urgently needs some special picture, price (except some insane requests) is not an issue. If there is HUGE competition, eg. micro copycats, you generally cant ask too much.
But regarding micro - clients really do NOT care if picture costs them $1 or 50c. Why? I live in central Europe, graphic designer charges aprox $40-60 per hour. What does it mean? That one sigle minute of searching picture often costs them MORE then the picture itself! In fact you have small chance to find suitable image on micro within one minute, so the price is not really an issue here. Macrostock charging $300 for green apple photo is of course extreme - another extreme is micro charging $0.5-$5 for pictures which required 10 models, pricy location and hour of postprocess.

I had no problems to get 70-80% accepted by SS - since end of november I always got 70-80% rejected. Most because of pretty disputable reasons. Suddenly everything is out of focus, low commercial value and blahblah - of course exactly same pictures are accepted on IS, DT and FT and many of them were accepted also on Alamy.

Probably new batch of editors, new training, policy update or something...

Check photoattorney.com - lot of indepth analysis about that. I was seriously surprised how idiotic agencies are about this - 80% of their requirements for MR/PR are just fear and not based on real necessity.

I think many folks underestimate power of this. Lets see, there are 273 million of photographers (according to SS todays stats) and about 10% of them are really active contributors. If just half of them decide to pull their links from website, its 13000-14000 photographers. We can suppose that most of them will pull at least 2 links (personal website, phorum link etc.) but more likely each will pull 10 or even more links. So in the worst scenario, aprox 27000 links to IS and FT will disappear. Even this is a huge blow for them, imagine if most of us have much more links then just 2. This will be double hit - first lost referred buyers and photographers (whats worse for IS and FT, we can forward them to their competition!) and second it will make serious blow to SEO and ranking in search engines.

Eg. one photographer with several hundreds posts in this phorum and IS and FT links in his signature pulls it - suddenly several hundred links are gone from ONE SINGLE photographer. Many ppl will pull several links from their personal websites, facebook, twitter, local language phorums (most of us are worldwide) and so on - this could in fact result in up to several hundreds thousands links deleted. Not something FT or IS will be proud of and it will hurt them quite a bit.

I see a lot of angry posts here - and I understand it did make angry exclusives to IS. Im terribly sorry but this is the first really constructive idea how to respond to IS and FT single-part decision about taking OUR money. (btw. I still have 30% commision in FT agreement) If IS or FT cuts my commision (better say charges me more for selling my pictures), then of course Im not going to promote them for free.

Second - we PAY (yes, we pay) agencies up to 85% of retail price to promote and sell our pictures. And then we do promote their websites ourselves and in best case we get what - 2-3% of referral sales? Do you see how stupid circle this is?

Let see example - you have personal website with pictures. Client somehow enters your site (becauase your site has very good SEO rank) and instead of charging your client you did attract, you send her/him away to make (maybe!) few cents. And you provide backlink to agency for free, ahile usually ppl charge $2-5 just for text backlink. Do you think this is smart?!

Well, I think it works itself pretty good. Firstly major of sales occur on photographer-client basis, not agency-client. Second, from agencies micro is just tiny part. Third - did you see microstock images in Google images results? Me not...

Depends on traffic and monthly earnings but I can see huge potentital to monetize such project. Usual price for smaller projects is 12-18 months project revenue, I wouldnt go under 24 months with this one. Check Flippa.com for similar projects, you'll see.

Technically, every item (even those cheap generic one) has its designer, manufacturer and owner. It doesnt matter who and how made it, simply its their design and you cant use it as you like, even if it is your property.

Doesnt matter if it is main subject or not, if it is just detail of the car headlight or whole car - every single part of the item is also designed by someone. You bought the item to use, not the rights to the design! Its exactly the same as photographing Mona Lisa and then calling it art or derivate work etc. - you simply based your own work on someone elses property and design.

In fact we do not apply IP law up to these insane levels but based on pure law and not logic, it could be done. Microstock agencies first didnt care and they still have tons of copyrightet cars, coins, post stamps, paintings, notebooks, cell phones, PC parts, banknotes etc. - all this stuff was created by someone and in most countries is strictly illegal to shoot eg. post stamps or banknotes and cameras, laptops and cellphones are of course copyrighted exactly the same way as car designs. Doesnt matter if you removed the logo - every photographer will instantly recognize eg. Canon camera, everyone recognize Apple laptop or Lamborghini car - with logo or not...
They do not accept some of this stuff anymore and I think its perfectly ok - it protect also us if we are too stupid to post some problematic stuff. They sometimes are too picky and reject pictures which are perfectly ok - then just resubmit or give up.

50D is definitely more durable camera then E-620 but it doesnt help much as it is NOT weather sealed (Canon claims it is but just in advertisement, Canon service says something else). E-620 has some pro functions which are not even in some cheaper FF cameras - as I already discovered functions like mirror lock-up with custom timing, pixel mapping, exposure bracketing with customizable steps and frames etc. are not included in most competitive models.
The be honest 50D has much better ergonomics then E-620, depends which lenses you have. For larger lenses from high-grade line is the E-620 a bit too small. For kit lenses or other smaller lenses like 9-18 is very good.

Zuiko optics is superb, if you dont go for really pricy Canon lenses you cant get better lenses then on Oly. Canon sensors are fine but the 50D wasnt the best model and E-620 was one of the Oly best pieces. Iso up to 400 is pretty ok for micro and with proper editing you will hardly notice any noise at iso 100.

Im using Photoshop CS3 for RAW conversion, in my opinion denoising in CS5/Lightroom 3 is too brute and makes "plastic-like" pictures. The Camera RAW 4.6 which I have in my CS3 works very good - it can denoise very well and the loss of sharpness is very small.

Yuri in his last Interview (John Lund web or so) mentioned some changes are necessary in micro. I have my personal thing I call "microstock dilema":

First problem is micro demands higher and higher quality, second they cut commisions every year (at least one or two agencies - 2011 just started and FT and IS already did!) and third, they require more and more pro pictures requiring pricy locations, models or studio setups or very niche pictures.
The problem is, the tight niche pics do not sell like hotcakes and despite being cheap, they will never cover the costs. The "real stock photos" or simly great pictures refered by some in this thread often require so pricy setup, retouching etc. they will never make it either. Plus add the fact that guys from China or India do not give a * about copyright and can copy your superb pictures within days for 10% of your costs. This is going to dead end. Im also very curious how will microstock sites solve this but unless they do serious changes, this problem will be bigger every day! We are not in 2005-2006 - the market isnt the same nowadays and what worked in 2005 doesnt work anymore.