Fully agree on sharpness, i did many tests with VR and in situation with moving people and low/dark light it gets the job done but the sharpness is weird sometimes, adding a sort of blur in some areas and making a mess in other areas, all things that never happens with VR off.

Said that, if the only alternative is using a tripod VR is very useful but the effects it does on final quality (only visible at 100%) are too much underestimated in my opinion, it's great if you shoot news or sport but for stock you must be careful.

Microsoft menaced by open source developers ?

Wrong, Linux and the hundreds of different linux distributions and hacks so far only managed to kill the commercial versions of UNIX, see what happened to Unix SCO (formerly Microsoft Xenix), Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, True64, Tandem, etc

Linux/Android also taken over the mobile and Embedded market, but with little if any financial gain by Google being it an open project, and absolutely zero payback for linux distros used inside routers and modems.

What all these freetards are getting back from their hard work is merely a credit line hidden in a few text files and about boxes, as so far the ONLY company making serious bucks on open source is RedHat, anybody else is begging for donations or accepting the fact there's no easy money to be made with free apps that anyone can modify and resell as their own and use in their hardware without giving a dollar back to the author.

How iStock is treating contributors is not much different actually, fees lower than 20% of a sale are simply a joke, can't remember a single other industry where the salesman eat more than 80% of the sale price !

Sort of like giving out our pictures for free ? Almost, and who knows, maybe their plan is going in that direction, wasn't getty already asking 50$ to include 3rd party images in their collection ?

I see on Yuri's own site, he has this clause in his T&C:
"Warranty
    5.1 Copyrights We guarantee that all Media for sale on the Site used in accordance with this Agreement will not infringe on any copyright laws, moral rights, trademarks or other intellectual property rights or any other entitlements.
    5.2 Releases We guarantee that all necessary model and/or property releases for use of the Media in the manner specified in this Agreement have been legally obtained."

By that warranty, he may have left himself wide open to this sort of legal case.
I'm really surprised his contract lawyers didn't advise him better.

It's a gray area.
I don't think the eyeglass maker will win.

However, agencies should make an effort to be very clear on what is allowed or not, they're the ones responsible for all this mess, they're the ones accepting these images and telling us it's all right, and they should be the ones liable in case of legal issue, NOT the photographers !

Don't shoot the messanger but i guess this lawsuit however it turns out could be a nice and well deserved smack in the face for the RF industry.

I also see some potential for pushing agencies into being more restrictive and taking more seriously the legal aspects of selling images, they will also realize they can't possibly run these risks while selling the images for a pittance as they do now.

Hi folks,
Just wrapping up a long photo journey in China! What a place to explore! I carried model and property releases in my camera bag and brought my canon mark 4 itch me plus tripod.  Some tips that might help you if you venture here-

1. Have a translator if you don't speak Chinese - this will keep you from being taken in purchases and not getting lost
2. Have a plan of attack - map out where you want to go and stay on that plan
3.  Bring all your clothing - very expansive here almost 2 to 3 times more expansive that the USA
4  have lots of memory cards. 
5 have a very good camera bag to hike. My bag looks like a regular hiking bag thus no body noticed my equipment
6 do not take tour group trips. They only take you to their places plus force you to go gift shops
7 hire a guide on remote places. They know the spots plus good prices for food as well.

Cheers.  T

What

you don't need any guide unless you're really not cut for traveling in asia.

memory cards can be bought pretty much anywhere in china and they're cheaper than anywhere else.

clothing : the only issue might be if you're really tall, in that case it's very hard to find big socks and shoes but for anything else chinese clothes are ok and cheap, just buy any fake north-face jacket/pant/backpack/gloves and you're done.

plan of attack : you don't really need it, china is too big unless you've 1 year of time to travel anywhere, there are guesthouses and hotel everywhere, all you need is a lonely planet guide for the maps (the only useful thing in these guidebooks).

translator : useless unless you're doing a reportage or journalism, however it's a big plus if you learn the chinese numbers to bargain in markets or you WILL be ripped off big time and asked up to 500% more than the normal price.

getting lost : if this is a big issue for you i recommend to stay at home and forget about travel photography, the very first skill required for a good travel photographer is to never get lost...

In general, most of the posts I've seen show people earning somewhere between 10 cents and $10 per image per month on average across all sites. I think Leafs last poll showed an average of 75 cents per image per month. This isn't specific to SS but since SS seems to be the top earner for most people by far it's probably close. So, if you're making 15 cents per image per month at SS and another 25 to 50 cents a month at all other sites combined you're probably somewhere close to the 75 cent average.

I think one thing that seems to be overlooked by a lot of micro people is profitability.  Micro is a business that frequently gets tagged as a hobby. People work so hard and spend thousands of dollars and end up making enough to buy a dinner a month and may never break even.  So while it's helpful to compare how you're doing against other people, you may want to measure how you're doing as a profitable business.

Performance is affected by saleability of your work, keywording, search algorithms, SEO, and a bunch of other stuff including just plain luck.

Exactly, in a nutshell it's finally becoming an unsustainable business model apart for the top 5-10% contributors who are able to produce both quality and quantity paired with a good workflow.

It doesn't look funny, it's a hard job, no idea why so many newbies still waste time and money on this.

if you're not logged in, BestOf is the default option.

They should change their QC policy and stop accepting every snapshot instead of bringing new search based on someone's personal taste.

With time new bold move they basically killed Alamy as a non-edited agency.
Now for every keyword you will soon get dozens of pages of BestOf, anything else will be irrilevant and never sell as the BestOf is now the default search option.

If before it was hard to make a sale over there now it will become impossible.

Time and Newsweek were digging their own grave since a long time.

They can blame the internet and the economic recession but their quality went down the drain and that's why they lost readers little by little.

It's a good news Newsweek is dead, hope the others will follow soon.

Yawn, sigh!! ................... I know, you like threads like this. Very entertaining and intelligent, arent they? have a lot to do with photography, havent they?

Ah yeah, have a cup of tea here, almost forgot.

Stock will never die, and micro is still stock, ranging from cheap to rock bottom.

Assignments and freelancers are things light years away from the average micro customer.
You're comparing apples with oranges.

I could tell you a few things about art galleries selling pure junk shot by so called artists on acid,
And their prints sell like hotcakes, just don't ask me how, to each his own market.

Problem with raising the prices in Micro is that if one agency does it, buyers will go to the next cheap agency. All agencies need to raise their prices, but to do that they need to make price agreements which is difficult to achieve and if not done right, it could be illegal (cartel price fixing). However book publishers have done it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_Book_Price_Agreement and also their is something called resale price maintenance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resale_price_maintenance

Yes, there needs to be a sort of "cartel", that's what i mean.

It would be beneficial in many other ways too, buyers must realize and accept we have huge production costs and that micros can no more guarantee to sell images in high quantity as in the past to justify such underpricing.

But i would go even further : in theory, buyers having no other alternatives could even be forced to pay minimum 50$ per image as it's still cheaper and safer than using freeware/CC/public-domain/crowdsourced stuff or assignments.

Can't see the problem, really, all they have to do is billing a few dozen $ more to their customers.
Go in any design agency and the minimum price to do even a simple depliant is hundreds of dollars, where is the issue if their images cost 10$ more ?

It's a non-issue !
And their clients also have no other alternatives as well, either they pay the new prices or they don't get the product they need, simple as that.

I can't believe in 2012 there's this endless talk about 10$ more or 10$ less, it's BS and completely out of reality especially if coming from design agencies.

That's not the point, the cheapest image on alamy (the infamous Novel Use and UK newspapers agreements) is still from 5 to 20$, we're talking of web-sized images, mostly used online, not on paper.

My last sales on Alamy ranged from 15 to 600$ for instance, views and zooms are rising a bit, can't see any decrease in RM sales or lack of demand.

Publishers have certainly been hit hard by the actual recession, many newspapersclosed down, people buy less books, and yet if they need some specific images all they can do is paying RM prices, take it or leave it.

Why for micros it should be different ?
Micro agencies lowered the bar too low in my opinion, this urban legend that clients will run away if an image will cost them 50% more is bollocks in my opinion, it's still as cheap as 15$ rather than 10$ which is nothing for any decent designer and any decent client.

They've no alternatives apart piracy or Flickr or recycling older RF images bought in the past.