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Messages - FD
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351
« on: November 22, 2010, 22:06 »
I am using gimp rather than photoshop ( feeling virtuos after reading the piracy thread;) ) but I suppose i could have tried something similar, I've never had PS and certainly can't afford it atm and don't want to go down the torrents route. You don't need PS to do the simple adjustments I made which are mostly simple levels and cloning. GIMP is great if you have the shortcuts in your "fingers". I'm not a PS "wizzard" at all since I try to get it right in cam. My last seascapes series was even done in DPP, the free Canon RAW developer: fringe, lens correction (vignette), levels, on the full image. PS (or GIMP) is just for cloning here and there. The major flaw, imho, on your dropbox cow picture was not waiting till the main attention focus, the cow, was in the full sun. Be aware that the patchwork I did (levels, soft layers) will introduce noise and artifacts but luckily, the skin of the cow is very textured.
352
« on: November 22, 2010, 21:20 »
The main site entrance is http://totallycoolpix.com Thanks for the link! The site has a respectable PR of 3 and is hosted in the Netherlands. Cubestat info. For us folks that do travel photography and editorial (mostly with a good story), it might be a fine outlet, since main stream media are looking for this kind of cheap content all the time. The only negative point is the absence of any real business info.
353
« on: November 22, 2010, 19:11 »
In the lands of the Rising Sun, "today" is already Tuesday, 8am. The DT estimated day says "now", and still 5,000+ images left. Time zones can be tricky.
The iPad is of course a lottery but the 100% commissions are for everybody.
@Warren: I don't think they can apply it to subs since those were paid before the magic day.
354
« on: November 22, 2010, 07:04 »
This one http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14783063/cow6.jpg was turned down at crestock for Artifacts and/or Compression flaws. I can't for the life of me see what they mean! For Shutterstock, the lighting and the attention focus would be off. In general, I found your shots too dark. The clouds are blown here out at points too. Why didn't you wait till the cow was in the full sun? I cloned out the blown out clouds, made the shot lighther cropped the blurred bottom out and added some soft light layers on the cow: 
355
« on: November 22, 2010, 05:55 »
Any observations are more than welcome. Perfect salable stock images. You don't need any lessons.  Crestock, oh well. Who cares about that picky 0.25$ site? Try Shutterstock and keep shooting.
356
« on: November 22, 2010, 05:32 »
Nice work, Yermolayev.
357
« on: November 21, 2010, 09:11 »
I have 7 images awaiting review and it may be the only time I've been wishing that ETR countdown clock would slow down a little! The ETR was far off the previous week. I had 120 hours and then suddenly accepted. It will be Tuesday for now. With 10 pending, I have a fair chance and you should too.
358
« on: November 21, 2010, 08:50 »
Don't give up! Or just go to a local repair shop. That's what I do. What does this have to do with photography or microstock? If the guy can't handle his grief over a simple hardware malfunction, why doesn't he join a whining & support group to share the grief?
359
« on: November 20, 2010, 20:28 »
So apparently I shouldn't be talking about microstock on a dedicated microstock forum. Genius. : ) Where did you talk about microstock? As far as I can read here you are handing out intelligence ratings.
360
« on: November 20, 2010, 10:35 »
1000 images = $600 a month No. Divide by 5. 
361
« on: November 20, 2010, 10:10 »
The question was: Are we really doing it right?
We can't know for sure. We can only look back and around and try to learn from the past, from others and from our own experience. But that's the problem, we can't look back. Crowd-sourcing is unique, Google is unique, the Net is unique. Allow me to go back in time, 1985 I guess. The Net didn't exist yet. Science Fiction writers wrote about wrist communicators that would allow to send SMS messages all over the world. Ridiculous, isn't it? The world was dominated by number-cruncher IBM with their big machines with a whopping 1MB RAM in a cooled shrine eating punchcards fed by priests in white coats that were called IT engineers. Syntax error in card 67646 and there went your night. There comes this young company that invented minicomputers, called DEC (Digital Eqp Corp). Ken Olson, the visionary and founder stood on the steps of the Cannes convention center, telling the eager pundits (no blogs too) that in the nineties, 50% of the computers would be "networked". The pundits laughed out loud. I still remember the floodlights of the press. Why do you need a "network" to connect mainframes when hard-disks are cheaper? A 1MB disk was just 4000$.  Ken didn't know (or he did) that the PC and Macintosh would be around that same year. He threw his "Vaxmate" on the market there in Cannes, just to find out that 2 years later, the IBM PC destroyed his minicomputer market by a clever OS written by a college dropout nerd called Gates. I pulled the thick yellow Ethernet cable myself through the corridors since my company didn't believe in this fad. I had to bribe the budget for the cable out of other budgets myself, but I had no personnel. Since then, DEC is long gone and IBM and GM too. A Britt in Switzerland combined Gopher and hypertext into "http" and for a year (1991-1993?) it was the toy of rocket scientists. Little did we know. 640KB (RAM) ought to be enough for anyone, IBM declared, and they allowed Gates to write OS2/Windows, since the money was in hardware anyways. Hahahaha. Enters Netscape 1.0, first with text-only, then with images. Those were the heydays of Compuserve dial-in for the in-crowd with their patented GIFs. It's still 1994. My 56KB modem was a marvel, and so was my phone bill. Compuserve had its own chat, personal profile and sites. They let that weird Net in later, too little and too late. The Net took the world by surprise and so did Google later. Web 2 was founded on the ruins of the first Bubble and tweets and faecesbooks destroyed fine social sites like MySpace and Friendster. Why? Myspace was fine. Most Microstock sites are just 5 or 6 years old. They are experiments in the WWW and nothing guarantees they will stay. How can we learn from the past when there is no past? In the digital WWW age there is no IP any more. The music industry has been ruined by it and the movie industry soon. Digital is free and there is an endless supply of it. The US lawyers may sue their @ss off but the US is done and over. They're just printing money since China stopped buying US treasury shares. China is buying Ireland and Greece, and soon Portugal. In 2012, they will surpass the US in economic power. IP ceases to exist East of Berlin. What does the West do? Insist on "human rights" when the IP elephant is all over the room. There is no past you can learn from. This is a total different world, as the world was before 1985 and 1968 and 1945. Enjoy it while it lasts. It won't last long. 
362
« on: November 20, 2010, 06:17 »
Oh no, it's going to be Sunday. Everyone stop uploading  Monday. 18,817 images left. It's a very nice gesture from DT since it sacrifices (200 working days in a year) 0.5% of its income. I figure they pushed the reviewers a lot since approvals were only 2 days the past week.
363
« on: November 17, 2010, 09:45 »
The way in which Leaf handled the thread, and the responsible way he closed it down, should be noted over at Istock. Or perhaps Leaf was worried about his IS sales and his Google PR. Moderators are free to close threads, but the last word from the moderator should not be a snarky personal attack followed by revoking forum rights so there can be no response. Of course. Anybody can ban me, but I experienced some very sneaky and cowardly behavior from Leaf (thanks Keith from Zymmetrical for telling me by email), and I'm not the only one. That's why I don't post here much any more. And for the record, I don't care who Lobo is.
364
« on: November 17, 2010, 09:34 »
Still waiting for a replacement since PIxamba did not deliver a platform yet:( Pixamba as such is out of business. I honestly don't see how video can add added value to a website (you can't use it in print). Personally I block all video on sites. Another waterfall or ocean waves? No thanks. It's useless. I do video on my 5DII but only editorial and assignment (weddings, seminars, etc...). Video for stock is stillborn.
365
« on: November 17, 2010, 09:18 »
My best match was in March 2008 with 1/3 of the photos I have now. Their search engine is totally biased, since most of my sales were from only 3-5 shots from 2005. That stopped but this month I only got sales of images 3 years and older. That's why I stopped uploading June 2010. It doesn't matter. For a credit buyer, DT is a much better choice. As an illustration how far their search engine is off, look for " engineer". On page one we see of course the most famous hubby of the hemisphere ( ) (very appropriate) but also this one with no engineer at all ( next or next), and this evergreen (on BS) with on cam flash and loads of similars in a lame pose. That's why I'd never consider buying at BS (BullSh*) and SS made a bad pick.
366
« on: November 15, 2010, 20:30 »
Beer!
367
« on: November 15, 2010, 20:27 »
368
« on: November 15, 2010, 20:18 »
stats What I read from these stats is that the number of contributors (exclusives as well as non-exclusives), the number of files online and the sales have been growing.
369
« on: November 15, 2010, 20:10 »
As a customer, I have been annoyed that a lightboxed image has suddenly jumped in price when I've gone back to purchase it after getting client approval. The same is true for a DT image that has jumped a level up.
370
« on: November 14, 2010, 19:49 »
"no thanks. Not another Facebookish time-waster, sharer and chitchatting crap attached to my PS. PS is about working on images without mother in laws popping up asking wazzup.
I even have to unplug my network cable nowadays when I start PS since it keeps nagging for updates. A mere upgrade of the Reader yesterday installed McAfee on my PC without even asking. Now I will lose time kicking it out since it keeps asking me to "upgrade"."
Spam? Speak for yourself.... some people actually pay for things they find useful, you know? And it seems related to Photoshop to me (being in the Photoshop forum) I didn't mention "spam", FYI. Please quote me correctly. I just said it's a time-waster. A forum can be fine (this is one) since you can browse it at leisure and read it asynchronously. I also didn't call the Yuri Monopod guy a spammer since his product was on topic and informative. But if you like to pay for a chitchat program, that's fine.
371
« on: November 14, 2010, 00:11 »
Please note that this rant is not aimed at you personally, FD-Regular. I have a high regard for your posts. I'm just sick of always being told that I'm the only one who has to play by the rules.
I know it's not directed at me personally since my conscience is clear. I just wanted to offer some observations on the world as it is, not as it should be. I posed this question a while ago to my photography pall and this is his answer: Yes it's probably bad for the people that made the software, but what should I do? Pay 1000$ or 500$ in a "legit" shop to just have the same all the others (my competitors) use without paying anything at all? What's more, even if I could pay 500$ (which I don't have) to a "legit" shop, it's counterfeit anyways. (I have to agree: the hologram printers are rampant around Manila). So, it's doing like everybody else or be a Don Quixote and go sit near a mall with a styrofoam cup for some coins. What can I say? 94 million sociopaths? I know who is to blame for all this but I can't comment, except that a fish starts to rot at the head.
372
« on: November 13, 2010, 20:52 »
I particularly enjoyed the comment about MS Office at $100 being too expensive. I will be crucified probably, like Ivan (Dreamframer) a few months ago. The world is larger, strange but true, than the industrialized high-wages West. In the Philippines (but the same is true for Indonesia, as I heard), 40% of the people have an income of <2$ per day. The monthly wage for a grade school teacher is 6000php = 140$. Yet many PC's I saw have the latest Office, PS and Windows Ultimate. When back in 2007, I bought my first local PC, they told me that for a legal Windows (the CD with the laser hologram) I would have to wait 7 weeks. In the whole Philippines (94 million people) not one legal copy present of Windows was my conclusion. When I fetched my PC after a couple of days and I wanted to install Linux-Ubuntu, I found out it had XP Ultimate, Photoshop, Office, Pro CD-burning software and "sample music" that filled up the rest of the disc. Courtesy of one of the country's largest PC chains. Don't ask don't tell. When I bought a replacement system disk earlier this year, as an "added service", the vendor included the same software, even if I didn't ask for it. All recent software and games are sold in markets and booths in malls, for 5$ or less. All in the open. The games have "installers" that create a virtual CD-drive mimicking the original circumventing the copy-protection. In principle it's illegal but a government that would dare to bust this home-grown industry would lose a lot of votes and would be faced with a major foreign currency drain. Last week I tried to buy Photoshop for my photography partner that is a full-time university student. I had the enrollment proofs ready. On the site of Adobe for the Philippines, it said you couldn't pay and download from the Philippines and you should order in Australia. Yeah right, the postal services open all the snail mail from abroad in the hope to find money in it. Last month I got a letter from Moneybookers with no external marks. The mailman told me with a cheesy wink that it was about money. How could he know? Ah, the letter had been opened. If you order something in Australia, be sure the CD will be missing or copied at least. Fair chance the customs will block the CD in their custody until you come with "proof" it's genuine. They will need months to "examine" the proof unless you give the decisive "proof" under the form of a banknote. Then you can take it right away. No thanks. In fact, you can't buy any software here legally unless you import it yourself. My Windows is legal (OEM on my new PC I brought from Belgium) but I'm quite sure I'm the only one in continents around. And before the moral rants start, my PS is a legal CS2 from long ago. It does what I want but of course the RAW handlers are not updated. My photography partner had to make a movie for a class assignment. He used Adobe Premiere CS4. He got it from the Chinese torrents, he told. Is he a sociopath? The price is a full year income of a school teacher and you can't even buy it in the Philippines. No movie = assignment failed = the college enrollment fee wasted. Sociopath, huh? When Microsoft did an audit years ago on the Indonesian government PC's, they found none of the Windows were genuine. They made a settlement with the Indonesian government to legalize these installs for 1$ per copy so they had access to all upgrades. After that, they poured the money x 10 back in scholarship grants to Indonesia. That's the right way to go. Adobe has no such program, as far as I know. I wonder who the real sociopaths are.
373
« on: November 12, 2010, 12:42 »
LOL let's close agencies for new uploads No no Luis, only for your uploads.
374
« on: November 12, 2010, 12:40 »
Ah it's about paying actually? I knew it, since the guy ignored my remarks. In a next post he will start a slick sales talk about all the benefits a subscription to his "service" has and then we will realize we wasted time again on a spammer. Been there, done that. If I need advice about rejections, I know the right place where to ask. The site support itself. Gnite.
375
« on: November 12, 2010, 08:27 »
I'm waiting for ProStockMaster/Pixamba too Pixamba stopped operation begin this year. It made me swear not to upload again to any new website. You can wait but please don't hold your breath.
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