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Messages - cascoly
4101
« on: April 03, 2010, 12:37 »
You'll never make saleable images with a P&S in bad or low light conditions, think about inside airplanes,
trains, waiting rooms, the only places where i shoot with P&S but it's just for fun, i never made crisp and sharp
images in these places, even using flash.
they're only good outdoor in optimal conditions but then why not using a DSLR ?
just because you havent done it doesnt mean it cant be done!! my sony hx1 images sell on all the sites - in fact low light is one of the better aspects of the camera! and as previous poster mentioned, size DOES matter - i have a digital rebel too, but it's not handy for skiing and other activities. if you always have a tripod and studio lighting, you might have a point, but even there, the newer cameras will do well too s
4102
« on: April 03, 2010, 12:20 »
My mistake, I'm wrong. iStock is the best. They rule. That's why they're #2 on the poll... Shutterstock users are just lying. 
People who don't make much at iStock will rate it poorly. It's easier to get accepted and quickly start selling at Shutterstock, which is why it's number 1. But the whole argument here is that those who can master iStock will realize greater earning potential there. Unfortunately it seems those who are doing so are in the minority.
i started w istock in mid 2006 and istock as never been my top earner - DT surpassed it as soon as i joined them, and most months now is is my 5th ot 6th best. for awhile i upl'd the limit every week, but now i rarely do. myy port is heavily landscape,travel etc, so i do best by having a large port with fewer sales per image. so it's not that i dislike is, i just recognize we don't have a good fit.
4103
« on: March 30, 2010, 15:26 »
If you can produce 100 images per hour how come you only have 700 images on Istock after 4 years? Did you just work for 7 hours then?
please READ my comment before replying, and tone down your personal remarks and insults... i said i can CAPTION & TAG 100/hr, not produce them - not that it's really your business, but istock has never been a good earner for me, so i rarely bother to go thru their submission process. thus it's no inidcator for me
4104
« on: March 30, 2010, 15:13 »
I've plenty of old 6MP images that were all passing thru QC like a breeze until november or december, now they're rejecting everything apart pin-sharp human portraits or images with big sharp subjects.
Anything else goes to the bin and they also ley you wait a week or more to tell you failed QC because of "SoLD".
...
In any case it would have been polite for Alamy to at least write in their blog that from now on the minimum acceptable is 12MP, they made me waste a lot of time for nothing.
yep - that's been my experience too - i had a batch of cybershot images accepted in jan, but nothing since. it's really pretty silly - quality should be the measure not snobbery or seeing who's camera is bigger i've been selling these images thru ss, is, dt and others with no complaints - the hx1 has a feature that takes 6 quick images and then prepares a sharp composite. i have a neuropathy that left my right hand unable to work a camera, and get tremors, but with the hx1 i get better resuts than with my dslr, even with a tripod. s
4105
« on: March 29, 2010, 19:13 »
Eight hours a week __ are you sure? You must be knocking out your illustrations (and uploading them to several sites) at the rate of 3 per hour which is amazing. I do basic photography but even so I reckon each image, from the planning, preparation, shooting, processing and uploading averages out at least one hour per image.
based on that analyss i find it difficult to believe ms could ever be profitable -- at 1 image per hour you'd need an RPI of $10 for EVERY image just to make minimum wage! sounds more like your workflow could use some streamlinng - for me currently, captioning & keywording is the most labor intensive, but i still can do 50-100 per hour; all other aspects [other than shooting itself] are highly automated - eg upl to all agencies takes only a few minutes s
4106
« on: March 29, 2010, 18:58 »
anyone else getting rejections for an unsuitable camera? i've been getting images from my sony hx1 ACCEPTED OVER THE LAST YEAR AT ALAMy - suddenly it's unsuitable - i susxpect a reviewer just looks at exif and doesnt bother looking at the actual image. all the images i submit to alamy are photomerged panoramas, using 3 or 4 or more images, so i don't need much if any upsizing - these images do fine with SS and istock.
i'm about ready to give up on alamy, but wanted to frst try to see if it's just one rogue reviewer or a new policy [no reply from alamy support]
their silly 'toss the whole batch' policy is bad enuf...
s
4107
« on: March 25, 2010, 18:02 »
it can get pretty silly - some years ago the US Olympic committee sued businesses on the Olympic National park borders for using Olympic in their business names - not sure if they also went after our state capital, Olympia
s
4109
« on: March 22, 2010, 18:47 »
thanks for polling this - i didnt even realize i'd crept up to the 36c limit. i immediately called my financial advisors to plan how to manage the extra cashflow!
s
4110
« on: March 20, 2010, 13:36 »
subject matter is more important than freshness - i do travel, nature, etc which is overcrowded and slow, but my sales have increased steadily over the past 3 years
i took a big hit in fall of 2008, and sales were flat for a few months, but since last summer, sales shot up, and basically hit the same point they were aiming at before the recession. slope of recent months is steeper than that for previous years.
but who knows? there's nothing to compare to - the field is constantly changing
one thing i've found is it doesnt matter whether i upload or not - my sales move about the same - i was gone for 6 wks last fall, then another 3 wks in jan, and neither had any real effect on sales.
steve
4111
« on: March 20, 2010, 13:23 »
Quality should be ok if Istock approved them. Could be "no commercial" or something like that. What was it?
One out of the 10 was okay, the others were not approved with more or less strange reasons but none of them was "no commercial", for example:
Composition--Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping, and/or composition. For those images:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=12001874
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=12076785
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=12289347 - I would have loved to shoot the whole Alps, unfortunately however I forgot to bring my helicopter :-)
http://www.fotolia.com/id/21041282
Or Poor Lighting--Poor or uneven lighting, or shadows. White balance may be incorrect. for that one:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=12174129 - that one was approved with ALL major stock sites...
Whilst those photos are definitely not the world best stock photos, they successfully passed eagle eyed inspectors nevertheless hence the rejection of my application came as a kind of surprise to me. That's why I am interested if anybody successfully passed their application process in the last weeks or if the are a bit "strict" at the moment as rumour says for iStock as well?
Thanks, Best, Frank
those are the 2 current favorite rejection buttons at ss keep trying - you'll make it eventually [took me 3 times] s
4112
« on: March 17, 2010, 15:51 »
I agree in part with what you've said, however I think one of the problems DT and others face is the contributors who can't differentiate between a series and 25 images of the same model shot on motor drive, I saw a portfolio the other day on DT that had 23 images of the same model wearing the same outfit leaning against the same wall doing, well nothing actually, on most of the images the only difference was her hand had moved slightly and I mean slightly and on others she'd turned her head a little bit.
that's not a contributor problem - it's Dt's for accepting them! if they take them of course a contributor will submit them! as has been mmentioned before, the solution is better search engines that can clump similars together so someone can expand to see them, but most viewers will just see the variety s
4113
« on: March 17, 2010, 15:46 »
I use very simple script that takes n random images from a large pool and uploads to every agency every night. Reviewers on  some sites have private tools like matching images on EXIF dates. That won't work unless you edit the EXIFs. 
Whole idea is to spread 20 images from one session over next 15-20 batches. Unless images wait in queue for a week there is a big chance they will never appear in front of the reviewer together :-) Actually I am observing images made couple months ago in current batches together with ones shot last week :-)
i do that too - some of the later ones are rejected for 'similarity', but overall it works much better for me this way -- what's always a surprise is when 5 or more of a series gets taken at 1 time - despite their saying not to submit similars, they DO take them the pain about dt is it's a break in sked - much easier to edit 50 images once a week than 10 images a day every day . I buy a few times a year and from my point of view there is never a big enough selection of similars. Someone a page back mentioned "image stacks". In a perfect world, everthing from a series could be linked and the photographer could flag 2 or 3 photos to go into the search for potential buyers to bring up the rest of the "stack" would need to be called up to search through. I was making a folded brochure on 11x17 and found 3 photos of same family with moving boxes. They were somewhat allright - but I sure would have loved a selection of about 20 to chose from.
Maybe if I was buying every day I would feel differently though and would have less time to look for the perfect set.
4114
« on: March 13, 2010, 15:35 »
been traveling so didn't notice the change in poll - the new entry system is MUCH better giving the info needed to make correct entries.
however, there are 2 problems with the displayed results --
for info with ranges, you cant just average the results, since the amounts in the ranges aren't uniform - you'd need to convert each rating to an equivalent $ figure, then aerage those.
also, outliers have a large effect - the bill gates walking into a bar effect - where avg income jumps from $30k/ person to $999k / person with no actual change for most. in these cases, the median is a better marker - the number in the middle of the spread of results. Thus five 1's and one 6 would still report as 1, rather than 2
4115
« on: March 09, 2010, 20:36 »
Here the response from the Deposit Photos team.
"According to the new conditions of incentive programs we have limited
access to the Promotion Program for the most photographers. It is connected
with great amount of works of inadequate quality sent the photographers who
participated only in order to receive payments under the Promotion Program.
As a result of their bad faith, we have tested many poor-quality
photographs; and in case of rejections of such works we heard accusations
of too stringent selection.
huh?? why do they accuse us of bad faith when THEY havent managed to make any sales? of COURSE i participated because there was a promotional fee - why else would i spend time upl'ing to a new unproven site. i made the $100 and got the payment -- i'll upload more if they produce some sales steve
4116
« on: February 16, 2010, 22:57 »
none of the agencies release any stats, but my personal opinion is categories are a waste of time -- hundreds of thousands of matches for a category doesn't help most buyers
steve
4117
« on: February 15, 2010, 19:52 »
trained in graphic design etc etc, I know basic photo skills..
my point was that I'm not personally that interested in the minutai technical details, rather I just make images, and to a print quality standard etc..in which case i might need to focus on these things if I want to contribute to stock etc..
welcome! your graphic design exp could actually hurt at first, unless you really look at what stock photos are -- useful for designers, not necessarily works of art themseves once you decide what you want to shoot, check whast's already accepted at various agencies to see your competitors and what sells fr me, when i stsarted in microstock, it took awhile to get used to rejections because lighting or focus was a bit off at 100%, but it does get easier if you consider the reasons for rejectins i'd also encourage you to try DT - you might also consider deposit photos since they not only accept most images, they also pay $.20 for each image they accept from you. i just made $100 there in the lasst 2 months steve
4118
« on: February 12, 2010, 12:41 »
thanks, adeptris - i was afraid the day would come when i needed to upgrade my asp site to .Net; at east this will give me a head start....
steve
4119
« on: February 11, 2010, 16:40 »
Are buyers mostly from east coast of America?
fwiw my SS sales are consistently higher during east coast business hrs s
4120
« on: February 11, 2010, 16:37 »
thanks to both responders - at the moment i'd rather avoid php since most of my website is on a server that doesnt support it.
my current need is simple enough i should be able to cobble something from the javascript mentioned earlier
s
4121
« on: February 08, 2010, 20:37 »
tried to upload -- did a browse & selected 5 images, then when that failed, just 1 --
both times got error:
'The file has incorrect extention '[extension] - yet these are jpgs -- the pahge however seems to indicate it may be expecting a zipped file? if so, why? and why let us select jpgs?
also, looks like it requires a category before allowing upload - meaning will have to upload many separate times? is there an ftp option?
steve
4122
« on: February 07, 2010, 17:24 »
That's a scary thought.
I agree..that reponse to madelaide from them was double talk, I read that over and over. "For example, contributors still earn 1 credit to the dollar for bulk consumer purchases that put credits at $0.75." How can $1.00 equal 1 credit which puts that credit at .75 cents. That doesn't even make sense. [/quote] seems clear enough -- FT sells images at a price in credits, and pays royalties based on 1 credit = $1 it says that FT is doing the OPPOSITE of what the conspiracy thoerists here are claiming -- they sell credits at a discount to buyers, but contributors still get paid AS IF the buyer paid full price -- FT is absorbing the difference steve
4124
« on: February 04, 2010, 18:35 »
Anyone know where i can find source code [java, asp] that reads the IPTC data?
What you want to set up is a mini gallery. I'm using a stripped down open source Coppermine Gallery for it, and the IPTC display code is inside "displayimage.php". Of course it's free, and it's php.
thanks, but i need something more programmable -- i'm using smugmug as my gallery, but i need to extract images on specific content pages - eg http://cascoly.com/trav/turkey/Istanbul.asp?lt=1right now, all the image captions are hard coded on the page, but i'd like something that does it automatically. ultimately, i want to automatically create alt text and other tags to improve page visibility, rather than doing it by hand... steve
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