Funny, yet a bit sad as well...

Looks like fun 

Quote from: Old Hippy on May 26, 2009, 16:42

vectors are vectors, illustration, graphic design, but not art, sorry...

Illustrations are no less art than travel photos.

I doubt that he considers travel photos art either. He sounds to me that he has more of a 'technical' mindset about this whole business.
But then again, physicians refer to their craft as the 'art' of medicine... so there ya go.

Quote from: averil on May 25, 2009, 07:27

...every other field. I doubt that wedding photographers are charging less because of micros.

The economics could cause greater competition among wedding photographers as more stock photographers seek outlets for the use of their time and the equipment they have already purchased for stock photography.

fred

The wedding photography biz is already quite crowded and competitive.
The Yuris of that field charge an arm and a leg, but the rest have to scrape along and just settle for the table scraps
A close and frugal friend of mine had her wedding shot for a mere $500.00
I saw the results and they were quite good. They downside was, he just gave them a disk of their shots and that was it. No Album, no slideshow no framed prints... nada.

I have shot a couple of weddings. I made more on each one than i do in a month of sales in Micro.

Yes I hate my images too, or at least about 90% of them.

Quote from: nosaya on May 24, 2009, 21:46

After I complete all the post, I fall in love with two or three of the best ones. 

The worst part is that it's not the images I love that sells most...

That is SOOO true!

Supply and demand... well yes and no.
An ex boss of mine was fond of saying 'perception is reality'.

Is there $30-40,000 more in parts and engineering in a Mercedes than in a Chevy?
Nope. It is a higher quality machine, but the rest you are paying for is prestige, service and the perception that is is worth more due to advertising.

Its the same thing with those pieces of sparkly carbon that most women demand on their finger for an engagement ring. It is a common element and not worth anything near what people are willing to pay for it.... except there is a perception that is has a lot of value due to advertising.

Traditional stock was kept at high perceived value.
The crowd-sourcing model has changed all that. it has also allowed many who would never have been accepted into traditional stock to sell their work. But make no mistake, this has changed the perception of the value of a photograph.

I'm so old and feeble minded that I can't recall where I first heard about it... but I do remember the DPreview bashing and also an article in Popular Photography magazine.

I tried uploading film scans at first to iStock and was throughly bashed for 'noise' (film grain).
So instead of sending them super high resolution film scans, I sent some junk I had taken with a 5 megapixel Sony digicam and got accepted!

I concluded that the punk, er ahem...young people doing the inspections had never in their lives shot a piece of film or ever looped a chrome.
Oh well. I got in and that's all that counts. 

I hope it works out well for you Joseph.
Drop in from time to time and keep us udated on your progress.

And this is a big part of why Yuri 'owns' the market.
He decided to take traditional stock production values and saturate the microstock market.... and it worked.

I would LOVE to have the means to jump in at this level, but there is no chance for me or most of us here.

I suspect he had a big bankroll to begin with (maybe a wealthy father?), because one does not build up to this sort of studio location in only three years without either some help or a huge amount of luck.

Oh yes, by no means do I wish to belittle his talent at either photography or his business acumen. Yuri has both in spades!

[/quote]I know what u mean but I assure you that there is a quite big difference. I goes from a 500:1 to a 3000:1 a year ago or something and you see noise like nowhere before. Obviously the overall quality is as much important such as image sharpness or even the type of glass used to protect the LCD screen. Those are not calculated
[/quote]

I currently shoot with a Canon 5D Mk1 and edit on a CRT (Yes, I still use a CRT and will continue to do so until it or I die). I also have a 1000:1 LCD monitor but I choose not to use it for editing.

Prints that I make from the calibrated CRT are spot on perfect. The LCD (also calibrated) has too much contrast and if I edit to the screen, then my prints will look flat.

Here is the thing. Maybe I would see more noise/artifacting on a 3000:1 monitor. BUT I have 0% rejections as it is for noise or artifacting with my current editing style.

If I (or anyone else) were to use a 3000:1 contrast ratio monitor and all of a sudden start seeing noise everywhere, that would cause me to have to further edit images that I am already getting accepted (by iStock as they are the only place I sell). I see no reason to start chasing ghosts. If Eizo says 850:1 is good enough for a professional monitor, then I say it is good enough for me 

Thats why I use 2 monitors , my old Samsung is good enough to have my tools on it

+ One.
I also use two monitors side by side. Its the best of both worlds.

Photos.com is just too good a domain name just to extinguish.

No one said that they had to get rid of the domain name.
Ever hear of a redirect? It is quite easy to make it so that when someone types in Photos.com to have it redirect to > iStockphoto.com 

I'm still very much a beginner with the painting (and 3D), but my more arty stuff can be found on RedBubble

You should be posting some of these on Flickr. I suspect you would get more exposure than you have on just Redbubble.