Baldricks, I didn't mean any disrespect. Just that I would like to keep this image hidden away from public view at this present time.

I'm going to guess this image isn't really as interesting as you think it is, and probably isn't worth the trouble.  A straw in a glass of water would demonstrate both surface tension and refraction.

Well you guessed wrong. Other people have seen this image and I can assure you that it's a lot more interesting than a photo of a straw in a glass of water (which by the way would only demonstrate refraction - not surface tension.) If the straw is sitting passively in the water, the surface tension is not being visibly disturbed. And I'm not going to fall for your trap by posting the image here. It's not available on the internet at this current time.

It is up to you, but I do believe in supporting science, so I would place images like these on the micros.

I do get great satisfaction out of my images being used for education, particularly science. Ive got a cousin who is a teacher and she has shown some of my time lapse videos to students in a classroom environment. Yea I guess I could reconsider the micros.

Just for info, Science Photo Library is the BBC's, so it's a prestigious agency and presumably supplies material to BBC science programmes and stories, as well as for general use.

Oh cool. Definitely worth looking into. Just wondering if you have to be exclusive with them (just found some contributor info - I'll start reading.)

Ever thought of submitting to the Science Photo Library?

http://www.sciencephoto.com/

Interesting website. I haven't come across these guys before. I note that they deal with RF images though what are their pay rates like compared to microstock? I couldn't see any prices.

I admit I am a bit reluctant about selling this image as RF.

Usually after I render my videos, I drop them into MPEG Streamclip where I encode them as H264. I did have one video sale with a h264 clip or maybe I was just lucky. Out of curiosity, would there be any freeware available for Windows that could convert a clip to PRoRes?

Congratulations! I made my first payout recently too.

This is going to show my lack of knowledge about codecs but even if you did upload or deliver your clips as h264, could the client convert that clip into an uncompressed format and then grade it? Sort of like the equivalent of still photo files where you have a lossy jpeg and convert it into a tiff to do your Photoshop work and make multiple saves with?

Something realy weird is going on with Dreamstime. The website is up and running but I cannot sign in. Each time I try and sign in with my e-mail address and password, it looks like the site is refreshing and then the logon fields become blank again. Ive tried signing in about five times with no success. This has never happened to me before.

One of my plane shots sold within 24 hours of being uploaded. Thankyou buyer.

Okay it's back up.

Last year, a short film of mine was selected for screening at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. More recently, I had the idea of selling copies of the film on DVD. So far, I have sold a few copies at a local market which I'm happy about. The film features Australian wildlife and landscapes so I figured it might be of interest to international tourists. It was mainly foreign tourists who bought the DVD at my market stall so perhaps no surprise there.

Anyhow, recently I contacted a store via e-mail that sells mainly tourism related merchandise and asked if they would be interested in selling copies of my DVD. I forwarded a private online link to my film to the manager and she seemed to like what she saw.

Now usually, when local artists supply their craft products (cards etc) to stores and outlets, I notice that generally they hand them over for free and if some copies are sold, the store takes a commission and the artist receives the rest of the amount. And that's what I assumed would happen in my case too with the DVDs.

To my surprise, the manager of the tourism store got back to me recently and asked how much I was planning to sell the DVDs to her at wholesale price. This is certainly not what I expected. Normally, I would jump at the chance of selling them outright like this but I'm a little hesitant in this situation. Let's remember that it is a short film that I'm selling here � running at 8 minutes. Although there is also over half an hour's bonus content contained on the disc, it is essentially an 8 minute film that is the main feature (and it's not even 'feature' length.)

In order for me to make a decent profit from the production of the DVDs, I price them at $12 each and that's what Ive been selling them at the markets for. If I was to sell them to this store at $12 for wholesale price, I assume that the retail price would be at least double that � so at least $24. Now I could be wrong but I can't visualise many people spending $24 or more on an 8 minute film. Also consider that these days, you can buy a blockbuster movie on DVD for considerably less than that. Although selling the DVD at wholesale price would be better for me from a short term perspective, Ive got a feeling that handing them over to the store for free and accepting commissions on a lower retail price would lead to greater sales potential over the long term and may even result in the manager asking for more copies of the DVD in the future if sales are exceptionally good.

The other thing is she seemed a little hesitant about buying the DVDs because it's not the type of product she normally sells there. She said she was going to check her stats on similar products she has stocked before.

So what's everyone's opinion � hand them over for free and accept a commission on sales or sell them outright as wholesale? I admit I'm totally new to this as Ive never been asked to provide a wholesale price for a product before. Obviously, companies who do sell at wholesale prices have their products mass produced in the thousands or millions so they would get a much greater profit margin than me when selling wholesale. Whereas my packaged DVDs are not mass produced � there's only a very small number of them.

Just trying to recall....minimum payout at iStockphoto is $100 or thereabouts? Wonder whether I should dessert them once I reach payout.

Your right its up to you what you want to do and one of the things I like Mstock is no one can tell me what to do!

Amen to that! Completely agree.