Quote from: lisafx on January 27, 2009, 17:03
I mentioned it in the "totalitarian" thread, but I'll agree here, that sales at istock are not down across the board.  Just shifted. 

The people who got a HUGE bonus of sales from mid October through December are no longer so heavily favored, and those of us who lost thousands of $ in sales during that time are recovering to the sales levels we had before that massive best match shakeup in October. 

I'm definitely in that first category - Brilliant November and December for photos, but my vectors disappeared. Now the photos have dies, and the small vector sales haven't made up for the fall. I learned early on  not to rely on continuing patterns of sales form istock - I got hit by the Great Upheaval in best match in October 2006 - my sales have never got back to that level again, despite a big increase in portfolio!

But right now is pretty sad - I've had zero sales today on what is typically my best day of the week. But at least vectors are back up in the search now (maybe a bit too much if my portfolio is anything to go by) so given they pay a lot more at least my $s should recover a bit if people start buying what they can now find.

I'm a bit puzzled by people saying that new files aren't favoured -  the only two files I've uploaded this year are right near the top of the obvious searches for them (not that they are great stock, and they won't sell much) And my best seller - an older file - has dropped right down the best match- (it was number one in the search for violin for a while which did my downloads the world of good, but it's now barely in the first 100 - as it was carrying my photo sales, it's hardly suprising I'm seeing a big fall off)) and has been overtaken by the vector version of the same thing in position - a much newer file.

It's always going to be hard work to make a full time living from microstock (let's face it making a full time living from most things is hard work, especially as a free lancer) I suspect most photographers don't have the necessary mind set and skill set to do it - it requires the research, the imagination and an ability to get a decent number of photos out at a relatively low production cost, yet still have them looking happy and shiny and professional. You need to ba able to combine quality and quantity of output and not get stale churning it out week after week. Certainly not for everyone. And harder now for newcomers to get a critical mass of good images put there to build up a base where their sales are consistent enough to rely on.

For most professional photographers, I suspect the best role for microstock is shooting at the margins - extra income for shots where the production costs are already effectively covered for other purposes - then the marginal cost of the shots is low. I know of a few who use different names for microstock to avoid "diluting the brand"  of their high end work (and annoying fellow members of the professional organisations) - it's effective market segmentation to increase profits.

For the rest of us microstock is a hobby to cover camera costs, which it does very effectively without too much hard work.

Given I got accepted at istock first go I assume I therefore don't count as a wannabee! (despite my lack of formal training in Art post High School or Illustrator)
Personally I think istock tends to overemphasise the  arty rather than commercial in what it finds acceptable with illustrations. S'funny it's almost the opposite of their photos where technically correct but totally non commercial and unlikely to sell images are accepted. With illustrations simple commercial technically correct stuff is more likely to get rejected as not stock rather than the  never going to sell anything arty stuff. (I have enough of the latter in my portfolio to know about it - I couldn't do a commercial icon set to save my life as I'd die of boredom first - I doodle to please myself and occasionally some one buys it. I have no illusions about being a top seller)

Quote from: averil on December 30, 2008, 21:26
Sounds like your main aim is to claim photography expenses as losses against some other main income. I guess if your tax laws allow it, why not? In Australia (my home) you need to have a significant turnover in the sideline before that is allowed, and I certainly don't have that from microstock.

It's actually almost impossible in Australia to write off small business losses against income from other sources  - usually the best you can do is carry forward the small business loss against future years' profits (as I understand it - that's what my husband's band does as they are marginal - some years a profit, most years just covering equipment purchases and depreciation). It gets a bit different if it's related to your main job/business, but otherwise the ATO is much more likely to want to treat it as a hobby if it doesn't make profits on a long term basis.

I f you are explicitly setting up a business the best bet is to get advice from a reputable accountant who knows the tax law and practices of the industry concerned.  That way you can be sure everything is set up properly and all the correct records are kept and you won't have any nasty surprises down the track.

There ain't nothing wrong with slave labor when it comes to your own children! Or you can give them pocket money just as you would for other chores (but don't expect it to be a legitimate business tax deduction!).
My kids have scored a wii, computer games and DVDs as well as extra pocket money for acting as models or holding reflectors for me. All on a strictly unnofficial basis. So I don't treat it as expenses, and they don't treat it as income (but my stock income is so low, it's  still a hobby as far as both me and the Australian tax man is concerned . I'll have to talk with the accountant again about that, though if my income continues to rise - it's still easily a loss, as I plough it all back into computer of camera gear or software and technical books but it might be getting big enough to be a loss making business.)

Official employment gets messy. And what's allowed varies a lot with the jurisdiction. I think it's fifteen here in South Australia (and younger for stuff like newspaper delivery on bicycles!)  There  often seem to be exemptions for hours of work and age for models and performers and sometimes for kids working in a family business. In Australia the taxation on kids income can be pretty heavy to stop people from just funnelling business income to other members of the family in lower income  tax brackets (I've got to check up on this as my youngest has just been offered some (I think paid) singing and dance work, so I can play at being a pushy stage mother!)

istock will take minors as contributors  - they have a form for parents to sign to agree to take the fall if there are any problems (basically!). If you email contributor relations, they can help. My daughter wants to contribute audio so I investigated it earlier this year, but she hasn't got around to recording her application stuff, so I haven't gone any further with it. I don't know about other stock agencies though.

The trouble with this idea is the server structure and search engine facilities required to facilitate an exchange are not cheap to run - and require specialised knowledge to set up in a way that is scaleable as the exchange grows. The scalability of the whole deal is one of the big problems that nearly all the sites seem to have had. Google certainly isn't run at no cost - searchers might feel that way. But the advertisers on it don't!


In the end an exchange would, I expect, end up looking like any other of the micro sites, except owned by contributors rather than a company - and that's a hard corporate structure to maintain as an enterprise grow in size. It's not a coincidence that istock which started out owned and run by photographers (or to be more accurate owned by one photographer) ended up selling to a corporate giant who could finance the expansion that was inevitable. You can't just have a free for all as buyers need to have legal certainty of he rights they get over the images that they buy - and inspection at least for copyright and image ownership issues would stilll be necessary (the number of individuals caught uploading other people's images as their own indicates that not every one is as honest as you are!)

IS 82.57 % (I'm exclusive - but it was up near there before I went exclusive)

IS 100 % 

BME for earnings (by a long long way) - thirty per cent over my BME which was June where I had a couple of extended licences (none this month) and a lot of vector downloads. . Fifty per cent up on October.

Photo sales were actually flat from October but more medium and large, fewer tiddlers - and Illustrations started to pick up again  - and as they are nearly all ten credit or better I get a big boost in earnings as my proportion of illustration sales increases. While the October change in best match drove my vector sales down to near nothing for a couple of weeks, they have bounced right back this month. (tweaks to best match as far as vectors goes plus the growth effect of being a near new illustration contributor, I think - I've gone from zero vector files to over 100 in the last twelve months).

It's quite clear the latest best match favours exclusives and older rather than newer images. I was pretty pleased and suprised with the results  as I don't have much in the way of seasonal imagery (and what I do have isn't selling anyway!) and my photo uploads have been nonexistent this year (with dollar binning my photo portfolio has actually fallen in size I think)

It's not going to pay the mortgage but it will make the Christmas stockings for my kids a bit fatter (given they are my chief models, that seems fair enough!)

Quote from: azurelaroux on September 29, 2008, 14:50
This is an image of the Character Emily the Strange. http://eu.fotolia.com/id/9288122

There is someone on DT with the same name but they don't have any vectors so I don't know if it's the same person or not.

The black cats are also from Emily le Strange (I was trying to hunt down the exact images he's ripped off before I posted publicly, but I'm sure you are right)

Given that the person concerned has a Peanuts cartoon copy in his portfolio,
http://eu.fotolia.com/id/9512176
one can only surmise (a) that Fotolia reviewers need a quick visual education (b) the contributor's command over the intricacies of copyright law is rather limited!

It's not just the subject matter it's also the type of lighting used. They are all the same - outdoors bright sun, pretty harsh shadows on two out of the three. Not only does this not show that you can use different types of lighting, it's also a lighting scenario not much loved by istock inspectors - only the muscle man one looks like much thought has gone into controlling the image lighting. (and that's an awkward crop with just the edges of the structure he's doing the pull up on showing - better to have come in closer and lost those distracting elements)

They aren't bad photos - but they don't show that you have a half way professional approach to taking images -  two out the three look like decent family snaps with rather distracting backgrounds rather than stock images. Now as one who has best sellers which shamelessly exploit my family snaps, you can get sales on microstock with this approach. But you have to take the snaps with an eye for stock, and to get in you need to be able demonstrate that you can do more than that these days.
If you are going to use outdoors sunlit shots, think about using a reflector to reduce the harshness of the shadows. Open up the lens to throw distracting backgrounds out of focus; think about the angle of the shot. Lie down on the grass and look up at the  kid jumping, so that you fill the frame with the kid and the sky and not much else. -the shot as it is has acres of boring sky, kid almost dead centre and not big enough in the frame and a very ordinary suburban backyard still in clear focus behind. The skateboarder is not very dynamic, has a dull suburban background with distracting shadowed trees with badly blocked out details - that alone would be enough to get a lighting rejection at istock (I should know, I have a collection of them!)

I can't even remember what I used for photo application - and it was in 2006 and standards have increased a lot since then. I think there was a landscape and a couple of objects isolated on white.

Quote from: grp_photo on September 12, 2008, 22:50

Quote from: ann on September 12, 2008, 21:28
You can get certain Adobe products at big discount if you qualify for education discount at places such as academicsuperstore(dot)com. Don't know if this has been mentioned already.

That's how I got CS2 Educator's version. I think the major difference is that you can't upgrade the Ed version, but it's a fraction of the regular. Very interesting to hear CS4 is on its way. You can qualify by being a teacher, going to school full-time and even part-time for certain levels, such as college....

But with the education versions you are not allowed to do any commercial work and for sure microstock is very commercial!!!!

There are two  education versions (at least here in Aus) - with the ultra cheap student version, introduced with CS3, you are not allowed to do commercial work and it's not upgradeable. But the standard academic version is fully upgradeable and you are (with the non macromedia components) allowed to do commercial work. At least that has been the case up to CS3 (I checked this out with Adobe when I bought the CS2 education version of Illustrator. And I upgraded my education version of Photoshop CS with the standard upgrade package)

Of course they may well change this with CS4. You have to read the fine print!

I think part of this conversation is due to the fact that microstock attracts two very different groups of photographers. One is the  set that regards themselves as professional photographers. They often have microstock as a only part of their photographic income, and/or make a large slab of their total income from microstock. They have worked hard and got good at it.

Another large group are the amateur photographers for whom it's a hobby. They have all these images on their hard drive looking for a home and only a small percent will be suitable for stock, but they throw everything into the  air and hope that some of it will fly. As long as the agencies are happy to go on inspecting their images and rejecting a large proportion of them but accepting the few half decent ones, and the photographers continue to submit despite the rejection rates, then it's a viable source of material for microstock. I think there's nothing wrong with the second group trying microstock, as long as they realise they aren't professional photographers, and aren't likely to get either good acceptance rates or decent dollar income, unless they actually learn a bit about both photography and the market  they are trying to access.
(I'm in the middle - I learned my lesson quickly about what's acceptable for stock, but decided that I didn't want to spend all my time shooting that, and just submit the more or less stock able shots from my general photography.)



The wedding photographers who haven't a clue are another thing entirely - once off photography like that requires training of some sort - either college or an apprenticeship with a pro or best still a combination of the two. There's no harm done to anything except the photographer's ego and the inspector's sanity if they get rejects from a microstock site. But fouling up people's special day because you are clueless is unforgiveable. I've been asked (quite frequently) to do event and portrait photography on a paid basis, and I've always said no as I don't have either the training or the experience to be 100 per cent sure in my own mind that I could deliver  what the client is expecting. I think that's my definition of a professional photographer. Someone who can take on a client's brief and deliver what is expected for the going market rate.

Quote from: holgs on September 15, 2008, 07:51
Its pretty obvious to most that microstock isn't a way to get rich quickly. On the other hand there are a growing number of contributors who are making regular payouts. On my estimates there would be at least 1500 contributors making it to a monthly payout on the major sites. You have to remember that this isn't from casually uploading a handful of images every now and then, it comes from a regular and systematic approach that starts to resemble normal work.

Must be a lot more than more than that on istock alone, I would have thought - just from the number of silver plus exclusives - if I can make payment every month then most of the other silvers can (and some will do a lot better). It' s pretty easy to get to a stage of making 100-200 dollars a month on istock if you have attention to detail and a few hundred images. I've been doing that for more than two years. Getting more than that is what takes the hard work in my view! To do better than that you need to start doing the full time job thing, rather than the ten files a month or less I average.
On the other hand I image that a lot of decent but not attentive to detail photographers will get bored pretty quickly with nit picking technical rejections (I know a few who started and decided it wasn't for them) - you have to have either a thick skin to ignore the rejections or be naturally anal retentive about what you upload to enjoy the experience (I'm in the latter camp)

Quote from: BillyBoy on July 27, 2008, 00:45
Susan S, which comes to the scary part of becoming exclusive, isn't it? How much say do you think you , as exclusives, have with the decisions of the site?
I don't think it is like that of a shareholder, but more like someone in the pecking order.  The higher your sales, the more preference you get, but unless you're a top draw, I can't see anyone getting the special treatment equal to that of being a shareholder.

I suspect on most issues individually I have very little influence on the Powers That Be at Istock. There have been a couple of issues where I think I and several  others acting as a group have had some effect
Generally I think istock will listen when a significant number of exclusive/high performing (which I'm not) contributors all speak together on an issue - as with the recent wiki problems, there has at least been some admission that there has been something of an issue, even if the response is not as yet terribly satisfactory. The response only happened when some relatively senior istock members, including some who have been very supportive of the wiki system, said that there was something odd going on with wikiing, en masse.

Ain't thread drift great.

Returning to the original theme of this thread, I think SarahLens images are striking, if not necessarily quite stock. istock seem to run with artists like this who they decide can represent the edginess available at the site from time to time. Personally I've never had any problems getting filtered images up on istock - I've got HDR (mild!) and heavily saturated landscapes through. The key thing is that whatever you do mustn't muck up the appearance of the file when you look at it at 100 per cent.  It helps if you have a body of work in a particular style to upload, I think, rather than random heavily processed images. And of course getting composites through is reportedly a bit of a lottery. But then I don't do them, so it doesn't affect me.

I'm exclusive at istock and I will say loud and clear when I think the things they are doing are wrong. Including on their forums. (I've not been banned yet!) I've been vocal on the current wiki fiasco - vocal enough to insist that they remove my little wiki icon as I no longer wish to be associated with the system while it's such a mess, and on several other issues.

My view is that because I've got all my eggs in their basket , I've gt the right to have some input into their systems - just as a share holder has the right to voice their disapproval of a company's policies at a share holder's meeting.

In the past I've had pretty quick responses by emailing Jordan (that's the real name of the istock admin, Keywords) - I've had keywords removed in error restored pretty quickly. He's been a bit slower replying to emails recently though. If you add back the keywords yourself, he can't backtrack and work out who was responsible for removing the keywords incorrectly, so it's better to do it that way (or that's what he told me anyway).

I think these people have come up before on istock - they buy the correct extended licence for prints (if they are the one's I'm thinking of) and are legit.

Here's the thread on it:
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=63570&page=1

My betting is that it will either be a former image of the week that had lots of exposure  or will be something that one of the mutual ratings groups get together and vote for (in the same way that some severely mediocre images get onto the most popular page).

I've got a 1/52 chance if it's one of the former!

It seems that istock don't take many PS illustrations. They will occasionally take scans of drawings/paintings etc, and well done compositing of photos (with random rejections so I don't bother) but illustrations done in photoshop and often in Painter and other raster based programs just are not acceptable to them. They will take very similar stuff done in 3D programs though for some reason.

It's one of the "they make the rules, if you want to submit to them, learn them" things that submitting to istock without raising your bloodpressure too far involves. If you start agonising too much about how unfair and arbitrary all the different hoops that the different sites make you jump through then you could easily go mad.

I passed (the first try) in December, so a bit over six months ago now
using versions of the three images in this lightbox:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&lightboxID=4388580
That's one trace, one vectorisation of an original watercolour and ink drawing, and one simple wine glass and bottle drawing - all were rejected for the collection until I did sme tidying up. In the case of the wine glasses I ended up redrawing them totally from scratch, so that the glasses and bottle were separable objects - so the one I passed the entrance exam with looked a bit different.
 

Quote from: Lizard on June 27, 2008, 20:13
What really frustrates me lately , is rejections for  "We have reasons to believe the image was created with components or brushes that are not originally yours"  or something like that.

I contacted scout few times and clearly stated that I never used a single brush that was not created by me and from my photos , that I can prove them that by sending them the brushes set or photos and scans of my textures or something , and they have been approved then.  But they keep rejecting stuff for that reason , and I cant be constantly complain.

The easy way of getting around that is to upload in the model release field a screen shot of the brush and the texture  source from which you derived it. Argument over before it starts, no need for scout. I do it with all my hand painted vectors and I've never had a rejection for that reason. (It's a good idea to have that documentation available in any event for all sites in case someone wants to argue the toss about the source of a component)

There currently appear to be no separate queues for exclusive and independent contributors at istock - both groups are getting photos approved slowly, with waits of about a week for all, but the vector queue appears to be moving fast for everyone. There currently appear to be no tangible advantages apart from upload limits (which i don't need) and the percentage (whcih is easy to make up on other sites) to being exclusive.

Actually image of the week on istock (at least for photo) makes a huge difference in sales, if the image is at all stockworthy (speaking from experience). I think the vector image of the week gets a bit less exposure.
A lot of getting good sales on istock for a particular vector image is a combination of research, luck and skill (in roughly that order). Even new comers to istock can get lucky. You have first of all to produce a really saleable image. if you look at the top selling vectors in the last month, the top seller was one of the very first uploads by a new vector artists that just got picked up by buyers a few months ago. It's very simple, there are maybe a couple of hundred almost identical fies on istock. So they just got lucky both in terms of getting the image approved as such simple files tend to get knocked back, and by getting a quick download which bumped it up the pecking order of the best match search. It got a couple more and hasn't looked back since. 
If you upload a lot of good quality saleable files then it means the chances of getting lucky are increased.

(My vectors are more to please me than to generate huge amounts of income - it's a hobby for me, and I don't do the research and don't generate large volumes of simple files. So my sales have been steady but a long way from spectacular, and they are only just starting to get going after submitting vectors for six months)