Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on February 24, 2015, 15:11

I've got to say that I'm skeptical about images suddenly catching fire and making thousands of sales.  I've had 250,000 sales (more than 50,000 of them on iStock as you can see in my profile) and I've never observed that. I've only got a handful that have generated more than 1,000 sales on all agencies combined.

I have several that have sold more than 1,000 times just on Shutterstock. One will pass 2,000 today. You have to keep in mind that subs sell much more often. I have a tiny fraction of that number of sales on iS.

(I'm not saying which image�but SS does not consider it one of my "most popular." I considered not uploading it because I thought it would never sell. Go figure.)

A different market, I guess, as you are dealing in designs rather than photos, which is my area.

Fair play to him really for parting so many mugs from their cash. But I do like these comments culled from the British newspaper The Independent:

�I�ve never even heard of him,� Martin Parr, the renowned British photographer, says.

Who's Martin Parr?

Trying to fix that kind of distortion on the computer lowers the image quality and not worth the effort me thinks. Your best bet is to use a prime lens and avoid less than 50mm range.hope that helps

Trying to reduce keystoning in architectural shots using perspective adjustment reduces quality because it interpolates. This is the reverse of that, you are squishing the pixels together, so I don't see why that would reduce IQ.  There are 24-70 lenses out there that are very nearly as good as any prime and with the lens correction software available today are pretty much unbeatable.
The trick to shooting food with a wide-angle lens is to get in really close so the perspective is not so obvious. I shot for a while full frame with a Zeiss Jena 35mm Flektogon (manual) lens and got some pleasing results.

The grey bars are starting to pop up now.
I've got green bars for the entire month.

first, let me say, i never met a cow that is bad. humans yes, cows never. it's why the hindus worship them.

If you want to turn a cow bad, tell it that it's a goddess. The only place I've ever been attacked by an arrogant cow was in India - and I couldn't even chastise the beast because the place was full of Hindus letting it do whatever it wanted.

Maybe junk filtered?

They seem to have stalled, not for the first time.

Rather than ebay it might be better to look at BHphotovideo's used department. They've got refurbished Canon DSLRs there for less than $400. At least you'll know the camera works properly

As I've said many times, the LCV/HCV idea only works if you assume equal availability of both kinds of shot. If suppliers shun LCV and concentrate on HCV then the dilution effect will tend to equalise the returns. In addition, exceptional HCV may do brilliantly, while mediocre HCV are likely to underperform even LCV, since there is a small market but only a very few suppliers for the latter.

There is no honour in selling your work for pennies

Honour and money are two different things

Is this thread a special resource for the convenience of people who don't want to pay for our pictures?

There is obvious distortion at the top right and and bottom of the pipe starting from about where the streaks of red paint runs down the pipe, I cropped off that bit and I was left with about 10MP in the centre that is sharp. It's not bad, really, for such a tiny sensor. Stopping down the lens a bit would probably improve things further.

Now some comments for those who wonder whether this really is challenging the DSLRs. I've experimented using a heap of old equipment and I think it's fair to say that the image quality this lens/camera is producing is roughly equivalent to what I have seen from consumer lenses from the 1920s (I must admit, I was surprised at how comparatively good those old primes were, but they were still a long way short of "L" glass on a DSLR). Specifically,  in addition to the lack of sharpness around the edges of the image, I would say the contrast is poor, the bokeh horrible (a bit like the "clumpy" Tessar bokeh, only worse) and the background looks to me as if it has had some in-camera correction applied for noise and CA. The sky is clean - but look at the graininess where the edges of the bridge meets the sky - that suggests cunning noise reduction to me. The out-of-focus tree to the left of where the pipes join has a green cast, which is a sure sign of magenta-green chromatic aberration, but again it seems to have been corrected. If you look at the posts on top of the bridge, the left hand side has a brown/reddish colour while the right hand side has a bluish colour - that's the result of yellow/blue CA.
A lot of this might improve if the lens were stopped down to its sweet point but I think it would probably struggle to get past inspections at Shutterstock, and if you can't rely on your camera to produce stock-quality shots when you are using it properly then I don't think it is any use as a camera for stock. You need to know that if you are doing everything right, then the camera will deliver the goods.