@fotografer

I've seen a significant increase but not the huge one you're experiencing, enjoy the fruits of your hard work.

A model release is not nor ever has been an Employment Contract.  It is astonishing to hear that from anyone who has any experience with law or the photography industry. 

Wow you better let all the legal minds that compile the law dictionaries know then  

Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as: "A person in the service of another under any contract of hire, express or implied, oral or written, where the employer has the power or right to control and direct the employee in the material details of how the work is to be performed." Black's Law Dictionary page 471 (5th ed. 1979).

Oh yeah, lawyers now control who can use which colors. Hadn't you heard?  John Deere owns green and yellow.  They invented those colors.

 I hope that on some future date we start to get court rulings on intellectual property, copyright etc. that make rational sense. It's totally nuts at this point.

Maybe you should look up what a trademark actually is, John Deere don't own those colours and aren't claiming to, they have trademarked those colours which in basic terms means they have protected the use of those colours against someone else using them on a similar product.

A trademark identifies a 'mark' used in a certain 'trade'. Simple isn't it.

I agree with Sean's take on it, I stopped reading his advertisement interview when I got to what I think is the real point of his ramblings, here's the way I read it (I've added the blue text)

"We are on the verge of launching a new online information service � PhotoLicensingOptions � that will expand beyond stock photography and deal with the business side of photography and every possible way that I can make money from photographers can who want to earn money from the pictures they produce."

Sadly were seeing more of these 'experts' spreading their wisdom on the future of stock photography which under closer inspection appears nothing more than a thinly veiled way to promote their next venture on making money from other photographers - hey maybe that is the future.

The flag will only inform you: you can educate the admin (and the flagger) OR fix the image (and you will not have your rights blocked).

How do you educate the admin, on the flags I've had there's only the option to reply to the flagger. And once read they disappear.

My biggest concern lies over the ability of the admins to understand that sometimes people flag a set of keywords they've used as a phrase when in single use they are relevant, and I'm also concerned that given the vast numbers of flags that have suddenly appeared admins may take the easy option of just approving the flag. Is there any recourse?

I know you say to ask on the DT forum but unfortunately you have a habit of deleting anything you don't like the sound of.

Well the water WAS pretty clean to start with, but after dunking fruit into it 50 or 100 times it gets pretty dirty

Yeah, I may of had some banding issues on these images - I think I solved that with adding some grain.

What method would you have used to clean up the water?

In regards to isolating the blue - I have never been very impressed by any sort of automatic isolation technique (when fine details are needed).  When isolating things I always end up using the pen tool or brush on a mask.  

Selecting the colour range is much more than just an automatic isolation technique, and can be used in many ways, in this instance once you'd done all your dust cleaning if you'd just selected the area containing the blue range of the water (fine tuned using the +/- and fuzziness tools) then you wouldn't have had to manually paint around all of the fruit because the fruit doesn't contain any of that colour range you've selected - if that makes sense which it probably doesn't.

I've just used this technique for a series of shots I did where my lights created huge highlights areas on the wall behind my subject, the walls were light green but so were other parts of the image, I selected the green range to only include the wall shades, then duplicated that selection and made it a uniform colour using the colour picker on an area of wall, then using separate layers with the opacity changed I added one as a 'darken' layer which gets rid of the highlights without effecting the rest of the wall including the area in between the guys hairs on his head, and I retain the shadows in the corner so it doesn't look like I've just painted in a new background.

Surely they already do, at least to some extent, in that you get increasing commissions based on your sales at most agencies. I'm pretty sure that on some agencies it is also more difficult to get images accepted until you have the sales record to justify their confidence in you. What more would you have them do to 'support' full-timers?

Yes you get an increase on some sites, but that applies to everyone irrelevant whether you upload 1 or 101 images a month, there's no incentive to upload other than what would be the result of your own skill. When you or I upload our images to a site they sit in the queue the same as the next person, they're reviewed by a reviewer same as the next person and on some sites reviewed by someone who may have only been doing this for six months and has a tiny amount of sales, when approved they go into the bin along with the thousands of others some of which may never see a sale.
FT changed the cannister thing a while ago so now you're competing against people on a higher cannister level who have produced and sold less than you, DT cut's it's extended license commissions and your images get flagged by people who haven't got a clue how the system works and model releases get rejected depending which way the wind blows, I get the same commission rate on iS as a guy with ten images and two sales, I'm top tier on SS but that's it there's no higher incentive, BigStock have a ridiculous upload system that requires wasting time to correct their system errors.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that's seriously considering whether microstock is financially viable anymore, or as in a lot of cases going exclusive with iS to get that little bit extra treatment (yes I know it's the same for all exclusives full or part time)

We can't blame the sites because there is nothing to stop us creating our own site and using it exclusively.  That would soon put our site at the top of the microstock poll results.  We don't need to spend any money on advertising, just use twitter, myspace, facebook etc.  I know people will find all sorts of reasons why we can't do it and that is a shame because I think it would be more positive than constantly reading threads about how bad the future could be for us.  If it is impossible, there must be other options.  I refuse to believe that we just have to sit back and watch sites cut commissions.

It's a very good point and one I've thought of before. If a site suddenly appeared that consisted of only the top 1000 microstock photographers (and finger painters  ) selling their images exclusivly at microstock prices for a fair commission it would be goodnight SS, FT ,DT et al. You'll never see the figures but I'm pretty sure that the top 1000 produce over 90% of all microstock sales. Yuri you reading this

There's been a few threads recently discussing upcoming events where one of the topics is 'the future of photography' and in our case the future of stock photography, as somebody who does this for a living I face the same dilemma as many others in my position and that is we need to justify our production costs against our income, and those production costs involve a very important factor and that is our time.
 Selling images via microstock puts us up against many amateurs for whom time is not an important factor, years ago before I took this up for a living I was into wildlife photography and would think nothing of "stalking' a subject for two or three days, I have a photo of a wild rabbit in my port that took me four mornings of lying on my stomach covered in camouflage waiting for the right moment, it sells well enough but I could not commit to doing that now for the microstock market as I'd go bust, my point being that even though I like to go for the quality rather than quantity approach in my port I still need to produce a fair number of images each year to make a living, and to make a living I need to get a justifiable amount for the work I put in.

 Buyers searching for images do not differentiate between the guy doing this for a living producing 1000 images a year and the guy doing this for fun producing 10 images a year, and they don't care how long or how much it cost all they want is the best image, the microstock sites themselves don't seem to care either as there is no discernable recognition and this is what I feel will lead to the microstock sites own self harm because in time the full timers won't be able to justify selling via microstock because the return is not sufficient enough, the microstock sites will still get quality shots from part timers but not in the quantity they'll require.

So my own interest regarding the future of microstock photography is how can a person doing this for a living compete against someone who is prepared to sell at a loss if the sites do not recognise that we need sales volume or commission to match our level of input, and my question to the microstock sites would be " Who do you consider more valuable 500 full time photographers producing 1000 quality shots a year, or 20,000 amateurs producing 10 quality shots a year? " and "What are you going to do to keep me producing for you and not concentrating my efforts on the RM macro market"

So for me the 'blame' does not fall on the amateurs but the sites for not supporting the full timers appropriately.

For some reason there seems to be some sort of vibe that microstock shouldn't be for people who are new - that you need to be a seasoned pro before you can submit to the micros.  Perhaps this is part of the negativity seen?

I don't get that vibe at all, the vibe I get and certainly the one I try to put out is that there's nothing wrong with being new (we were all new at some point) but don't expect to have things handed to you on a plate, anybody that's had any success in microstock has done it by hard work, long hours, learning the craft and doing the research. I will and do support people who want to do the work but need a little guidance but I won't support or respond kindly to the one's that come here with questions like "what should I shoot" "how much do you earn" "what's your best seller" and I have even less patience for the one's who sole aim is to get info to put on their blog for enticing referrals to make an easy buck.

Is it just me, or has there been an awful lot of blame and accusation going around this forum recently? 

Yes and it's all your fault  

If the buyer is a one man band then they'd most probably shop around depending how important the budget is, it's no different to you shopping for something on the internet.

If they're part of a large company they would most certainly buy at one maybe two sites as that's where the company will have the accounts.

Looks like it's been through the wash and lost all it's colour.

The stats page is better though.

lol..! don't you have "favorites"? I got a few from SS, IS..! Don't you?.. Are you that egocentric?

My comment wasn't meant as an insult which is why I started it with "Nothing personal", the person you're referring to has many 'fans' and that's the way he likes things, the point I was trying to make is that anybody can write anything on a forum and make themselves look good, if you learn to see through the smokescreen you'll see that sometimes these people aren't the success they want you to believe . If you want to succeed in this business take advice and inspiration from those that actually are successful.

You moan that 'newbies' are not treated with respect, making the statement that you're a 'fan' of someone the successful one's amongst know is nothing more than full of sh** is not going to get you that respect.