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Messages - BaldricksTrousers
Pages: 1 ... 31 32 33 34 35 [36] 37 38 39 40 41 ... 206
876
« on: January 03, 2015, 07:38 »
They must really be suffering a massive loss of customers.
Or the search might have shifted to bury independent content. How long has the default search been "new" rather than "best match"?
877
« on: January 03, 2015, 04:54 »
My monthly a average was about 100 US Dollars. last month - 0 sales!!!
I wrote to them and their answer was that there few images related to Christmas in my portfolio....excuse me - how stupid is that???
Exceedingly.
878
« on: January 03, 2015, 04:52 »
I'm into the eighth day without a sale, my previous record for the whole of the last 11 years was two or three consecutive days. I see some people are reporting sales in the New Year, so there are some coming through (I'd started wondering if they weren't going to bother continuing with real-time - almost - reporting) but has the tap been turned off for independent contributors?
879
« on: January 03, 2015, 04:47 »
It's a big part of why I have so few images there - I had travel images from Newport Rhode Island that I could not upload because "Newport" is a forbidden term and was constantly rejected, and my ticket to scout went nowhere. I have images from Muir Woods in California where the trees are not properly identified because they narrowed my choices. Again, my suggestions for additions to the controlled vocabulary were ignored.
It's so time consuming and annoying to upload there though the software plug in helps.
Fun Fact:
It takes just as much time to post here to whine and complain and improve nothing at all and not have your images show up on a search as it does to suggest keywords of which they most likely will approve then add to their CV to have your images found and make more sales.
I suggest keywords whenever this happens to me, and almost 100% of the time they add the keyword to the CV.
So quite whining here and do something constructive and suggest a keyword "Newport - Rhode Island" with this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport,_Rhode_Island and I am 100% certain it will be added, then your images will be found.
They have a suggest keywords on the forum, use it.
It's totally pointless, until they get round to listing every single place name on Earth, every single known animal and plant (which has, actually, been done by scientists using the Latin binomials, most of which will be rejected by istock). You might as well tear the index out of the Times Atlas of the World and post it off to them. Then get them to sort through all the stuff they have where if you use an initial capital for a word it defaults to one thing and if you use the same word without capitals it defaults to something else. I've reported that a common Greek place name (Agios Nikolaos - St Nicholas) defaulted to a village in mainland Greece which made it impossible to correctly keyword the Cretan holiday resort of the same name - they cancelled the mainland Ag Nik and redirected to Crete, so then anything that had previously been correctly pointing to the mainland village was turned into spam. And there must still be 100 other Ag Niks all over Greece and Cyprus which have been wiped off the map by the the CV. The whole thing is a disaster for anyone doing travel or nature, or any non-US subject (such as national cuisines from non-English-speaking countries) always has been and always will be.
880
« on: December 31, 2014, 05:29 »
The idea that the reciprocal of the focal length gives the slowest shooting speed to avoid camera shake was aimed at ordinary enthusiasts, but Ansel Adams did his own tests and reckoned that the reciprocal of three times the focal length was needed to avoid shake completely. It depends what works to your satisfaction (and how steady your hands are). With flash in a studio the effective shutter speed is the duration of the flash, unless you have enough ambient light to show up in the picture.
As for the difference between f4 and f2.8, it affects the speed at which the autofocus can react and the maximum shutter speed/lowest ISO you can get away with. It's probably most important for sports shooters who need to freeze action as well as for general low-light shooting.
881
« on: December 22, 2014, 15:56 »
Still a few most days but the trend has been in the wrong direction for a long time.
882
« on: December 20, 2014, 10:25 »
$69 - which is a nice extra bit in a (very) slow month.
Thanks for the info, TeddyTC
883
« on: December 19, 2014, 03:30 »
Does anybody remember what time period the claim covers? Is it for the 2013/14 tax year, 2013 calendar year or something else? And do all UK sales ever made get worked into the calculation or just those for one year?
884
« on: December 17, 2014, 05:17 »
Istock seems to have a new pop-up to encourage people to switch to subscriptions if you click on an image (at least, I think it's new). Perhaps Getty just wants iStock to compete with SS on subs and isn't much interested in credit sales any longer.
885
« on: December 17, 2014, 02:56 »
I agree with that 100% , hobo. With the way microstock is going, proper galleries are obviously the answer.
886
« on: December 17, 2014, 02:46 »
i had one for 10c the other day, but that might be after tax
887
« on: December 16, 2014, 02:59 »
One thing for sure - Lik's getting a lot of traffic to his site because of all this publicity, and probably selling a lot of his "cheaper" stuff too... good marketing move... regardless of the sale being fake or real, he got the clicks... I should do something like that for my FAA portfolio 
Actually, he's doing us all a favour by telling the public that pretty ordinary photos can be worth a lot of money. Funny thing is that I saw a guy selling much more original and more difficult 10x8 images than Lik's on a Christmas market for about $25 each the other day. I thought he was under-pricing himself quite badly.
888
« on: December 16, 2014, 02:54 »
John Huszar interviewed Adams for his 1981 film, Ansel Adams: Photographer. Adams recalled:
"Well, people have asked me what kind of cameras I used. It's hard to remember all of them. Oh I had a box Brownie #1 in 1915, 16. I had the Pocket Kodak, and a 4 x 5 view, all batted down. I had a Zeiss Milliflex. A great number of different cameras. I want to try to get back to 35 millimeter, which I did a lot of in the 1930s. Using one of the Zeiss compacts. In the 20s and into the 30s, I would carry a 6-1/2 x 8-1/2 glass plate camera -- that was a little heavy. And I had a 4 x 5 camera, then of course we went to film, to film pack, things became a little simpler.
"...I guess we all did the best as we could. If we had very heavy cameras we simply didn't go so far or take so many pictures. Knowing what I know now, any photographer worth his salt could make some beautiful things with pinhole cameras."
I am surprised he went down to 35mm. Most photos of him show him with a large format camera, but there is at least one where he is using a Hasselblad. If you want the absolute best out of black and white film you would still go for large format. As for pinholes, well, they might sometimes look nice but they would fail QC - even on iStock!
889
« on: December 16, 2014, 02:42 »
Istock is no longer Canadian but US now, so taxes apply. For contributors from non tax treaty countries that can mean 30% taxes.
... on licenses sold to US customers, not on everything, thank goodness. I have no idea what percentage of iStock sales are to the US, the lower it is the better ---- I should soon be finding out.
890
« on: December 15, 2014, 15:41 »
Salgado is in my all-time top 10 of photography, his photos have just everything, technical skills, emotions, a message, composition, and he's still underrated
I agree. If you want a real investment in high art photography Salgado certainly has potential. Good luck to Lik, why shouldn't he make what he can? and I think the Guardian comment about it "proving" that photography is not art is ridiculous, it just proves that the people who pay telephone numbers for pictures aren't necessarily good judges of art.
891
« on: November 22, 2014, 15:07 »
Be Well and BTW Is BaldricksTrousers an expression? I can't remember. It is catchy though.
It's just something I took from a British TV comedy.
892
« on: November 22, 2014, 03:03 »
It's not about how much you upload anymore, it's about being better than the top images. If you can't beat them, chances are they'll be buried instantly. I used to get frustrated uploading large batches and getting very few sales, now I prefer to make a batch of 1 or 2 that I know will sell quite often. 1% of my images are responsible for more than 30% of my sales.
Really? You can guarantee that good images won't be buried in the blink of an eye? You surprise me.
I can Guarantee it for me.
So did I...So did I man. they still show up every Now and then and Im talking Images that are in the 5000 DL Range. Really burned me up when they changed the search
That's a bit odd, because I can't do it and yet when I compare our portfolios on DT I notice that with a near identical number of images online I've outsold you by more than two to one. Yet all I'm doing is sending images in to see what sticks.
893
« on: November 21, 2014, 19:31 »
It's not about how much you upload anymore, it's about being better than the top images. If you can't beat them, chances are they'll be buried instantly. I used to get frustrated uploading large batches and getting very few sales, now I prefer to make a batch of 1 or 2 that I know will sell quite often. 1% of my images are responsible for more than 30% of my sales.
Really? You can guarantee that good images won't be buried in the blink of an eye? You surprise me.
If it's a high demand niche (rare these days) and a top quality image well keyworded and uploaded with good timing, I would be very surprised if it didn't sell regularly. Of course that doesn't apply to most subjects.
"High demand niche" - I had a couple of those a decade ago but they soon got swamped (though pics that got in early continued to sell well for years). It's not hard to find low-demand niches but unless you have special access to something, an industrial plant, for example, high demand niches sound very improbable. The point of a niche, of course, being the lack of competition - which will, indeed, ensure that your image remains visible.
894
« on: November 21, 2014, 17:28 »
It's not about how much you upload anymore, it's about being better than the top images. If you can't beat them, chances are they'll be buried instantly. I used to get frustrated uploading large batches and getting very few sales, now I prefer to make a batch of 1 or 2 that I know will sell quite often. 1% of my images are responsible for more than 30% of my sales.
Really? You can guarantee that good images won't be buried in the blink of an eye? You surprise me.
895
« on: November 21, 2014, 11:49 »
account balance - I had to search the "all sales" page for the file number to find out when the sale was.
It was a file that hadn't been paid for.
896
« on: November 21, 2014, 10:38 »
I just got a "customer refund" notice for a sale in April 2012. I guess this notice should really read "client default" since it is utterly unreasonble to refund a sale after more than two years. Maybe they are cleaning out the bad debts. Anybody else seeing the same?
897
« on: November 19, 2014, 13:50 »
Is it really illegal to send out a bulk mail that includes the address list, as Axel said? Just curious.
898
« on: November 17, 2014, 16:02 »
Obviously, one change down the years has been a steady decline in returns, otherwise we wouldn't have to keep uploading simply to cling on to earnings levels we have , if we are able to do that (and I doubt if many long-term contributors are).
899
« on: November 17, 2014, 06:47 »
It seems normal to me and I am selling pictures that have been uploaded within the last month, so it's not just that my images are spread pretty evenly from 2004 to date.
900
« on: November 14, 2014, 10:31 »
Or maybe just stay away from microstock, where they will make you shoot in a style you don't want in order to fit their agenda (or you'll waste a ton of time uploading stuff just to have it rejected). I think if you have your own style it's best not to compromise. Later on, you might not want people to judge you as a microstock shooter (we're not the most highly regarded photographers, you know) you might want to be classed as an art photographer.
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