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Messages - niemiga

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I'm a relative newbie here myself. My first two submissions were rejected at Shutterstock and I'm waiting for the 30 day period to resubmit again. In the first submission all 10 were rejected for noise. In my second submission 6 out of 10 were rejected for other reasons so I am improving. I have 15,000 photos myself and based on my experience only 100-200 are of high enough quality for stock. The Istock reviewers are quite fanatical and demand perfection. I would recommend viewing all of your submissions at 100% and look for the smallest flaw because the reviewers will see it. Then edit or reshoot until it is perfect. My highest acceptance rates have been at Fotilia, BigStockPhoto and Featurepics which are 90% or higher. Currently my acceptance rate at Istock is 33% which is lower than I would prefer. Submitting to microstock will definitely be a learning experience for you and will improve your photography skills.

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iStockPhoto.com / Re: IStock Drives me Nuts!!!
« on: June 28, 2007, 00:34 »
Sharply done, I also was rejected at Istock for the white swirl of a jet engine. I was browsing there tonight and what did I find but a close up of a GE engine with the swirl the focus of the image. Such inconsistency! I'm tempted to report it but I'm a newbie at Istock and don't want to rock the boat. There are many posted images with the supposed trademarked swirl. I guess they're grandfathered in now and there are different rules for new postings.

Istock is quite hard to comprehend. The first 3 submissions I gave were good enough to get me into Istock but all three were rejected later for other reasons when I reposted them. It will be worth the hassle because I'm getting many more views there than the other sites I've posted to. Long term I think it will pay off for me

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I guess what I meant to say that for Photosig the shots that got the best reviews were post processed the most - probably more than necessary. In my opinion people prefer overly saturated colors that look artificial to me. If you boost the saturation that much then you get increased noise which will get you rejected in microstock. Also for Photosig I was processing for a final size of about 800 x 800 pixels. At that size artifacts will most likely be hidden. When shots are judged at 100% crops there is little room for technical flaws.

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Thanks everyone for all the comments. The consensus seems to be that microstock is hard work and is not a get rich quick scheme. Unfortunately the media seems to the emphasis on the money and not the work. I'm not going to expect to make money overnight. My strategy will be to post a few images a week and gradually build up a portfolio over 6 months to a year.

What do people think the market is for aircraft flight shots? I've been taking quite a few lately of jets at a nearby airport. The major problem with jets is that they all have the airline's logo on them. I was even rejected at Istock because of the GE logo on the turbines themselves. So there is a lot of time required to clone out the logos and other copyrighted items on the jets. Frontier airlines is one of the worst because their logo surrounds the windows. It would be difficult to do a good job of cloning their name out.

Thanks again everyone for all your responses to my post.

Greg

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There definitely has been a change to my workflow. I've been posting a lot to Photosig where your image size is so small most artifacts don't show. Often what I've posted there gets rejected at microstocks because of noise and artifacts. Photosig has "taught" me to spend a lot of time post processing for contrast, saturation and sharpness that isn't necessary for stock. From what you and others have said the less processing the better when doing stock photography. I guess it's all part of the learning curve of stock. It will probably take me a few months to get up to speed.

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That's good news to hear! It looks like the best selling images involve models. So how can you make a profit after paying models their fees? I hope I'm not diverging too much from the original post. Don't models charge $50.00 an hour or more? I'm not sure where I got that figure so I could be totally wrong but it sounds a reasonable rate to me.

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You can credit (blame?) the recent New York Times article about microstock to get me interested in trying it myself. I wonder how many newbies started in microstock this month because of that article and others from the media.

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I'm curious how much time people spend each week on microstock. This would include shooting, editing, posting and keywording. I've posted a few shots so far and it seems very time consuming with little or no return for the time I've invested. It seems to me that you would be better off working for minimum wage than posting photos to microstock. I've been spending 5-10 hours a week for the last two weeks to post about a dozen images to several sites with no sales yet.

It seems to me that even the most successful microstock people are not even going to come close to $7.50 an hour. I would guess more like $0.50 to $1.00 an hour.

Maybe it's too early to expect sales from a dozen shots but it would take hundreds of hours to generate the 500-1000 shots that many photographers have in their portfolios. It would be fine if I were shooting things that I enjoy shooting but I'm not. My birds, wildlife and nature shots aren't very marketable in microstock from what I've read in the forums here.

From my experience so far I don't think microstock is a good fit for me. I guess I have to be a bit more patient and wait and see. This is also a very slow period for sales so my timing is not ideal to start posting.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Greg

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