MicrostockGroup Sponsors


Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Forgiss

Pages: [1] 2
1
Off Topic / Re: This should settle some different opinions
« on: September 06, 2023, 10:02 »
What actually surprised me was the fact that you can become president in the U.S. despite having a criminal record.


Here, it is almost a requirement... :(

2
Adobe Stock / Re: Fotolia cuts commissions again
« on: January 29, 2011, 03:53 »
...I set some goals for me for 2011. I son't see them happening. This is sickening. I'm really seriously thinking about dumping microstock alltogether, I haven't seen any macros pulling stunts like these (IS, FT)
...

Hahahah... are you serious? Maybe it's because you don't sell through them? The trad boards are pretty much up in arms, as is the trad shooters that come into the shop... "Web Licence" on Getty = $4.99 (or something to that effect) Getty selling iStock, Corbis marketing trad and micro together through Veer... All eating into the Trad markets and sales...

One of our customers said he dropped 75% since Getty bought IS...

3
Veer / Re: Veer Dash for Cash
« on: May 21, 2010, 01:30 »
Oh I should also add that you can upload more than your limit of 100 and have them sitting in the "new" section of your workspace. 
That way when the week is up, you can submit the images that you already have uploaded and waiting in the wings.

...all well and good... I am doing that allready, hoping they don't have a timelimit on processing those files like some other libraries that delete them after 30 days, 6weeks or 7 weeks

4
Veer / Re: Veer Dash for Cash
« on: May 19, 2010, 13:55 »
@PB:

Please don't get me wrong... I am not Dissing RM at all. I think RM definitely has a place, and not all images are destined for microstock, but there are images that has no place for $23k sales...

By the way, congrats on the sales... I hope it sold some more in the 12 years before today.

5
Veer / Re: Veer Dash for Cash
« on: May 19, 2010, 03:27 »
... It is the micros that are new, and have come along and undercut on pricing and greatly contributed to it being so tough to make a living shooting stock these days. Perhaps Veer are wanting to establish a viable microstock collection with out descending to the level of those sites that take all comers just for the numbers...

I read these statements and am always amazed at the absolute lack of thought that goes into them.

What protected traditional stock was "barrier of entry" (both from the agency side, and the cost of technology) that barrier was lowered drastically as technology made it possible for the buyer to sidestep expensive RM images completely for day-to-day functionality.

It's wouldn't surprise me if the OP made that statement from their iphone filled with happily purchased $1 apps

Secondly. The old model was a lock-in model... You buy from XYZ company because you allready invested a few thousand Dollars into getting their catalogues and search disks shipped to you. That doesn't fly anymore, Getty's new site quotes 41% of images buyers do their search through Google... So to survive, you are either a niche market site (i.e. all Medical, all the time) or you have everything that passes a technical spec, and improve your search system to allow a buyer/designer to find what they want, exactly.

Even if microstock didn't exist... do you really think that the old model would survive with Flikr and Deviant-art, etc images available to a designer?

6
Veer / Re: Veer Dash for Cash
« on: May 19, 2010, 03:13 »
Is it just me... or is the dash for cash more like a crawl? reviews just do not seem to be happening at any kind of pace?

7
Veer / Re: Veer FTP Problem
« on: May 19, 2010, 03:08 »
Ok... just an update.

After their weekend server update, I cannot connect to the server anymore, it now rejects my password :)

I have reverted to uploading through http... it's a bit of a screwup, because you can't use the automated systems of the Mac or FTP software, but, I suppose it's better than nothing

8
Veer / Re: Veer FTP Problem
« on: May 11, 2010, 12:41 »
I have a same error with Transmit 4... But it work on Transmit 3.6.8

well... you are lucky then... I upgraded to 4 because my ver 3.6 didn't work anymore, and I was hoping (above hope) that it might solve the problem

9
Veer / Re: Veer FTP Problem
« on: May 11, 2010, 11:14 »
Any chance to upload via isyndica?

Isyndica is to small for my current gallery, that's why I use Photoshelter (I have the online store and 100gb) But I use Isyndica for video, and have not seen that they can do Explicit TLS

Don't know about your FTP client, would it be worth to try your luck with FileZilla? (Then we could at least verify whether the settings are the same everywhere)
Will try filezilla... trying to keep everything down to a mimum on the machine though... but if that's what it takes, then that's what it takes... sad...

BTW both 60k and 80-90k is very low if you have 8mb line (if you are talking download speed). I've got my ADSL updraded to VDSL recentely with upload speed around 1.5 Mbps (I mean real tested speed). The average upload speed to Veer is around 120 KB/s (used to be around 50KB/s when I had ADSL with 0.5Mbps upload)

No, Download speeds is 280Kb/s + ... upload speed upload speeds is still 3 times faster than we had in South Africa though !! :D

10
Veer / Re: Veer FTP Problem
« on: May 11, 2010, 09:43 »
...It could be not a bandwidth issue but latency...

I can upload through http... but one by one is an awesome pain!

I thought the same as you, so I switched on keep alive and 'tickle' for long period uploads, but even then, 7mb file takes less than a minute to ...erm ... almost complete

I did notice that it's an error native to IIS7 (can't seem to find anything similar on other FTP servers) but then again... don't really see a corbis site running on anything else :D

11
Veer / Re: Veer FTP Problem
« on: May 11, 2010, 07:54 »
My password gets accepted fine... but the FTP transfer just doesn't complete... confused :(

12
Veer / Re: Problem with FTB to Veer?
« on: May 11, 2010, 07:27 »
I am using Fetch and trying to FTP to Veer and it's not taking my password. I see in another thread a poster had issues with FTP saving metadata and apparently that got fixed. Anyone else having problems with FTP?

I have...

Ryan said the engineers fixed something on the FTP yesterday, or this morning, so maybe your problem is sorted... mine is still active

13
Veer / Veer FTP Problem
« on: May 11, 2010, 07:25 »
I have started moving my portfolio to Veer, but about 2 weeks ago, halfway through an upload, everything just stopped. The images transfers all the way, right up to the final byte, and then there is an error, and it never makes it to the site.

I have contacted Veer, and Ryan came back to me requesting that I double check my settings, which I did. I also updated my FTP software (Transmit) to the latest version (ver4) and still no luck.

I have tried smaller files (in case it was a filesize issue) but no go... always exactly the same.

The error I get is:

425: Data channel timed out due to not meeting the minimum bandwidth requirement.
Error - 132: could not send file to remote host

I am on a 8mb DSL line, and my test this morning to Veer connected at about 65Kb/s (to anything else it goes to about 80-90Kb/s)

I have also tried to connect via PhotoShelter (my preferred distribution system) but the server setup there cannot do explicit TLS only sFTP

It seems everybody else is happily chugging allong with their uploads, so, if I am the only one, is there anybody that can give me any kind of indication as to what possibly might have gone wrong, or what I need to change? (or better, how to set up my photoshelter FTP to connect to Veer)

Ryan thinks it's a problem on my connection, but of the 18 different FTP servers I have connected to this month, transferring files between 1mb and about 165mb only Veer's has a problem... so I am flumoxed  ???

Any help would be appreciated, Thanx!

-----
My Setup: Macbook Pro on MacOS10.6, Transmit 4, 8mb DSL

14
Microstock Services / Re: Find who uses your photos
« on: December 19, 2009, 01:37 »
not sure but I think TinEye developers has this as an actual commercial service... Seem to recall something like that?

TinEye itself is supposed to be a fully featured but cutdown, single acces type version (kinda like jing for screencapture)

I can't think that they will allow this for long. Can you imagine what this will do to their public access servers if the micro community all hits them with complete database searches? Let's say half that? It's still about 4million search queries on a system that was designed for a "one by one" search.

ID say... Rather petition one of the big boys to add it as a feature... ID even pay for a search like that. Do it once every few weeks to see what's on where...

Quote from: ap link=topic=9548.msg126171#msg126171 date=
thanks a lot, using eyemypics has permanently blocked tineye for my isp.  >:(
users should be aware you may not be able to access tineye.com anymore.

15
General Stock Discussion / Re: MSG shoot in South Africa
« on: March 28, 2009, 03:38 »
I don't see the point of have human models in South Africa, but what about hiring a tame lion or a tame leopard?  ;D ...

Hey... are you saying South Africans are ugly? ;-)

anyhoo... there really is no such thing as a tame lion... it's just a lion that has currently decided you are not worth eating! but...

Commercial shoots of both lions and cheetah can be aranged...  models are cheaper though..

16
General Stock Discussion / Re: MSG shoot in South Africa
« on: March 28, 2009, 03:31 »
I would like to join in - August to October is Spring - early Summer in SA, so it would be a good time for nature photography.

Because of the massive changes in altitude, we have green coast in the winter, and green inland in the summer. Best time to shoot wildlife though, is in the winter (the grass is shorter, and water scarcity brings more animals to the waterholes... Eco can give better feedback about that than me.

17
General Stock Discussion / Re: MSG shoot in South Africa
« on: March 27, 2009, 16:35 »
I think there is enough here to shoot whatever you want. I agree that a studio shoot would be a waste of time, that can be done anywhere, that is why I mentioned other items like the big wave surfing.

Photo safari is great experience though, especialy if you do it with people that know what they are doing.

Frankly, anything can be done elsewhere as well, so that's not quite the question here. I think Leaf wants to visit Africa, and he is inviting whomever wants to join up. We have a lively group of shooters down here that will help and organise and take around.

Join us for Biltong and Blatjang and some African Sunshine ;-)

18
General Stock Discussion / Re: MSG shoot in South Africa
« on: March 27, 2009, 05:43 »
All my resources are available to you...

I might join you, I might not, but at the very least I want 1 day at the pub!

If the dates are flexible, the 10-12 July is the photo and film expo in JHB, which should be nice... 27 June to 6 July is also the Mr Price Pro Surfing champs - http://www.mrpricepro.com/ or later in July, we should see another Redbull BigWave surfing contest (unconfirmed) http://www.redbullbwa.com/

Typical studio day, look at aprox R2500 per day ex equipment. Full Studio rental fee (so about $250 - exchange rate is about $1 : R10)

Depending on the type of models you want to shoot, expect to pay about R1000 per day for anything decent (ie... a model that can cope with instruction of 4 photographers) Personally I would suggest setting up location shoots instead of studio.

Nice locations can be locked down for about half of a studio's rental fee.

Don't want to fly with your whole kit? Rent it....

8 days rental of (just as a guideline, Nikon kit also available):

5dmkII - R425 per day (stock machine)
1DmkIII - R510 per day (wildlife and sport)

24-70 f/2.8 - R187 per day
Canon 500mm and 600mm - R425 per day
Canon 800mm f/5.6 - R765 per day

Decent sized tripod (really big stuff) is about R130 per day
Wemberley freeflow gimble heads is also about R130 per day

Cost of Living...

Depends on how well you want to live... Dinner for four at a local steakhouse will run you about R400-R500 for four people (dinner, coffee, desert)

Stay... again, you can get nice locations for about R2000 per person per night or you can get bed-&-breakfast locations for about R300 per person per night.


19
Shutterstock.com / Re: Forgiss stops uploading
« on: January 27, 2009, 11:34 »
Well... you keep on going with red apple... Shutterstock keeps on importing the wrong field, and as such, the 200 char limit has not been reduced, so I asume they are not planning anything.

From Anthony:

"The description/title field is capable of having 200 characters (including spaces).

The character length field has been at that length for quite a long time. The idea behind the image description itself is to put a simple concise description for your image."

Con-cise
Adjective
Giving a lot of information clearly and in a few words; brief but comprehensive

So if there is more in the image than a red apple... and the longest title in that question was 104 char... hardly "war and peace"... and definitely not so exagerated as your claims...

I am not Skirting the rules. I Asked for clear guidelines, not given. I asked for consistency... not provided... in both instances.

You seem ticked off at me personally. I can't for the life of me think why, and as you remain masked, I suppose I will never know. I share all my information freely, posting various articles, behind the scenes videos, and share all I know to anybody who asks freely.

You on the other hand, prefer to hide your knowledge from all other submitters, so that they "don't steal your ideas" you hide your face, you hide your identity you hide your portfolio, and then you shout from behind a rock... very big of you.

I will keep on butting heads with management when I see something obviously going wrong, and you keep on hiding behind your rock, and we can both go our seperate ways. Wish you all the best in your endeavours.

So... seeing as you are so adamant that this was a "direct contravention of their uploading instructions" please point me, and all of us following the issue to that document on the Shutterstock Website.

Now... the only guess I can make is that seeing that you are miffed about it, so maybe you are that reviewer?


Ok then ... here's the bit from the uploading instructions that you have such an issue with;

 Description should be short and simple - example: 'Red Apple' - please don't include a story.

You practically had 'War & Peace' in the examples you posted. Like I said, you have a history of making a lot of noise when you try to skirt around the rules and then get caught out.

No, I'm not a reviewer although I have been one (elsewhere) in the past so yes, I do have some sympathy for the job that they do.

20
Shutterstock.com / Re: Forgiss stops uploading
« on: January 27, 2009, 09:51 »
I was referring to your recent very public squabble with SS when you complained long and hard about having images rejected for having excessively long titles, in direct contravention to the uploading instructions. Why can't you just follow instructions and do what they ask __ it is their agency after all.

Hmmm referring to a thread started in September last year... more than 4 months ago? so that is the "can't go more than 50 hours"

For the sake of the non-anonymous members here that has no idea what you are talking about:

    1. Shutterstock has
no length limitation for titles in their submission guidelines
2. About two years before, Reviewer Lisa (the head of reviews at that time) asked for full and complete descriptive titles. You can check my older files... all were 3 to 7 words.
3. The title field at shutterstock has always been 200 characters and still is.
4. Shutterstock has by choice, decided to pull that data from the EXIF "description" field instead of the EXIF "Title" field
5. For no reason whatsoever it seems a single SS reviewer started rejecting submissions for long titles
[/list]

Now... this was clearly not the case for the previous 4 years, the titles were extended to match a request by the Then Head reviewer, and WITHOUT any communication this policy seems to have changed.

Does the title have anything to do with the image quality? No.

Does other sites use this information to rank searches? Apparently yes.

But, in the end it seems this was not the case of a Policy Change. This was reviewer error, and so confirmed in a telephone conversation with Anthony... then also posted to the forum as a clarification, and then in subsequent reviews. I did exactly what I was told, and I followed Shutterstock submission guidelines, as per site documentation as well as per instruction from the Head Reviewer at the time.

So... seeing as you are so adamant that this was a "direct contravention of their uploading instructions" please point me, and all of us following the issue to that document on the Shutterstock Website.

Now... the only guess I can make is that seeing that you are miffed about it, so maybe you are that reviewer?

21
Shutterstock.com / Re: Forgiss stops uploading
« on: January 26, 2009, 17:01 »
Sean's got plenty of form when it comes to public whining when he doesn't get his own way. The trouble is SS have caved in before to similar demands so it is only to be expected that he's going to try it on again.

I don't know what his problem is with regard to rejections as there are plenty of us long-term, high-volume uploaders that are either not experiencing the same or are keeping very quiet about it if they are...

... who are you again?

I am not sure what you are talking about. I open my mouth when something seems out of place. I didn't realise that it's a bad thing.

Actually, I have been a big defender of Shutterstock's decissions in the past, and promote them at almost every step, so your statement baffles me. The only times I have gone against SS policies was when it was clearly wrong (for instance, converting TIFF files from the JPEGs and selling them as a high quality option) but even in my last posts I kept on repeating that Shutterstock has a right to choose what they want to sell and who they want to represent. What you are suggesting is that I have or had the power to "force" a decission previously upon Shutterstock management? A submitter with a few thousand images against a company with close on 6 million images and 150,000 submitters and signing up a few thousand more a month?!

I am honoured, but you give me a little bit too much credit...

My issue here is with consisency in review, something you clearly have never had a problem with, or do you just continue on when it happens? To me, it's a waste of time and resources, and that is what I have said on the SS forum, and here.

22
Shutterstock.com / Re: Forgiss stops uploading
« on: January 21, 2009, 03:08 »
Hahahaha.... I actually can't believe this whole thing is causing so much furore!

Google picked up this thread, so I thought I should just come in and clarify a few things:

1. Income:

I have stopped discussing my income a long time ago, but I will share this for the sake of clarification. I do a comfortable 5-figure $US income, Six figures in our local currency (maybe that is where the confusion came in) This is our main/only income source, and we live quite comfortably and virtually debt free. I am not Yuri or Andres, and currently I only spend about 2 hours, 3-4 days a week on stock images right now. Both my wife and I earn about the same from stock, although we have vastly different strategies and styles.

Our income has grown, year on year with a minimum of 13% which I feel is a pretty decent growth rate, given the time spent, the sizes of our portfolios, and the growth of competing submitters.

2. Reason for stopping uploads:

I have made it quite clear (I think...) that I am not quiting Shutterstock, and not stopping uploads. All I have done is to move Shutterstock down in the "upload list" we run.

Basically it comes down to "not uploading" because I rarely get to spot number 5 or 6. Shutterstock has moved to spot number 7. If and when I have a slow month, and/or remaining bandwidth, I will upload images to SS and see what happens. I just didn't want to spend more time and effort on a process that is currently very frustrating.

I have also spent some time in discussions with Anthony C of Shutterstock to try and resolve the "bad lighting" issues some reviewers have with my images.

Our discussion ran on a test set of images of natural textures. Anthony felt they were all underexposed and didn't "pop" enough, although I matched the exposure to match as close as possible, to the actual texture. My personal feeling is that, as a texture, it should be acurate.

I then took the top three images on the shutterstock search (most popular sort) and did comparitive levels to view how far under I was. The results was that I had a perfect exposure, spot on in the middle of the range comparing with the top three current sellers. Pushing the image exposure up, would create specular highlights, burnout, and blocking of one of the three colour ranges, so it's not really an option... appart from removing the realistic view or "look" of the image.

The actual quality of the images was not disputed. Shot on a tripod, incedence lightmeter reading +2/3stop exposure to match Whitepoint reading, ISO 100, RAW conversion to 16bit tiff for final edit, custom Whitebalance done on location. 21mp sized down to 16mp to ensure smooth gradients and no noise, shot with a 24-70 f/2.8 L at 50mm f/11 (the sharpest point of the lens) - In my opinion there is not a lot more I could do to get a perfect shot for this test out of the camera, but Anthony C. still felt it wasn't good enough (although, during our discussion the shot was accepted by another reviewer)

That leaves me in the situation, that I honestly feel my quality is not good enough for SS. I can't stop doing this, as it's my main income source, and the images that do get through review on the first, second or sometimes third review does indeed sell. (I counted, and 7 of my all time top20 sellers at SS has been rejected on the first submission, and resubmitted without doing any editing)

I do not, and never will claim that I am a super artists... but I do not feel I am very bad at this stock thing either.

Personal viewpoints aside, if the quality of an image is good, it has an ability to sell to some markets. If an image is sharp, well focussed, noise-free... most probably it will sell somewhere. That is my opinion... the proof is in the fact that wifey's port is less than a third of mine, but she chose to go a different route with what and how she shoots. Also going from the standpoint that if it gets rejected for LCV, she just moves on. Initially rejected images on her side (specifically for LCV) has then gone on to sell 600-800 times in the last year... 

I think there are serious issues in the Shutterstock house, I also think that SS can't do anything than protect it's reviewers in public, whether the reviews were good or bad. I think the review process is flawed, and I have had this same discussion for the last three years.

But... I do respect the fact that any agency can chose what they want on their site, and If what I am producing is not what they want, then I shouldn't be wasting my time, and their time by uploading what they feel is not good content.

==============

The lighting question - Images (the last one is my version)



and 100% crop:


==============

As a subnote, since posting, and it seems the little ruptions it caused (which was really not the intention) I have been contacted by an RM agency that would like my whole portfolio... I don't think we will go that route, because I still believe in Microstock, but it's definitely something I will look at. What was interesting was the comment that they want the images because "it doesn't look like mass produced MS stock" ... food for thought?

23
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock signs deal with CreateAds.com
« on: April 21, 2008, 10:53 »
I think that it might end up beeing a better deal for the submitters than the free image deal for microsoft office users or the vox blog thing

24
New Sites - General / Re: Picolib...
« on: October 25, 2007, 16:49 »
...appears to be owned by Forgiss (or at least he has a significant interest).  Andresr is also a founder member...

Just on another note... I will ask you not to make statements like these! it places me in a very dificult situation with the stocklibraries I allready have relationships with!

25
New Sites - General / Re: Africapic
« on: October 25, 2007, 16:16 »
Hey Nightowl...

I have been keeping an eye on them, but it doesn't seem that they are growing!? have they reviewed your images?

I got fed-up with redimages because I had images in their queue for 14 months that was never reviewed, so I removed the lot and moved them all to picolib.

There is another South African site called snapshot (www.snapshot.co.za) but their pricing is scary!

Quality: Small
Dimensions: 332x500(px)
Price: R70.00

For the non-South Africans R70.00 = $10 per image

Pages: [1] 2

Sponsors

Mega Bundle of 5,900+ Professional Lightroom Presets

Microstock Poll Results

Sponsors