Yello,

I've been surfing the Shutterstock forums and came across one fellow who wrote a very helpful post on how to prepare yourself to apply for Shutterstock.  One of the suggestions was to check the portfolios of those recently accepted and also check the top downloads by week to see what's selling.  By doing so i noticed a significant number of photos use a completely white background with a colorful object in the forefront.

Is this something that's done in Photoshop, or is it a white sheet or board that I've seen photographers use?  I'd like to experiment and see if I can shoot such a photo myself.  Any suggestions appreciated.   

iStockPhoto's people are a bunch of snobs.   

They like my photos, but the most consistent complaint I've been getting for rejected ones has been "undue artifacts, undue artifacts, undue artifacts, wah wah wah wah, undue artifacts, sniff, sob sob..."   

Sheesh.  They just saying that cuz they don't want my photos to compete with theirs.     I kid, I kid.... I think.

Previously, I had my camera set to save photos in the highest JPEG format available (SHQ 3264x2448), but it's capable of taking pics in TIFF and RAW too. (I have an Olympus 8080Z)

I'm thinking I should just go with RAW since I can postprocess it to death if need be, but it takes about 20 seconds per photo to finish though, and I can just forget about taking continuous shots too.  I've had this camera for a while, but is this still typical of how slow RAW is on a digicam that's not a dSLR?

If it is, I may keep the current JPEG format and tinker with the settings a little more.  I don't get it though.  On a clear blue sky, bright day, the photos will sometimes look awesome, and then out of the blue noise starts showing up en masse for no reason (even when ISO stays the same).  Anyone else experience this?  Any suggestions on how I can reduce these kinds of distortions?  I'm not a professional so springing for a more prosumer level camera isn't really cost effective for me right now.