4 - iStock is not a place to explore ones inner level of artistic expression. The proactive removal of the image of questionable quality from the iStock archive provides us with a clear message of that. Buyers are looking for commercial creativity with a commensurate level of technical quality. Images which trade off quality to allow mobility for artistic exploration should not be made available for sale on iStock.
Point #4 in my previous post was broadly misunderstood. iStock is a place for creativity and creativity is definitely needed in commercial stock photography. But it must coincide with producing images that meet a certain level of technical standards in order for the images to be viable for commercial use.
The subject picture of this thread was not acceptable as commercial stock on a technical level. That is widely agreed. It had many technical faults as already pointed out by other posts in this thread. In fact, the composition was rather flawed, lacked creativity, and it wasn't a commercially viable image in any way. Thus it was eventually removed from the iStock collection.
In addition, the description provided for the photo was not complete, as it stated nothing about the subject or contents of the image the way a description/caption should do.
It is an image however that might fit into a photo exhibition if it is a photo that makes up part of a story being told through an essay of editorial photos. It would also have a place if it is a particular artistic style, process, or finish applied to a series of images being exhibited.
So what was meant by "iStock is not a place to explore ones inner level of artistic expression" is that images like this might be viewed as artistic under certain conditions and in certain instances, but it was not suitable as a commercial stock photo or even usable as a simple illustrative stock image for the type of food it portrayed.
If you don't adhere to the principle of the point made here then you end up with a collection of images unsuitable for commercial use. This needs to be avoided at all cost and images like the subject image need not continue to pass inspection in the future or the standards of what is deemed as viable commercial stock photography on iStock will be lost.
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