Nature is a tough one because you run into that segment of the photography world that typically is very experienced, does it out of love, and usually has great equipment: the birders (who also tend to get a lot of great nature/wildlife shots while out birding).  I don't know of any specialized sites for the general photographer, though I do know a few guys that have pooled their resources and put together a fine art/stock site devoted to nature in general with a large bird section.  Finding some people that share a common interest (I'm sure that there are a ton), that would like to get their work out their somehow and getting together your own website might be a good way to go.  I recently pointed a buddy of mine on Flickr towards photoshelter with the same predicament, pretty good bird/nature photographer.  I can show you an example of the group of guys' site that I'm talking about if you pm me.  I'm sure that there is a way that a 3rd party could host the site and deal with any printing/downloading/financial interests.

Smiling Jack - I'd love to see some of your aerial work.  I always whip out my camera when I fly (commercially) and I get nice clear skies, and I've got the PPing down to where I think that they look pretty darn good, not good enough technically to ever get accepted by a regular micro agency (if anybody has the PS skills to turn a 30,000 ft shot into a stock worthy shot, technically at least, wow, my hats off to you), but if there is any group of my photos that I just set to slideshow and enjoy, these are the ones.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/waldo4/sets/72157602444373898/
I've got a ton more to process, but they take so long that I only work on one when I'm really up to it.  I think that the evolution of PPing is definitely noticeable, maybe I'll do a Mize-like tutorial (sans the video) someday on my workflow and techniques for them.  I'm sure some of the pro level guys here would find the PPing to be nothing special, but for the PS amateurs and learners, commercial aerials are IMO the most challenging type of shot and they are really where I learned and became comfortable with the different modes (RGB, CMYK, LAB) in PS, especially LAB, and where I really tuned and honed my eyes for color.

Beware that the latest versions of Adobe Camera RAW are only supported by CS3. For example RAW files from Canon EOS 40D can't be processed with CS2...

Other than that there is some difference in advanced functionality - you can easily find it on adobe website where they provide side by side comparison. But if you are moving from version 6 this functionality is unlikely to be of great importance for you.

16-bit processing is already quite good in CS2.

Aren't updates to the ACR supported cameras available well after the fact?  For example, I got CS2 about 6 months ago, though my 350D was supported by it from the get go, several cameras were not, though the update done while registering brought the product up to date with all the RAW formats on the market.

I offer you a look at my portfollio on DT. Use it as an example of the niche I have found.
I do strictly concept images. Half photo's half digital art.

I concentrate on business, and marketing, as well as the internet as a whole.
Peruse it if you wish and gather some ideas from me to get you jump started.

http://www.dreamstime.com/rjmiz_portfolio_pg1

The MIZ

One theme that runs through your work, it goes back to my first post, it is all presented as clip art.  The camera angles, the approachability, everything about the way it is presented has a lot in common with clip art.  Which is fine, it is what sells.  If anything however I have no interest however in getting ideas from others, I have plenty of my own, maybe themes and generalities, but that really is as far as I like to use others.

I'm just trying to find a way past the Fotolia "this is not stock" rejection in a way.  It will help me everywhere, a lot, but I basically hit a brick wall there and had almost 25 straight rejected for the same reason.  They have my lowest acceptance rate by a pretty good margin, though since I came to this realization I had 2 straight accepted.

Hmmm...post #100.

The trouble is the "this is not stock" rejection that I face on 60% or more of my shots at Fotolia (I have considered dropping them as the amount of time spent uploading is an absolute waste of my time, it'll just be rejected anyway, if not, it won't sell).  It helps to have an idea as to who your customers are.  It's easy when your customer is a bride, or a newspaper and there is a specific task at hand, or even if it is the display of your ultimate in creativity as fine art.  But for an unspecified we want useful pictures (it honestly isn't any more clear than that anywhere), and that is about as much as you get, any clearing of the fog is helpful.

Quote from: Medvedev on March 07, 2008, 08:24

I don't read a lot of magazines, but I was paying more attention to the photo magazines I occasionally buy, and I noticed that many of them use microstock photos without proper attribution - for example "photo by istockphoto" , they don't mention the name of photographer. Only one magazine I found using FT has "John Doe/Fotolia.com" which is very nice.

I am shocked that -photographic- magazines don't give proper attribution to photographers. And why they don't just use their reader's photos I have no idea.

Are magazine editors just plain evil or what?

You'll also find that many photo magazines also invite photographers to enter competitions to win goodies, when in the small print it gives the magazine a royalty free license to use the picture however they want.  The magazine industry is not the most honest.

Also, if you're in the UK, keep your eye on nuts and zoo if you shoot glamour, they tend to take photos without asking and only pay up when you see your picture and send them an invoice.

Worst part of it, some of the most photographically prestigious magazines are doing this.   I know that NG is one of the culprits, kinda sad really.

I'm the lone one at >30%, but take it with a grain of salt.  It was 1 in 3, so 33.3%

Lame

Definitely have seen a lot better though out of amateurs, especially with the bird shots.  I've got a couple of contacts on Flickr that blow his doors off.

Sorry to dig up an old topic, just going through and reading some of the old stuff.  I do have quite a bit of experience with these lights, not for photography though, but I have considered it.

Compact fluorescent (CF) lights have become the standard for large aquariums because they have a nice spread, are fairly cool (temperature wise, still need cooling fans on an aquarium though), and are extremly bright (the trick with aquariums is to pump as much power into a small space as possible, while remaining cool, hence incandescent and halogen are out of the picture, bad heat:light ratio, with MH and HPS lights the ratio is manageable (ridiculous amount of light)), much brighter than is possible out of regular fluorescent tubes.  The light output is very high, I've got 4 55W tubes on my tank, for a total of 14,400 lumens (about 800W incandescent/1000W halogen power), in a relatively small space.  The bulbs come in a variety of color temperatures (always listed), but unless they are the standard temperature (5300K I believe) they can get expensive ($40+ per bulb), but they last seemingly forever. 

If I was to build a continuous burn lighting rig for my studio, this is definitely the route that I would go; much nicer soft spread than halogen without the fire safety concerns (better color temp control too).  But they aren't readily available everywhere so you may have to hunt (any good aquarium shop will have a variety of the more expensive specialty color temps, usually with 1 mirrored side on the tube to direct all light in one direction).  They aren't nearly as available as the small screw in ones (especially the fixtures), same principal on the lights though but much brighter.  They are flat 18" U tubes and take a special 4 pin base. 

Definitely not to be confused with regular fluorescents, these things are bright, very bright, yet cool enough that they don't burn you by touching them (close though, they do get hot).  Just looking at a tube, they hurt the eyes more than an incandescent light bulb would but less than a big halogen shop light, but still in the same league as the halogen.

I imagine a bank of 4 of these above an isolation table would be a great very bright yet soft and safe source of light.

Problem is I doubt they have an IT department that is capable of writing improvements to the site, it simply isn't something that is necessary on the staff.  They can get by with management, reviewers, marketing, and accounting and a limited tech staff that is better with hardware than software.  They probably had somebody else program their site for them, in which case the core of the application can be working perfectly, but it can be loaded with a bunch of little bugs that take a lot of time to fix. 

In my experience dealing with things like this, the primary programmers will program the main app, but at the end once it is implemented and bugs come to the surface and need fixing, they send out the noobs to do the fixing, and often times just getting them to come out and fix the things is quite a struggle in itself.  Even if they have somebody competant on their staff to fix the issues, altering any of the base code would void the warranty on it, so they would be stuck waiting for the programmers that they hired to come out and fix it anyway.

Just the way things went with the implementation and the bugs and cleaning of them that is going on now, it leads me to believe that they did not in fact write the code in-house, and hired somebody else to do it.  The core of V2 seems sound though.

You're essentially conning the designer, you may as well just upload it at the largest file size you have, since a designer can always add extra white space.

I don't see it as conning a designer (if you did this and then downsized, then yes, it is), you are still uploading in your native resolution, the resolution is no different, the image is just bigger.  A designer isn't going to care about what camera took the image and is the file larger than it can produce, they will see the image size and can evaluate the size of the object on the background and if it fits their needs, if the resolution hasn't been manipulated at all, how is it conning (upsizing through interpolation is conning).  Who you are conning is the agency to get your image accepted (unless you are shooting for size levels, but IMO that is a waste of time, the % of files downloaded at max size is pretty minimal (maybe IS is different)), especially since his camera actually does output in the minimum resolution required for FT (4 mp), but the aspect ratio is not the 3:2 of a DSLR that FT asks for (2400 x 1600 minimum).  Then again, without a huge and great portfolio, FT isn't going to do that much to help you get a new camera, especially at the eastern European prices for DSLR's, I could get a 5D for what he is facing for just an entry level DSLR.

One thing you can do to your images to get them a little bigger without upsizing the image is to add more to them.  This is especially easy for isolation shots, make your canvas a bit bigger to get over the threshold and add some more white. 

You can do the same with a pure blue sky (like the comp critique shot that I did for you), you just have to use the clone stamp.  Do the vertical dimension (the top) first because you'll want to remove any vignetting (it would look weird) before expanding in the horizontal dimension (not too many apps, but I just had one so they do exist, it was a shot that I thought would be perfect with a square comp, without cropping however, so I just added.  It is selling well at SS so I'm happy with the results).  You'll need to carefully clone when you expand horizontally because of the natural gradient of the sky.

The last way that I know of to make a shot bigger is to take multiple shots and let a panoramic stitching program assemble them.  Some programs can stitch in 2 dimensions automatically (autostitch comes to mind, the free version can only use .jpegs, but it really embarrasses Canon's and Adobe's stitching programs in performance).  Even if the quality isn't superb of the final product (.jpeg jaggies, though it can save at 12 quality), if you are stitching lots of photos together (overlap, overlap, overlap is the key) you can severely downsize in either Gimp or PS to eliminate the jaggies.  On my first try it assembled a 29 shot pano no problem for me (somewhat bad input files too, handheld with varying WB and exposure, perfect assembly though, completely seamless), the resulting file is absolutely ridiculous (60 mb .jpeg), but it is one heck of a cool panoramic.  Even with a 4 mp camera, if you do a 3x3 pano (9 shot) with good overlap and a little downsizing, you should be able to submit files that are just as big as those taken with a 12 mp camera without a problem.

All these methods are more work, but they'll get you closer to actually purchasing a high MP camera so you don't have to do them.

I haven't had a DL in over a week, then again with my pitiful little portfolio can't make too much of it, though it was slow and steady before this last week.