How are these landscape images? Do you guys think they are better than snapshots? The top one is Mt. Rainier at sunset, the middle ones are Death Valley, a saltflat and some sand dunes, the last one is an oak I shot into the setting sun at Mt. Diablo state park in California.











And here is my website for a wider range of images I have taken-

http://rasmussenimages.smugmug.com/

I am not pimping my images or anything, but all of these were just rejected by a certain microstock site for being low quality and like too many others in their collection, and yes, they did hurt my feelings. I know it is late but I can't help it, I am so upset I probably will not even be able to sleep tonight. I keep thinking I am getting better at this but I keep getting shot down/ignored. I am fairly successful with vectors and a few other things on the micros but it is frustrating that my passion is with landscape photography and I don't seem to be any good at it. Sorry to complain but my frustration has been building up for quite some time now. I put more work into this than the average snapshooter, generally use a tripod, filters where appropriate, like a graduated ND filter, and put considerable effort into shooting these. The Mt. Rainier shot I had to hike back at night because I cannot camp there.
 

I am interested in knowing if my experience trying to upload to these guys is typical, or if I am doing something wrong/inefficiently. I managed to get one single image up a few months ago, and it actually sold the other day. So I decided to try to upload more images. I don't have FTP yet, I noticed you have to apply for an ftp account whatever that entails.

Anyway, I upload another single photo to this agency. When it is uploaded, it apparently doesn't read the IPTC data or whatever they call that where you put your keywords into the document though Photoshop.  This means that I have to open the image separately in PS to copy and paste the keywords. They also have a system similar to Alamy where you have to put your main keywords and then the rest of the keywords so it takes more than one copy/paste to put them there.

As I was going down filling in all the info they wanted I realized I had to also upload a property release for this particular image. So I click on their link to upload a property release and proceed to put it in their database. No problem. However, when I go back to the upload section everything is apparently erased, as if I never uploaded the image. I cannot seem to find where the image I uploaded is at on their upload system so I upload the image again and start from scratch filling in the keywords and blanks. At least this time I have the property release in there.

 Finally I think I am finished and I click submit, only to come back with an error message saying I need to separate my words by commas. You see, if you fill out your keywords in Photoshop CSII they are all separated by semicolons, not commas. Perhaps there is a way to change that in CS2 but I don't know what it is and in any case I already have some 2000 images with keywords separated by semicolons and not commas.  Since I already got this far with the image, I just go back and erase the semicolons and put commas after every keyword. I didn't watch the clock but I think the time it took me to do this was between 15-20 minutes for one single image. This if worse than IStock's uploading system. Is this what you guys go through when you upload there or are there shortcuts/I am doing something wrong/being an idiot? Just curious.

I am looking to make a professional looking website to display my photos and probably sell prints, of both custom work and general artistic photos.  I have my own url that I would like to use, so I was looking at various options since I am not that up on how to design my own website from scratch. I was thinking of going with a Smugmug pro account.  Smugmug seems to fit the bill and cost about $140 a year for a pro account and I get to use my own web address, except they don't do paypal and people on various forums have complained about their buggy copy protection that doesn't really work. Are there better alternatives out there for what I want to do?

I know I am not the first to ask about Smugmug on here, but no other alternatives have been discussed in the other two posts on here. So that is what I am curious about, if there are other alternative ways to conveniently set up a photo website out there.

I currently have my extended licences priced at $45.00. I am thinking this may be too low, I am currently getting 2-3 EL's per week at Fotolia. I am afraid if I raise prices these will go away, has anyone else raised their EL prices over $50? Have sales been affected negatively doing that?