As Bateleur said with such lens you are going to see blur due to Earth's rotation even on relatively short exposures. Without a tracking equatorial mount you might be limited to the moon.  You could maybe try to stack a bunch of short exposures to avoid star trails. 



Let us know how it goes

EDIT:
you might want to look up some information about barn door drive - it's a simple tracker that can be made with some spare wood and tools.  Can be motorized or not. 
I have this link in my bookmarks:  http://hometown.aol.com/Davetrott/page17.htm
I don't know if such setup would be feasible for a heavy 500mm lens thou.

I was wondering.  When do you consider that all the hard work that went into creating a photo has paid off?

I'm sure everybody has images in their portfolio that didn't live up to their expectations - all the photos that we labored over in Photoshop for hours and that produced 2 sales across all the sites  

So at what point do you consider an image to be worth your trouble?

Hi, I'm wondering. I post my food shots into food & drink category only, and leave the second one empty. I'm wondering if I'm not missing out by doing so.  On the other hand I don't want to spam other categories with irrelevant pictures.

Any suggestions? What other categories could reasonably apply to food photos?

Thanks,
J.

My sales stopped on May 1st.  Used to get multiple daily downloads, and so far in May I've got 3. And fotolia was just starting to look good :O

J.

I got the same rejection on my first batch at StockXpert, the second one went through without issues, and so far they accepted 120 of 126 submitted files. 

In my opinion worth to try again. 
Beats me why my initial submission got rejected - I used photos that both Shutterstock and Istock were happy with.

That's a neat end of year target.

I'm in a similar bag as the op, as I started about 6 weeks ago. The difference is that I started with all sites at once (with the exception of StockXpert which rejected my 1st application) - shutterstock, istock, dreamstime, fotolia, bigstock and 123.

So far - shutterstock - more or less steady downloads from the very beginning (good for boosting morale when you are starting).   A couple of scary low download days . The other sites took at least two-three weeks to start working for me.  The first weeks I had 0 downloads there.

Right now earnings ranking for me is as follows : shutterstock, istock, fotolia, dt, 123, bigstock.

One thing is that so far I don't have any really good shots in my gallery - my most popular image has only 50 downloads on shutterstock.

BTW. DT bumped images that were due in 2 hours yesterday to 7 hours (and is staying at it for the last 12 hours), and images that I just uploaded have ETR 10 days and 8 hours! lol!

BigStock has pretty bad review times, 123 reviews everything in 1 day more or less.




BTW.

One more question. I assume that I don't have to erase logos/billboards etc in case of editorial images?

Thanks!

Hello everyone!


I have a number of shots of city skylines at night. On many buildings there are neons with corporate logos, hotel names etc.  Obviously the logo itself is never the subject of the photograph, but it is visible nevertheless.

Do we have to remove all those neons when submitting a photo for stock agency? I've got some of my photographs accepted in the past, however recently I get rejections because the photograph contains copyrighted elements.  I'm just a little bit concerned about the previously accepted images.

I'll appreciate the help. Thanks!

J.