guys this gets even better, he is exclusive at DT

Apparently he has been yuriarcurs'ed at DT. Good for him.

I am very holpfully to get some help from you, and I want to make friends with you!!!!

CaptainYoung, here are a few tips from me:

1. Istock is no longer the site it used to be a couple years ago. Download numbers are much lower and the royalties for independent photographers have been cut. Don't expect good performance from iStock and you will not be dissapointed.

2. As others mentioned this kind of subject matter doesn't make much money in microstock.
If you describe the locations very exactly, Alamy might be worth trying. But you need a lot of patience with Alamy.

3. If you shoot landscapes, do a search on istock for "landscape" and sort by the number of downloads.
Then you will see what kind of landscape photos do sell in microstock.

It's ridiculous! This is what happen when there are no upload limits and no QC.  Personally, I'm sick of all these new snapshoters flooding iStock with their big portfolios full of crappy images. 
My advice to any fresher:  Stop flooding the site with all your snapshots!!!You are not going anywhere doing it.

I think your comment is out of line.
1. The photographer supplies the kind of pictures that iStock now wants to see. What's your problem? Are you afraid of competing with "snapshots"?
Haven't you heard that iStock is THE place for professionals?

IS have big plans for their collection. They will now be able to compete with Mostphotos or flood Google Drive.
Resistance is futile

2. CaptainYoung's photos are not bad. The compositions are generally quite OK, e.g. this one is quite nice:
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-29311448-the-road-in-bamboo-forest.php
The main issues are: too many nearly identical photos, the light and colours are not so good and the subject matter which is not popular in microstock.

Do you remember the Galapagos series that was accepted some time ago? Compared to that photographer CaptainYoung is a true master of photography.

I could log in, but after I did I wished I hadn't.
Nothing to see there. Don't waste your time, do something useful instead.

32 GB ram. Isn't that a bit overkill ?

I don't think so.
I didn't think along these lines but rather "Will it be fast enough for the next 4-5 years or should I get a mainboard supporting 64 GB RAM?". Now I'd say 32 GB RAM + i7 + SSD is "fast enough for me".
I simply don't have any performance-related issues and the PC can do many things at once.

I've got i7-3770 3,4 GHz with 32 GB RAM.
Win 7 64-bit installed on a good SSD from OCZ. Lightroom catalog and previews live in another SSD with good write/read speed. Photos are stored on a 4TB HDD.
This is not a new PC, it was built by a retailer according to my specs more than one year ago.

Lightroom is pretty fast, I cannot complain at all, I barely notice processing times.
In fact, everything is pretty fast. I forgot what it meant to have a slow PC.

Hmmm, ok thanks. I need to know if that program is sufficient enough for stock submissions.

For stock clips MPEG Streamclip is sufficient and it is free.
It can convert your clips to the common formats and codecs, trim, mute sound etc.
If you need to clone out dust spots then you need additional software (After Effects, Photoshop, etc.)

I also use Sony Movie Studio Platinum, but for film projects and not for stock.
It is not very expensive, I bought a bundle with royalty-free soundtracks and loops from Sony.

Uploading there you sell Getty the rope with which they will hang you.
The more people upload, the sooner you will go out of business.

Hello Dan,

I had a strange feeling of deja vu when I saw your post.
Now I know why - because I answered the same question from you in February:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/had-a-list-with-min-payment-but-lost-it/msg299711/#msg299711

Cheers

I have a folder on my harddisk called "Stocksy", I thought I would prepare an application, since I like the concept.

But. I have a problem.
The problem is that I dont know what pictures to put into it.
I really dont. I took a look on Stocksy 5 min ago, and it was still the same: I cannot see any style, or any trend that makes an image qualify.
What I do see is images that break rules. No respect for the golden section, no respect for white balance and no respect for exposure.
So I ask myself, do they want pictures that break rules? Like cut in halves people standing in awkward positions in the middle of the frame?
Then I check my area of expertise: pictures of butterflies. And the search of "butterflies" brings foreward the worst miscoloured amateurish snapshots I have seen in a long time.

It leaves me bewildered and worried.
Can that kind of pictures sell? Is it art on a level I do not comprehend?

JPSDK, you are a true master of butterfly photography, there is no doubt about it + you are an expert in that field. But I would say your style is rather encyclopedic, perfect for example for handbooks or encyclopedias. Stocksy's vision is probably different. They might not be able to compete with such pictures with microstock sites.

I don't know the minds of Stocksy curators, I suck at explaining styles and I am not qualified to critique your pictures, so I will tell you a story instead:

There was an accomplished classical musician who wanted to play in a Canadian jazz band. He said: "Your band seems like a cool place to be, I really would like to play with you guys. I just have a small problem with that... hmmm... jazz music. I really don't feel it, and for the life of me I cannot understand why you guys play like this. I am very good technically, I play the flute for the Copenhagen Philharmonic. I listened to your music and I found that a few of your tracks kind of suck... there's no harmony in that. But I really would love to join you, please tell me how I should play, give me a hint..."

What I wanted to say with this allegory is that if you take jazz or blues etc. musicians, most of them probably didn't become jazz/blues musicians because they had thoroughly read book definitions of jazz / blues
but because they just heard a few such pieces and thought: "Wow, this style is kind of cool, I can also play like this".


Back to Stocksy, I would say that as everywhere else, there is the Mainstream and the Fringes. It is the job of the applicant to recognize what the mainstream is and how wide the fringes are. If an applicant hasn't figured it out he would probably take too much of curators' time. It's basically the same as at many microstock sites, just the level of difficulty is a bit higher.

Greetings

I performed just one search and found several infringments. These guys don't know the difference between commercial and editorial licenses.

Sorry, not really infringements. According to their EULA the buyers must check themselves if a release is necessary.

Great. I don't think they will ever become a major agency.

Quote from: wds on September 11, 2013, 11:34

Him saying "...iStockphoto is the extreme example for that. We've put 13 people who had never been on the iStockphoto website before in a room and we watched them. At the end of a hour, they had no idea what we were actually doing..."

I have a hard time believing that not one out of 13 could figure out how to buy something on an ecommerce site.  After "an hour".

Let me speculate: were those 13 persons by chance high ranked Getty officers?
Apart from Mr. Klein, there are actually 13 of them:
http://company.gettyimages.com/officers.cfm?idT=EA

and they certainly also "have no idea what they are doing".

They could have asked their janitors. I'm pretty sure after 1 hour most janitors would have  no problems to figure out what a site is about.

where have you seen Pete acting like a superstar? your post is interesting and helpful but watch what you say, at least read his posts, he is actually quite humble

Well, on second thought you might be right Luis, I might have read the post too quickly, I've just seen the mention of "I've been a contributor to Getty for many years". Probably my impression was wrong, sorry.
Objectively, Pete's published images are really impressive but this doesn't mean that his work must fit into every curated collection. This is what I meant to say.