Hi all,

Let me start by a disclaimer: this post is self-promotion, but hey, Yuri did it for a monopod, so why not me  

I think however it may interest some microstockers.

As you may know, many are experiencing difficult times for about a year now, and I'm no exception. I thought about it a few months ago and I have decided to try another market to sell my images: I have decided to create my own iPhone / iPad wallpaper app (I'm a software engineer... it helps).

Obviously, the purpose is not to sell stock images, but more aesthetic one: it is a good way to get some money from my best macro shots which do not sell on microstock sites.

The app is free, but access to the best images require purchasing a premium access as in-app purchase: I think "freemium" business model is the best way to do it.

If you are interested at looking, the app is here: Araminta Wallpapers. It is free to download and it is a universal app for iPhone and iPad.

The app is available on the AppStore for a few days only, but I can already tell you that should sales stay the same, it would already bring me as much money as all microstock sites (but I'm not Yuri). I'm not sure however how sales are going to evolve in the future, the main difficulty being that you quickly get lost in the crowd if you do not reach some Top Ranking: sounds like a known problem to all microstockers  

If you are interested, I will give you some feedback concerning sales: why not trying to create you own app?

Thanks for reading and sorry for those who are not interested.

Hi everybody,

I'm planning to purchase a new lens for my Canon 450D (not planning to buy a FF... yet) dedicated mostly to stock/studio photography (you know, the famous objects on white and why not some woman with headset on white too  )

I currently have a Sigma 18-200mm as a general purpose lens, a Canon 50mm 1.8, a Canon 100mm Macro and a Sigma 10-20mm... and a Canon MP-E 65mm Macro, but this one is not very useful here.

I'm now interested in a mid-range good/high quality zoom and I've selected some candidates:

Sigma 17-70 f/2.8-4-5 (cheap) - best range, but not as fast as the others ... but cheap.

Sigma 24-70 f/2.8 (not expensive) - good range and constant aperture... but the 17-70 has a better range and is cheaper.

Canon EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 (expensive) - Not sure with the range (70mm seems useful for "candid" portraits), and expensive, especially because it will not be compatible with a FF I may purchase in the future.

Canon EF 24-70 f/2.8L (very expensive) - Probably the best one, but the most expensive too. I'm somewhat reluctant to spend so much money.

Can anybody share his/her thoughts on these lenses? Or any other lens?

Thanks

Hi,

Some interesting statistics I would like to share with you. It's amazing what you can get with a few PHP scripts 

I've extracted here the list of the top 20 photographers (based on portfolio size) plus some other (including me  ) and this statistic displays the average number of downloads for the Top 60 photo in each portfolio as well as the individual downloads for the top 10 photos.

You can easily see that Yuri Arcurs (logos) is quite successful... what a surprise!

http://araminta.net/~araminta/stockinfo/

Those figures are based on StockXPert only for now.

If you want to see your own statistics in the list, feel free to request it here (give me your ID at StockXpert).

I may add other interesting statistics in the future at this URL, so keep it bookmarked if you are interested.

Hope you will find this useful.