Photography can be as exciting or boring as any other job.

I often find my shoots (and especially post processing!) boring. But sometimes a shoot can be very exciting, interesting, inspiring, funny etc.
I'd still say most of my shoots are boring routine work, 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.

Of course it would be more interesting to shoot bikini models under palm trees, but I guess even that would become boring after some time...

(Photography is still one of the best jobs there is!

I really can't understand why most of microstock sites think that the word "editorial" equals "newsworthy".

There is a huge market for "non-newsworthy" editorial images, for example unreleased travel photography, new products in-use, etc., but it's very difficult to get images like that accepted at many sites.

Rejecting non-newsworthy editorial images is not a very bright idea and creates a huge gap in the collection.

And If I ever happen to shoot the most newsworthy image of the year, I won't be uploading it to microstock sites...

I might have missed a comment you made, but thanks.  I'm shooting every day, but mostly first thing in the morning and then some wildlife stuff in the afternoon.  Sun's not setting till 8:30 or so my time so I'm not getting too much at night.

Wildlife doesn�t (generally) sell well. If you are going to succeed in microstock, you can't just shoot what you like, you have to shoot what sells!

(Oh, I saw someone already pointed out that for you. But they are right; an hour spent on wildlife is an hour less spent on something that will sell)

Could someone please answer... I need to get some images off-line ASAP!!!

After reading the topic, I thought: "Finally some positive news!". Boy was I wrong again...

Try persuading your employers to close their account and open one at Shutterstock or Dreamstime. That should keep Lobo/iStock happy

+1

- Delete every image with 0 downloads after 3 years.
- Delete every image with 1 download after 4 years.
- Delete every image with less than 5 downloads after 5 years.
- ...... with less tha 10 downloads after 6 years.

Those figures seems about right. Maybe I would remove the last row (10dl/6 yrs.), but otherwise your system does sound reasonable.

Seriously, any professional in any market place has to know what his customer is looking for and go and meet THAT demand, not the demand he feels that the customer SHOULD have and, make no mistake, in this case Dreamstime is the customer and calls the shots whatever any of us think of that.

No, Dreamstime is NOT "the customer", they aren't the ones paying for the images. They only have a somewhat warped idea about what the customers want (for example rejecting some perfectly good shots that sell like hotcakes on other sites).

They don't even seem to understand why someone would want to choose between a vertical or horizontal image of the same subject.

My Fotolia income has dropped from 300 to 400 dollars/mo to 150....200. This month has the potential to be the weakest month since January 2009.

So sad. It seems my avatar predicted even this...

Which just goes to show that we are all taught our own versions of history.

So what do you think German and USSR did between 1941-1944? Played chess and drank vodka?
The real turning point in defeating germany was Stalingrad in 1943, not what happened after d-day, even if people from US seem to think that way very often. I really suggest to read some books written by others than US writers. Or even Wikipedia.

(Okay, this is getting seriously off-topic

I have noticed that using a polarizer to get a bright blue sky often seems to cause noise. I don't know why, I think it's like the blue pixels in the sensor gets overload.... Maybe the bright blue sky contains no red or green information and that messes the bayer interpolation. Or something like that...

I can't really find the targets motivating in any way. I'm already at 17% this year (I have about 13,000 redeemed credits), and I don't think I could make it to 18% even if I uploaded like h*ll (I would need 27,000 redeemed credits more, the would mean doubling my income for the rest of the year - not going to happen). The gap between 12,500 and 40,000 is just HUGE.