OK, after some tabletop tests it seems that the "ONE SHOT" mode is reliable.  The focus takes place more or less under the exact spot selected and doesn't change when the camera is moved.  But it does consider an area somewhat surrounding the actual dot, presumably because the tiny area of the defined focus square is often too small to use just by itself.  Maybe if I try to position the model's eyes or lips right under the dot when focusing.

The "AI SERVO" mode works, but it is so slow to react to movement that it's probably useless for shooting sports.  Not that I really plan to.  I believe that this was one of the "Cons" identified by dpreview.com in its recent in-depth review.

The in-between, "AI FOCUS" mode takes a long time to realize that things are moving, and then bump the camera into "AI SERVO" mode.  Not that it does much good.

The relatively dim light of the strobes' model lights may not be helping, plus the camera probably doesn't have an image processor as powerful as high-end gear.

There may also be a problem with softness of the lens when shooting a full-length shot with the model's head somewhere near the edge of the image.  Though with a 50mm f/1.8 Canon lens on an APC sensor at f/8 I wouldn't expect this softness to be more than negligible.  I'll take some more shots with a test chart.

No, when the system is working correctly, the database is updated once a day.  Accepted images will show up the next day. 

If you looked in the help forum, you would see the threads discussing the issues of last Thursday's outage.  Nothing has been indexed since then.

Thank you!  Just caught up on the whole thread.  That was a doozy of an outage.

... when images begin to show up in the search engine.  When I go searching for my own images it seems to take maybe a week after approval before they start showing up using their original, approved keywords.

You can see this for yourself if you try a really generic search like "one person" AND computer.  The newest image that I can find in any keyword search sorted by 'Age' is always around a week to 10 days old.  Even the "Browse Recent" button seems to show exclusive images (presumably reviewed and approved in only a couple of days) that are over 5 days old.  Not exactly hot out of the camera.

Yet the "views" ticker for my newest images starts going up, often within minutes of the approval email being sent.  Somebody is finding my images right away, but how?  Are there different search queues, indexes or servers for some users versus others?

Among other problems, if the length of time before images show up in queries is slow or irregular then this will make it harder to drop seasonal content into the hopper "just in time".

I like my Alienbees.  I tried a B800 with giant softbox and a single B400 for background but found that the background was not fully lit for full-length people shots (it was adequately lit but not fully white from head to toe, this may be OK depending on what you want).  So I added a second B400 and have been in heaven ever since.  Well, except I would like to expand my studio space by about 6 feet vertically and on each side, and by about 12 feet in length   

If you add a full-length silver reflector just in front of your subject on the opposite side of the main light, I think you'll find the lighting very satisfactory.  Painting the walls white but pinning up black broadcloth strategically will help get the light where it should be.  Stock doesn't seem to normally require hair lights for that glamorous look so unless you're going into business as a portrait photog then I think you could skip the 4th light.  I think I would have to cut a hole in my ceiling to use one anyways.

I imagine a B1600 type flash would only be required for large sized studios when shooting more than two models.  For 1-2 models and product shots I think the B800 is adequate.  I shoot with it about 5-6 feet from subjects with softbox at f/8 ISO 100.

While I would like the ease of having a "commander" type solution for controlling the flashes, for now I'm happy with only a single basic Alienbee transmitter and one receiver with the other flashes triggered as slaves.  Every so often I have to switch the receiver to a different flash, but in the scheme of things that's very little work.

I understand that these patterns of cut glass are probably distinctive to the maker and the product line ... but are images of these products considered suitable for stock?  Or are they rejected on the grounds of copyright/trademark?

Is your eyedropper set to 1pix or is it measuring the average of a 3pix or a more wide area?

It says "point sample" in CS3 when the eyedropper is selected.

I tried using DPP to convert to "Exif-TIFF 8bit" instead of "TIFF 16bit" and the problem no longer happens.  The 255/255/255 background stays that way when opened in PS CS3 and converted to JPEG.

I still have a couple of questions -

1) Is DPP messing up the conversion of RAW to TIFF 16bit, or is CS3 messing up the handling of TIFF 16bit?  Or is the camera firmware messing up the encoding of RAW?

2) Is there a significant practical reason to prefer 16-bit TIFF to 8-bit TIFF as a middle step between RAW to JPG?  I suppose that the 16-bit version preserves more color information, or whatever, but in this case I assume that the "extra" color information is somehow being rounded off, truncated or otherwise converted incorrectly at some stage.

I haven't been able to find a detailed, hands-on review yet at the usual sites (dpreview.com, imaging-resource.com, photozone.de).  A typical question in the pre-reviews seems to be, "Can the kit lens produce decent 18 mp resolution?"  I would like to see some RAW images produced with the kit lens (EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS) and also with a decent fixed-focal lens (e.g. 50mm f/1.4 USM).

The 18 mp resolution handily fits the istock XXL size limit with some room to spare for leveling, cropping and even moderate downsizing.  If it produces images (with decent lighting and a decent lens) which are high enough quality then I don't think that any budget-conscious still stock photographer with significant sales at istock can ignore this camera (given the limitations and compromises of a "consumer" or "prosumer" body).  Not to mention the potential for stock video 

Photozone.de site is great, thanks.

Also found this site, comparing Nikon D90, D5000 and Canon 500D/T1i features.

http://www.digitalreview.ca/content/Nikon-D5000-D90-Compared-to-Canon-Rebel-T1i-500D.shtml

I would say that so far, the D90 is coming out ahead.  The chromatic aberration in-camera correction feature looks intriguing - if it doesn't mess up the focus or add artifacts then it could save a lot of tedious work manually correcting CA in photoshop.  I've only had to do that a couple of times, but it gave me a strong distaste for that kind of work.

Rather than the kit zoom lens, if I got the D90 then I think I would get the 85mm f/1.8 lens, to go with the 18-55mm AFS which came with my D40, and an old 50 mm manual lens someone gave me.

http://www.photozone.de/nikon--nikkor-aps-c-lens-tests/221-nikkor-af-85mm-f18-d-review--test-report

I was hesitating to get on here and start complaining because my port is very small, it's only at one microstock site, and I haven't added new photos for some time.

But since the topic of the bad economy came up ... right now I am experiencing the longest period that I have ever endured without a single download.  Like, three times as long as the previous record drought.  It's not much of a data point, but it is an anomaly compared to activity in the last 14 or so months.  Sales were ticking ... ticking ... ticking ... STOP.

This quote popped up in another thread.  Apparently a "client" posted this
at a warez site where content is shared illegally.

"good share, shame the kids look so dated. why do they dress
these american kids up in such old and bad fashions...I know
most Americans get clothes from Walmart, but these fake stock
kids would be a last resort for any client job....thanks for upload
....but I need REAL pictures of REAL people.not just badly dressed
models....I see a gap in the market!!!Stock Photographers - any
balls, ??!!??"

Aside from the absurdity of complaining to content providers about
the quality of the stolen content which s/he is enjoying, does this
person have a legitimate complaint?

I rather think that stock, royalty-free images will always tend to contain
bland, Walmart-ish no-name apparel, for reasons of not violating trademarks
or copyrights.

Or maybe what the "client" was complaining about really was 5- or
10-year-old content, and it's just whinging because the latest and most
trendy stock images have not yet been ripped off and shared.

In any case, would anyone care to share some tips about dressing models
for microstock?  Is it Walmart or bust?  Or do you aim for trendy, but
understated fashions from more hip outlets?  I.e. with small or non-existent
logos/labels and without truly distinctive patterns or prints. 

I assume that someone actually plugged into the retail clothing industry
would be able to recognize practically anyone's products in a second based
on color, cut, etc., but the question is, where is the happy medium between
trendy/bland?

A possible way to get non-biased people to accurately grade the quality of keywords would be to provide a "rate keywords" button with every image.

The rankings would have to be weighted according to how many images one has *downloaded* (purchased).  Those who only upload (sell) images would have zero weight attached to the rankings they submit.  Those who both download and upload would be weighted according to (number_of_downloads) minus (number_of_uploads), to prevent individuals or gangs of uploaders from buying a few images so that they can then vote themselves or their pals upwards.  To prevent contributors from establishing sock puppet downloading accounts, the length of time a downloader has been actively purchasing images would also have to be weighted in.  I.e., if you suddenly announced this feature, you would have to ignore rankings from contributors who suddenly create a new downloading account in order to give themselves a boost.

Hopefully customers who find that they have been victimized by keyword spam would be motivated to give the offending files a "zero (most keywords are spam)" rating, and when they find a good file they would give it a "five (all keywords are accurate)".  It would be easy to flag contributors who mysteriously receive a lot of zeroes/ones and a lot of four/fives, to check whether the high ratings are suspicious (e.g. originating from a small number of buyers).

Likewise, the image quality ratings should be strongly weighted towards *customer* opinions, and (net) contributor ratings should be either ignored or else given a completely different category.

Most images would probably not get any rank, so a contributor's "average" (per image) ranking would have to be used in the best match.  I.e. if they have uploaded 1000 images and 50 of them are ranked, then the average rank assigned to those 50 images is used to weight all of the contributors' photos in the best match.

If the rankings of image and keyword quality are more "real" (from the customers point of view, with the biggest customers having the biggest say) then they could be made a significant part of the best match.  These rankings would help turn the focus from "contributor oriented" and biased, towards "customer oriented".  In other words, let money talk and B.S. walk.

Its not really rewarding to be original in the Microstockworld, take your time and look at the portfolios and the stats of it, you will see its always the same stuff that sell well though really original and innovative portfolios seems to get no significant downloads at all. So my tip would be if you really create something original don't submit it to a Microstocksite save it for a traditional or macro agency ;-). But note some microstockers think they are original but they aren't at all ;-)

Not only that, but shooting outside the box is also likely to result in rejections because the reviewers are specifically trained to think inside the box with respect to subject, lighting, color, composition, etc.  This motivates a contributor to be a boring copycat and to use other, not-merit based factors to get sales, such as keyword spamming and best match spamming using whatever techniques happen to work with the current algorithm.

I speculate that this tendency is more pronounced right now because the prevailing economic pessimism is leading to generally conservative and cautious business attitudes.  A more optimistic business climate would presumably lead to more originality and creativity in business-related graphic arts.