Agreed. After reading Joyze's FAQ, I don't see anything "reassuring", nor anything that comes even remotely close an attempt by istock to gain their contributors trust back. Even stronger, this confirms my fears that iStock just strengthened their own "playing field", in which they can change their royalty structure and policy and modus operandi as at will, whenever they deem fit. A complete disregard and disrespect of all contributors' interests.

It seems we're free to shoot lego bricks without having to be afraid of copyright infringement.

The European Court rejected the copyright claim by Lego:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7726700.stm

Would be interesting to see whether the agents adapt their policy in regard to lego bricks...

yet another one (found via the istock threat):

http://www.emberstudio.com/blog/?p=193

Microstock has generally affected my life positively:

1. If it weren't for microstock, I wouldn't have managed to survive the economic crisis so far - having to rely on photography for my income. Assigned work almost came to a standstill early 2009, but growth in my (micro)stock sales (yes - growth  in income) made up for that decline for a large part.

2. Sales stats of various different images from various stock shoots are a great tell tale of the ever changing trends, fashion and styles in demand, which helps me target my assigned customers better.

3. The freedom of organising what to shoot next in stock allows me to try out new things, and the sales stats are - again - a functional tell tale to keep me on the right (commercial) track.

4. Meeting the increasing quality demands (also the "too similar" issue) helps me to remain sharp and not let image quality slack.

5. Treating Microstock as a huge playground and being able to shoot what I decide to shoot (whereas that luxury rarely exist in my commissioned work) provides me with a great outlet to blow off steam and frustration.

6. Treating Microstock as a huge learning school: The low revenues per sale helps me to plan shoots more effectively, which pays off big time for commissioned gigs. In addition to the above mentioned, it gains me much more experience and routine in setting up bigger productions.

On the downside:

1. I feel shooting generic stuff, worrying about image quality, copyright issues and sales potentials for stock, limited (and still limits) the enjoyment I used to get out of my non-assigned work prior to 2006. This in turn, feels like its limiting my ability to shoot "creatively". All quite ambiguous and subjective, of course.

2. With assigned work picking up again, and feeling the urge to maintain the stock-production pace I had during slow times, It's becoming a challenge to supply each customer equally well, and keeping focus on the primary business drivers of both fields of photography. A temporary luxury problem.

Bottom line: The decision to split my business focus into two, thus spreading the risks, worked out well for me. It's how I intend to continue, at least this year: The lion share of my income will (remain to) be assigned work, and (micro)stock will continue to fulfill its function as a "safety net" when needed, and provide a fine additional income.

Out of curiosity:

I'm actually more professionally useful to the real world should I need a job out there again.

Can you elaborate on that?

Thanks for the help guys both on the forum and via sitemail

Hopefully the links will be helpful to any other contributor who didn't get a link too, or (as in my case) got the wrong link to the buyer survey...

FWIW it really is important to put your own ID # in there.  I didn't do that on a link I was sent and may have messed up somebody else's survey. 

You are all my witnesses, though.  If I win the Ipad it's going to the guy whose survey I accidentally took.   

Nothing new indeed... Emails, text and graphics also bear a resemblance to StockXpert, or is that just me? The familiarity makes me feel right at home

Shutterstock is performing very well for me. Bigstock has never been a big earner, so a BME is as easy to achieve as a WME; I'm not too worried about it.

I'm not worried, just a bit concerned. I'm currently waiting four weeks for my pay-out.

I'm using Amazon's S3 storage for backing up my vector files. They charge based on how much storage space you use. Right now I'm only paying .36 a month.

$0,36 a month sounds more than reasonable How much data have you stored at amazon?

I tried Fabrik http://backup.fabrik.com/ (which I think uses Mozy as the backend) and it works great if you have GB of data. I have over a TB and the initial load was too long.

I have an Acer Windows Home Server for auto-backup plus a 2TB brick I store in a fireproof media safe.

I've also been looking into Photoshelter as a backup.

I think I'll pass the TB of data I'd like to store away from my computer and server soon, or at least wouldn't feel comfortable running into such issues when I do, so thanks for the info, very useful!


For now, the Amazon S3 seems the best option. But I'm unsure about what they mean by requests - As in they charge you $0,01 for every 1000 calls to their servers, even when you're just trying to list the files you've stored there? So, if you have 10.000 files backed up at the Amazon S3 servers, and you're trying to get a list of the files, without changing them, it'll cost you $0,10? How does that work in real life? How often are the files listed?

I've been using mozy for some time now. Never had any problems, used it to reupload some files I deleted.Feel less anxious about losing my images due to computer crash. I think it's a smart way of backing up files.

Thanks, now even more seriously considering getting an account!

I'm off to a similar start in having images flagged. Photo of the Eiffel Tower flagged for - you guessed it - "Eiffel Tower".  Too early for me to call for a revolution, but an email to DT support definitely is an option...

Quote from: taglist on February 18, 2010, 03:41

Working on two screens, the aspect ratio between height and width of the tablet and the combination of two 24" screens is a bit off, but the Intuos4 has a precision mode, limiting widht-height ratio exactly to one screen.

perhaps you know this, but you can set the wacom tablet to only use part of the tablet - so that it either tracks faster (because you are only using the middle 50%) or so that it tracks correctly to a 16:9 format screen or even wider if you have two monitors.

I know, just never really bothered to configure it properly, and now I just got used to it. I just draw an oval if I need to create a circle on my screen I'm tempted to fiddle around with it now, so thanks for the push in the right direction!

My sales at BigStock have picked up dramatically in the past 10 days.  They were very slow for the 3 months prior to that. 

Dramatically is a big word. BigStock has been steady with a slight increase over the past few months. Sales seem to happen in bursts, though - a couple of days of dormancy, and then all of a sudden several sales per day - random images, too.