... Throughout history people have uttered their opinion, at revolutions, in KZ camps or in internet forums....

Starting comparisons between KZ camps and internet forums because of some anonymity issue is a bit of a far stretch to put it very, very, mildly.

...But nothing ever happened by anonymous statements, only chaos and undermining from all sides. The ruler continued to rule.

And Leaf, as the ruler, will do whatever he deems necessary, leaving it up to him whether any of my personal statements are considered "undermining" this community.

...When you are anonymous, you are free to speak, and can say everything. And such over the years everything will be said by anonymous people: obscenities, hatred and slander.

Please, point out to me when I have been obscene, showed hatred towards another member or committed slander on this forum. Because if you make statements here that are unsubstantiated then you are the one who is hiding behind this anonymity. You are generalizing anonymous folks, you are putting me into the same pot with trolls and members that do not respect one another. I do not appreciate that.

There is no payback, no one can be held guilty.

Yes there is. They will be banned. IP will be blocked. Email will be blocked. And btw. you say "there is no payback". Are we going back in the days to an eye for an eye? I thought we are some civilized bunch of microstockers here. Let some troll have his 5 minutes of fame. Eventually they will be removed, end of story.

I think the basic interaction between men is the rule of law: people can say anything to each other, but it counts.

Since English isn't my native tongue I hope I interpret this correctly: That everything somebody says should be thoughtful and well considered before insulting or disrespecting your conversation partner. I'm all for that. Me being anonymous should not change this one bit.

...  If you were making, say, $2,000 - $4,000 a month from a particular site, would you be reluctant to post something negative and have your account closed in retaliation?

Let me answer that for you Lisa:

YES!

If you have any questions regarding my response, kindly refer to Sean Locke for further clarification! That is all.

...All this anonymity or � anonymyty is simply dishonost and not to be taken seriously.

I'm sorry to have been dishonest and not serious with others posting on this forum. But with members feeling this way, it really appears that anonymous members never have been considered an asset to this community.

Shocking.

I have acquaintances who think that the only people who use e.g. PS (etc) are those who can't 'take a decent photo with their camera'. It's what Michelle Obama calls 'a conversation'.

Haha, and those people obviously must believe that the cover images on Vogue etc. are straight out of the camera.

They also believe that celebrities never age or have any wrinkles.

 

As long as you created all elements of the illustration yourself (dove, olive wreath) - supply a property release stating that this is your creating.

This olive wreath looks awfully similar. I might have seen that somewhere else before.

... but we're a stock photography website not a template provider for designers. ...

With all due respect Achilles, but this is unsubstantiated.

Other agencies prove that buyers look for and buy similar images. We can tell because this is how we make our money!!!

If you are seriously only providing "stock images" and NOT "templates" - please do us a favor and remove all images of an apple except one!!! Or better:

Remove all images of a business man except ONE!
Remove all images of a business woman except ONE!
Remove all images of a business meeting except ONE!
Remove all images of a XXX except ONE!


Because apparently ALL of Dreamstime's buyers are designers. Really?

If I can provide newer, better versions of an existing best seller (of mine), what is the logical reason to reject it because it is competing with an image from my own portfolio.

AS IF I DON'T KNOW THAT!!! That's why I'm uploading a better version so I can get MORE downloads.

This is insane!!!! I can't believe what you posted...

The buyer's side is down for maintenance for the last 10 minutes at least...

I've never seen that at SS 

 Upload impossible from Miami.

...By contributing your photos to Depositphotos, you are actually presenting your creative work to millions of image buyers around the world....

http://www.fotolia.com/Info/Contributors/GeneralInformation

By uploading your files to Fotolia, you are presenting your work to millions of image buyers around the world, 24/7.

PR fail.

So is this the new version of "pretty woman with headset smiling" photo?

I think it's quite ok with Yuri moving on, can't blame him.

He grew his company to a considerable size using several shooters, nice locations... the whole shebang.

His equipment and image quality is in most cases miles ahead compared to the average microstock shooter can produce with the "little" means they have.

Yuri is a businessman who decided to find a better home for his high cost production content and by nature this cannot be microstock. I can see that.

However, this has nothing to do with an "end of microstock". In fact it will open up better revenue again for top quality producers in microstock because many (micro) customers will not switch to Getty in order to buy Yuri's stuff so they have to look for comparable images from other contributors.

I think that's a good thing. It also takes the pressure off that we have to shoot with 60MP Hasselblads so we can sell those images at 25-38 cents at Shutterstock - which didn't make sense to me in the first place.

I don't see anything special happening. Yuri is going his way and besides some groupies screaming of joy that he joined "the herd", nothing, absolutely nothing else will change.

Good luck to him.

Hostgator + Symbiostock = no problems! 

I've been doing a bunch of night skyline time lapse clips myself and I can only imagine how much work that was put into this... But it was a lot!

As with everything that stands out from the crowd, you can tell if somebody poured their heart and soul into it...

Some clips are made from HDR photos no doubt.

The news story I read about this clip was that it was done by a Russian who illegally went onto rooftops in Dubai to get some of the shots but was never charged with anything. No idea how he pulled that one off... 

But of course it does help filming/shooting from hundreds off feet high up in the air down into the city. Those are views that are spectacular without a doubt.

Some of the zooms are 99.9% post processing and not very hard to achieve once you know how to work a graphic editor with ease ins and outs but it was very nicely used in this example. It made me jealous too and I'm sure I will work on that for my clips as well 

The only thing I'm having a hard time understanding are some of the actual, physical camera movements (sideways). Twice it looked like he was moving the camera sideways for more than 30 feet. No idea how he set this up. Either he used a (self made) dolly and then ligned up all the shots in post again so it looks like a smooth ride. Really nicely done. Maybe some of you know how he might have done it... 

Regarding the time spent, I'm not sure if he really shot this all by himself as supposedly he was on vacation there (according to the news article). He shot from many different locations and there is only so much you can shoot while having all factors working in your favor (dusk, dawn, traffic, water fountains, illumination of the buildings). You can only shoot that between roughly 8pm and maybe 2am. That's not a lot of time for time lapse recording... You have to do that night after night after night. And once he was on the rooftop of one skyscraper I doubt that he only shot a couple clips and left again. He probably spend an entire evening up there to get as many shots as possible from that location.

I would say it took him a month or two to shoot the stuff (wouldn't be surprised if more even). Post production is a nightmare too and takes a long time but that's ok because you can enjoy the pretty pictures you took. The computer is the one doing the hard work.

Anyway. Nice stuff.