It's always going to be hard work to make a full time living from microstock (let's face it making a full time living from most things is hard work, especially as a free lancer) I suspect most photographers don't have the necessary mind set and skill set to do it - it requires the research, the imagination and an ability to get a decent number of photos out at a relatively low production cost, yet still have them looking happy and shiny and professional. You need to ba able to combine quality and quantity of output and not get stale churning it out week after week. Certainly not for everyone. And harder now for newcomers to get a critical mass of good images put there to build up a base where their sales are consistent enough to rely on.

For most professional photographers, I suspect the best role for microstock is shooting at the margins - extra income for shots where the production costs are already effectively covered for other purposes - then the marginal cost of the shots is low. I know of a few who use different names for microstock to avoid "diluting the brand"  of their high end work (and annoying fellow members of the professional organisations) - it's effective market segmentation to increase profits.

For the rest of us microstock is a hobby to cover camera costs, which it does very effectively without too much hard work.

Sounds like your main aim is to claim photography expenses as losses against some other main income. I guess if your tax laws allow it, why not? In Australia (my home) you need to have a significant turnover in the sideline before that is allowed, and I certainly don't have that from microstock.

It's actually almost impossible in Australia to write off small business losses against income from other sources  - usually the best you can do is carry forward the small business loss against future years' profits (as I understand it - that's what my husband's band does as they are marginal - some years a profit, most years just covering equipment purchases and depreciation). It gets a bit different if it's related to your main job/business, but otherwise the ATO is much more likely to want to treat it as a hobby if it doesn't make profits on a long term basis.

There ain't nothing wrong with slave labor when it comes to your own children! Or you can give them pocket money just as you would for other chores (but don't expect it to be a legitimate business tax deduction!).
My kids have scored a wii, computer games and DVDs as well as extra pocket money for acting as models or holding reflectors for me. All on a strictly unnofficial basis. So I don't treat it as expenses, and they don't treat it as income (but my stock income is so low, it's  still a hobby as far as both me and the Australian tax man is concerned . I'll have to talk with the accountant again about that, though if my income continues to rise - it's still easily a loss, as I plough it all back into computer of camera gear or software and technical books but it might be getting big enough to be a loss making business.)

Official employment gets messy. And what's allowed varies a lot with the jurisdiction. I think it's fifteen here in South Australia (and younger for stuff like newspaper delivery on bicycles!)  There  often seem to be exemptions for hours of work and age for models and performers and sometimes for kids working in a family business. In Australia the taxation on kids income can be pretty heavy to stop people from just funnelling business income to other members of the family in lower income  tax brackets (I've got to check up on this as my youngest has just been offered some (I think paid) singing and dance work, so I can play at being a pushy stage mother!)

istock will take minors as contributors  - they have a form for parents to sign to agree to take the fall if there are any problems (basically!). If you email contributor relations, they can help. My daughter wants to contribute audio so I investigated it earlier this year, but she hasn't got around to recording her application stuff, so I haven't gone any further with it. I don't know about other stock agencies though.
 

IS 82.57 % (I'm exclusive - but it was up near there before I went exclusive)

This is an image of the Character Emily the Strange. http://eu.fotolia.com/id/9288122

There is someone on DT with the same name but they don't have any vectors so I don't know if it's the same person or not.

The black cats are also from Emily le Strange (I was trying to hunt down the exact images he's ripped off before I posted publicly, but I'm sure you are right)

It's not just the subject matter it's also the type of lighting used. They are all the same - outdoors bright sun, pretty harsh shadows on two out of the three. Not only does this not show that you can use different types of lighting, it's also a lighting scenario not much loved by istock inspectors - only the muscle man one looks like much thought has gone into controlling the image lighting. (and that's an awkward crop with just the edges of the structure he's doing the pull up on showing - better to have come in closer and lost those distracting elements)

They aren't bad photos - but they don't show that you have a half way professional approach to taking images -  two out the three look like decent family snaps with rather distracting backgrounds rather than stock images. Now as one who has best sellers which shamelessly exploit my family snaps, you can get sales on microstock with this approach. But you have to take the snaps with an eye for stock, and to get in you need to be able demonstrate that you can do more than that these days.
If you are going to use outdoors sunlit shots, think about using a reflector to reduce the harshness of the shadows. Open up the lens to throw distracting backgrounds out of focus; think about the angle of the shot. Lie down on the grass and look up at the  kid jumping, so that you fill the frame with the kid and the sky and not much else. -the shot as it is has acres of boring sky, kid almost dead centre and not big enough in the frame and a very ordinary suburban backyard still in clear focus behind. The skateboarder is not very dynamic, has a dull suburban background with distracting shadowed trees with badly blocked out details - that alone would be enough to get a lighting rejection at istock (I should know, I have a collection of them!)

I can't even remember what I used for photo application - and it was in 2006 and standards have increased a lot since then. I think there was a landscape and a couple of objects isolated on white.

I think part of this conversation is due to the fact that microstock attracts two very different groups of photographers. One is the  set that regards themselves as professional photographers. They often have microstock as a only part of their photographic income, and/or make a large slab of their total income from microstock. They have worked hard and got good at it.

Another large group are the amateur photographers for whom it's a hobby. They have all these images on their hard drive looking for a home and only a small percent will be suitable for stock, but they throw everything into the  air and hope that some of it will fly. As long as the agencies are happy to go on inspecting their images and rejecting a large proportion of them but accepting the few half decent ones, and the photographers continue to submit despite the rejection rates, then it's a viable source of material for microstock. I think there's nothing wrong with the second group trying microstock, as long as they realise they aren't professional photographers, and aren't likely to get either good acceptance rates or decent dollar income, unless they actually learn a bit about both photography and the market  they are trying to access.
(I'm in the middle - I learned my lesson quickly about what's acceptable for stock, but decided that I didn't want to spend all my time shooting that, and just submit the more or less stock able shots from my general photography.)



The wedding photographers who haven't a clue are another thing entirely - once off photography like that requires training of some sort - either college or an apprenticeship with a pro or best still a combination of the two. There's no harm done to anything except the photographer's ego and the inspector's sanity if they get rejects from a microstock site. But fouling up people's special day because you are clueless is unforgiveable. I've been asked (quite frequently) to do event and portrait photography on a paid basis, and I've always said no as I don't have either the training or the experience to be 100 per cent sure in my own mind that I could deliver  what the client is expecting. I think that's my definition of a professional photographer. Someone who can take on a client's brief and deliver what is expected for the going market rate.

Susan S, which comes to the scary part of becoming exclusive, isn't it? How much say do you think you , as exclusives, have with the decisions of the site?
I don't think it is like that of a shareholder, but more like someone in the pecking order.  The higher your sales, the more preference you get, but unless you're a top draw, I can't see anyone getting the special treatment equal to that of being a shareholder.

I suspect on most issues individually I have very little influence on the Powers That Be at Istock. There have been a couple of issues where I think I and several  others acting as a group have had some effect
 Generally I think istock will listen when a significant number of exclusive/high performing (which I'm not) contributors all speak together on an issue - as with the recent wiki problems, there has at least been some admission that there has been something of an issue, even if the response is not as yet terribly satisfactory. The response only happened when some relatively senior istock members, including some who have been very supportive of the wiki system, said that there was something odd going on with wikiing, en masse.

Ain't thread drift great.

Returning to the original theme of this thread, I think SarahLens images are striking, if not necessarily quite stock. istock seem to run with artists like this who they decide can represent the edginess available at the site from time to time. Personally I've never had any problems getting filtered images up on istock - I've got HDR (mild!) and heavily saturated landscapes through. The key thing is that whatever you do mustn't muck up the appearance of the file when you look at it at 100 per cent.  It helps if you have a body of work in a particular style to upload, I think, rather than random heavily processed images. And of course getting composites through is reportedly a bit of a lottery. But then I don't do them, so it doesn't affect me.

In the past I've had pretty quick responses by emailing Jordan (that's the real name of the istock admin, Keywords) - I've had keywords removed in error restored pretty quickly. He's been a bit slower replying to emails recently though. If you add back the keywords yourself, he can't backtrack and work out who was responsible for removing the keywords incorrectly, so it's better to do it that way (or that's what he told me anyway).

My betting is that it will either be a former image of the week that had lots of exposure  or will be something that one of the mutual ratings groups get together and vote for (in the same way that some severely mediocre images get onto the most popular page).

I've got a 1/52 chance if it's one of the former!
 

I passed (the first try) in December, so a bit over six months ago now
 using versions of the three images in this lightbox:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&lightboxID=4388580
That's one trace, one vectorisation of an original watercolour and ink drawing, and one simple wine glass and bottle drawing - all were rejected for the collection until I did sme tidying up. In the case of the wine glasses I ended up redrawing them totally from scratch, so that the glasses and bottle were separable objects - so the one I passed the entrance exam with looked a bit different.
 

There currently appear to be no separate queues for exclusive and independent contributors at istock - both groups are getting photos approved slowly, with waits of about a week for all, but the vector queue appears to be moving fast for everyone. There currently appear to be no tangible advantages apart from upload limits (which i don't need) and the percentage (whcih is easy to make up on other sites) to being exclusive.