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226
« on: May 07, 2009, 12:24 »
Thanks for your patience, all I can say is it's a temporary pause, the resume date is not finalized - we are working to implement new methods for keeping things fair for everyone- The message on the site pretty much should say it all - most people are reasonable enough to be selective about their uploads, a minority are not - and those people should not be taking away resources from you folks. My last upload was almost 2 months ago when I stopped uploading since my submitted queue was stuck then at 42 (with FTP uploads of January-February) and it's still like that now. The weird thing is that the later non-FTP uploads all passed. I lost already about 200 FTP uploads last year, that vanished in the hayes, and I really don't understand any more what's going on at Zym. Three months or more in the approval queue seems a bit outlandish. There have been so many glitches before with the FTP, and now again with the 42 stuck for months (not one single cevapcici poo shot in it to be specific), that I totally lost track what Zymm has and what it hasn't. Now I learn here that the upload has been stopped for a minority uploading crap. I don't understand Zym any more. Do like DT, and set an upload limit according to approval ratio. This all seems like a total waste of reviewers resources. All I notice is that the sum of rejects and approved is about half what I have at DT. The rest, I guess, is somewhere dangling in the Nirvana. I actually gave up silently the first week of April. I'll check again somewhere in August, but in the mean time I figure I'll start with Panthermedia. Those shots will be on Zymm anyways.
227
« on: May 06, 2009, 03:46 »
Well I'm on a different time zone so I couldn't cope reading all yet. Actually, the idea of a United Artist stock site was launched by Rinder about 3 years ago. He researched the idea thoroughly and found out it would just be Another New Site with loads of capital needed. When I brought up part of his ideas again, it was mostly to create a wiki of the Ideal Site, to produce a sort of benchmark to judge sites against. And also as a stimulus for existing sites to abolish some very unfavorable recent decisions in the rush to the bottom line price. As for me personally, Dreamstime still is close to the "ideal site", and in a recent poll here, I guess for many. The subs are under control there, judged from an increasing RPD. For StockXpert and iStock, it's too early to judge, as probably Getty itself is still struggling with their strategy after the buyouts. Judging from some very remarkable personal messages, the vested stock sites are certainly a bit worried about a microstockers collective, but there is no reason for really. I was more thinking of a benchmark for existing sites, although the looming of an independent Mother of all Sites can certainly be motivating in taking the benchmark seriously  Technically, it's not that difficult to build a new site. LO and YAY have been built by one guy. The problem will be maintenance and balancing server load after a while, and those experts don't come cheap.
228
« on: May 05, 2009, 02:27 »
If we all can keep calm and stop our inflated artists ego's getting in the way, we may be onto something really good. What started this is that our egos are underinflated.  I don't have any idea about marketing, but using SEO can already solve a lot.
229
« on: May 05, 2009, 00:33 »
Will this be a problem for lookstat and picniche? It crossed my mind from the moment I saw the Captcha (see other thread). Isyndica will have problems too when they want to get hold of the categorizing. Prostockmaster probably too. Dreamstime has set the example.
230
« on: May 05, 2009, 00:00 »
Ok, your posting crossed mine so I will reply to this. Based on the response we had today? Not many. so I'm cutting out ! Good noite ! You all did Getty a great favour. Some people live on opposite sites of the globe Batman. While you're going to bed, others just woke up. Don't quit yet. I need some time to think it all over. The idea is very valuable and I think it is in the mind of most. There should be a wiki of the ideal site, and existing sites can try to match that idea, why not. You can have a loose confederation like the adult sites, or a unified empire like iStock. You will have to think more goal-oriented than means-oriented if you don't want Yet Another Microstock Site. There are simple answers for the subs concept, the exclusivity, the QC, the LCV, the search engine. The key entity in the concept should be the buyer. Some tiny examples of thinking out of the box: - Why can't we buy out Cutcaster and hire John as our CME? After all, like Stacey said... it's our content. - Exclusivity - nobody wants to give up his existing agents, but we can commit to upload our new images to site U as a first and keep it exclusive there for one month. After that, spread it out over the mob as you wish. - QC - none. Contributors are elected in, then do their own QC. We know our stuffs, right? LCV will be no problem any more. Three strikes out on inferior uploads. - Search engine: bias on newness and relevancy. Three kinds of keywords: essential (10), accessory (20), concept (10 from an exhaustive list) (replacing categories) note. Keywords can be wiki-ed by fellow contributors. Tackling relevancy from the start is essential. The current sites are totally winded up in a Gordian knot about relevancy/best match since basically, all keywords are treated equivalently and no way to change that any more after 5M images. Relevancy/best match is patchwork.Subs: replaced by "try at 1$ before you buy". Buyers need it for comps, don't take it away from them. If they want to use it for anything else than a sidebar or a blog (max 250px), they will need to buy the full license. Buyers can download full size at 1$ for inspection and comps. If they want to use it in a final product > 250px, then only they will have to download the full license.Purchase: listen to buyers how they want to be invoiced. Extended : exclusive buyout possible in the one-month exclusivity period - the buyer has the warranty that the image isn't sold to John Doe and 100 others. ... ______________________ note - The current keywords field can be kept as it is, to ensure compatibility with the current sites. Identification of essential and conceptual keywords can be done by repeating those keywords in an IPTC field that is not used by the current sites. Whatever is not defined there, is considered "accessory".
231
« on: May 04, 2009, 23:39 »
Then the independent gets successful, is bought out and you get screwed, or they screw you. Are you referring to iStockphoto / Getty / Jupiter? 
232
« on: May 04, 2009, 23:24 »
I'm getting an "internal server error" message when clicking on my bookmark, anybody else having this problem? It's the captcha they just added. Me thinks that it messed with the "logged in" cookie. Just type in the "submit.shutterstock.com" thing manually one time, and then re-bookmark. They are probably fighting against the third-party products that overuse their resources by parsing the HTML, like DT did before.
233
« on: May 04, 2009, 23:06 »
SS in my experience is definitely one that needs to be continually fed in order to keep steady earnings there. I'm not producing a heck of alot of stock imagery these days (8-10 images/ week) and it seems like SS needs about 20 or so quality images/ week in order to maintain decent sales.
Yes, with a minimum of 10, with a wide variety. It's useless to upload a series since you just pinpoint the temporary attention then on one subject.
234
« on: May 04, 2009, 20:15 »
After adding 150 January-February and some in March, I had a big fat BME in March with On Demand and Extended too. No uploads the last 2 months made my sales collapse by 65% in April. Apparently, you still have to feed the beast, more and more.
235
« on: May 04, 2009, 02:06 »
Well, I certainly agree with Lobo, Mr. Arcurs. I've checked your portfolio and I think you desperately need all the self promo you can get I don't care, since Arcur's blog is in my feeds. His most recent post " I spy with my little eye" of May 2 is quite instructive. Don't need iStock to find it.
236
« on: May 03, 2009, 23:09 »
rofl, you just wait till batman and flemishdream get going!  they work in tandem , like a tag team . i 'm surprised Flemish isn't here yet; he must be shooting some more male porn self portraits ! I just noticed this thread threat now. It's a new one but it has been here before after spamming unveiling a new service at SS, not iS. A glorified Filezilla that asks money, was the conclusion then. Of course, it was to be expected they would spam inform us more. Woohoo! They didn't even pay for an ad on MSG? Woohoo!What changed? A new user with the name of a Hurricane. Did she write a book on Ego-Rythm? Will you get a free bottle of snake oil signing up? Woohoo!Ah, let's be nice for a moment. You'll have to excuse me now. I got this great proposal from a Nigerian banker by email, and I definitely have to answer it. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. (Petronius) " The world desires to be deceived; so let's deceive it."
237
« on: May 03, 2009, 22:12 »
I think the weather frustrates me more than anything else. Its like the clouds are just waiting till I get set up, or there isn't a cloud in site and you end up with banding issues. The infamous banding of blue skies, right. There are ways to solve it, but they eat time.
238
« on: May 03, 2009, 21:58 »
Just tried Lookstat a little and the one feature that I would be really interested to see is tracking of groups of images. It was mentioned before - the idea is to track not individual images across sites but results of complete sessions. Yap, I asked for it before. This would be a most useful feature, since it would allow to calculate the yield of a total shoot.
239
« on: May 03, 2009, 21:53 »
Anyway, what are the practical differences between using sub-domains vs sub-folders? That is what is unclear to me. They just look like the same thing presented in two different ways. Will they both work if one day I change host and transfer everything to the new site with the help of cPanel? Will they both work in the case of the password-protected area? On Hostgator, subfolders and domains are physically the same. You will just have to declare in your CPanel that a particular folder is actually an add-on domain. The name of the subfolder should be the name of the domain. With your registrar, you will then have to declare the nameservers of your host, but the mapping from the domain to the subfolder is done by the host. For the Net, it looks like two separate domains though. The advantages are purely SEO. Google doesn't like mixed sites that much, and you will easily exceed the optimal number of keywords and the simplicity of the description. One of the exceptions is when one of your subfolders is a blog, related to the main topic (ic photography). A blog always draws more traffic than a gallery and the traffic might spill over to your gallery. Yuri Arcurs does it the other way round. Arcurs dot com is a blog, and the portfolio is a subfolder of it. The same holds for Lee Torrens. Reading comments around the usefulness of online galleries, most agree they are not useful at all, certainly not when they are in flash. Our agents do a fine job exposing our ports on Google. Only if your gallery contains images not available on stock, like assignments, events, weddings, specific editorial, sports, and you have a local direct sales option, a personal gallery might be worth the time and effort involved. Just my 2 centavos.
240
« on: May 03, 2009, 21:16 »
Is the guy playing chess and the little dude in front related? Well, they're both nuisances or aids in public photography.
241
« on: May 03, 2009, 21:01 »
The ones who hides their eyes , that's the one you watch! Ah obviously, you have been a spy too. Sunglasses are used (1) to hide who you're looking at ( turning your head 30 degrees away) and (2) in the event of a blast, you're the one who's recovers his sight first from the strong light and you don't get debris in your eyes. Speaking of difficulties doing public photography (on-topic), the main difficulty doing beach shots in the Phils are the kids, yelling " Piktyor" and always sneaking in behind the model to be in the frame. With 50% of the almost 100,000,000 population under the age of 20, they pop up literally everywhere. Ten minutes on a beach and you look like a Scouts leader, dragging a long tail of kids behind you. The bargain to make is taking their "Piktyors" with loud clicks, show them on the LCD, then erase them. After that, you get about a 10 minutes grace period with your model, and then the game starts all over. 
242
« on: May 03, 2009, 20:35 »
The driver in the first image has the right look. Shot him by surprise. I framed a long time on this street chess player, then suddenly pointed up. I wouldn't recommend doing this when you are a local, or worse, wearing a scarf, or you might end up as a Gruyre cheese. 
243
« on: May 03, 2009, 20:15 »
Haha nice one!! LMAO This obviously innate attraction to cams isn't limited to the military. Shooting the remains of the burned Christian part of a municipality ( the local Muslim commander thought they needed a "lesson") last year, I spotted a weeping lady near the remains of her house. All was gone. So I asked for a "piktyor" of this event, with her in the foreground as the dramatic victim, and this is what I got ( she first needed 10 mins to put on her make up). I gave up.  
244
« on: May 03, 2009, 19:53 »
It's sad that professional photographers are pushed away from opportunities like these where you can get real "close" without being a military photographer. Here the main problem shooting military is to prevent them from smiling, cheering and posing when they spot a camera. They would just fight to be in front of the lens, they can't resist this innate urge. Sometimes I have to yell, please look tough, like you're in a war! ( they actually are). Doesn't help much. The only way to capture them normally is to shoot them by surprise.  The rusted ferries here in the South on the seas between Indonesia, Malaysia and Mindanao are always prone to piracy or on-board bombings, so "secret" military is always present on the vessels. This happens when you try to capture this "secret" operation:  There ain't no fun shooting a war like that, when you always have to shout: don't smile, stop hip-swinging, be tough!
245
« on: May 03, 2009, 19:08 »
i won't mention the country as i adore that place so i don't want to give the impression it's a bad place. Singapore! Dystopia
246
« on: May 03, 2009, 13:06 »
Was diversity mentioned I shot shemales, but they don't sell, even in business suit with a headset and choking of pig flu.
247
« on: May 02, 2009, 00:40 »
248
« on: May 01, 2009, 23:21 »
Hmmm... that's interesting because I populated the Headline section in IrfanView but none of the sites read it as a title.
Only the keywords were read correctly.
Is Exifer a free program? I never had problems with Irfanview, except with the title at BigStock which sometimes takes a previous version of the title. Title = tab Origin, field Object name. Description = tab Caption, field Caption. "Headline" is not used on the main sites. Keywords: use the newline delimiter: it works everywhere, included Flickr. Commas and spaces don't work well on some sites. Watch out for Exifer... I had it corrupt photos, so make sure you keep a copy of your images. Yes it's free but apparently not updated any more. Irfanview is regularly updated and it has batch processing too (press T) with selected thumbs, add to fields and selectively change fields (check the Options tab). Ifranview uses the base IPTC definition, and that might be corrupted as to keywords by Photoshop. You'll have to remember to keyword after all Photoshop is done.
249
« on: May 01, 2009, 22:57 »
The best illustrators can make a 6-figure income with less than 1,000 images, some with as few as 300. Illustrations are a totally different game than photos. Anybody can push a button, but it takes a real artist to make good illustrations. If you look at the port of a contributor with a mixed set of photos and illustrations, you will see that the illustrations always come in front in #downloads/popularity. I don't think that technical quality for photos is very important, given a certain quality. Buyers don't buy undistorted pixels and no-noise since they mostly just buy judging the thumbnail. It's the usability and the originality of the concept that counts. If you are different and you produce shots that are difficult to duplicate, you will keep selling. All done in studio is easy to repeat given the proper models and props. Shots like that, when original, are shock and awe for 6 months, then will die because the copycats redid it, often even better. So, one should also concentrate on shots that are difficult to repeat. And never upload similars because they will compete with yourself.
250
« on: May 01, 2009, 22:44 »
Start a new stock site and live from the images of people that never reach payout.
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