Hurro...

For conventional stock you will need a model release for the jockey, and if the horses have visible brands that are obviously stable brands (as in burnt-in tatoos, not branding on harnesses etc) you may need a property release for the horses.  For editorial you obviously don't need any, but I suspect editorial horse racing photos may not sell that well in the scheme of things.

I have some shots of harness racing as general stock where the faces of the riders were obscured and I did substantial editing to remove/obscure sponsor logos and horse brands.  I've also got some I'll put on SS as editorial at some stage, but havn't got that far through my 'must edit and upload' folder.

For what it's worth, they don't seem to be stellar sellers, but one of them has done OK on all of my sites:


Because racing is a logo rich environment, with everything from the tack, buggies, sadles, covers, numbers, fences, railings, jockey's clothes and even the horses themselves in some way marked with potentially copyrighted logos I personally think the of the level of editing required to make the images acceptable RF stock is too high to make it economic in pure money terms.  ie: unless I luck in with a logo free race image when I'm covering the races for the paper I wont be submitting any more of them to non-editorial stock agencies.

Cheers, Me.

edit: Doh.  Double post. 

I dunno...  It seems to work OK for the test searches I did for some of my images.

Relevent ones were in the first one or two pages, and not so relevent was down the back of the pack.  And I'm not a 'high performance' contributor, quite the opposite in the scheme of things, so I don't think that has a large bias on the results...

I'd be assuming that the largest effect will still be the combination of keywords, and their relevence relative to the description phrases or text, and categories picked.  Dunno how it works, but seems fairly fair to me.

Chellyar..

It's fall here in the land of OZ.. 

Ditto here, I'm across the ditch, just south of Christchuch, NZ.

Awwww.. No fair.  ;

Hi Sharply...

You are right, but you have to remember that for some of us it is just a hobby...  For some it's a full time job, some do it 'on the side' as professionally as time allows, others only peck at it once a month.

While this industry has great potential for generating a very good income, it is also accepting of all levels of input, and to some extent skill.

For my part I plod along with stock, only adding a few non-specialised images a month to my portfolio, I average about $150/month or there abouts.  It helps with the finance on some of my gear, which I'm happy with.  That's enough for me.

Sure, I'm a wee bit jealous of folks who are doing very well in this game, but only because I'd like the money without the work.  I'm sure you've put in a lot of hours to get to the 150/day mark, and I'm sure that Logos has put in a tremendous level of effort to get where he is.

I put in a lot of time and effort with my sports work, and I get a fair return on my efforts there.  I muck about with stock, and it pays pocket money.

I think you're expecting too much of the average microstock photographer as well...

The people who are 'good' at photography, and are able to create good images will benefit from specialising in one area and moving to create world class images.  Those who do not have the level of natural ability required will be better off covering a lot of bases to get sales.

At the end of the day photography, as with any creative endevour, requires a level of natural ability and, for want of a better word, 'nack'.  Some people can pick up any camera and shoot class images, others struggle for years though photography classes, clubs, online forums, and reading every book in the library, but still take fuzzy over exposed photos in full auto mode.

I really do believe that if someone is struggling with high rejection rates and low sales for more than a couple of months in this game, they would be better off selling their camera on Ebay if they ever want to make money in stock photography!

Cheers, Me.

Hi Steve...

All it would take is a hook in the header includes to put up 'I'm broke, please try later' messages, I did that for all the complex sites I coded, although I'm not in the web dev. game any more...

(Thank goodness, sold my online business in 2004...  Too much pain, not enough gain!!!)

Cheers, Chris H.

Ditto with a bunch for me, 28 of them..

Odd that the thumbnails and scaled image is ok, thry obviously lost the full res images in the outage...

Good to see it's not just me...   

I wonder if it is a timezone thing for the cookie?  I'm GMT+12, what timezones are you folks in?

It did work for me a few times back when I first joined, but I've not managed to post in the last few months...  Very annoying, there are some interesting threads on SS, and because Jon & crew don't instantly stamp out conversations about other sites and SS itself it's the one other micro forum I'd feel happy paticipating in....

Cheers, Me.

Trivia Questino Phil...  How are you seeing which images went into there?  From the email they sent, or is there a quick way on the site to check?

I got an email a wee while back about 5 images that probably deserved to go in there, but now I don't know which ones they were, and I didn't keep the email...

Hurro,

I've been using exifer for doing keywords etc, and was wondering if anyone knows of a different/better standalone tool?

The thing that annoys me about exifer is that I can't just copy'n'paste in the keywords in a comma-delimited list, or something similar, you have to add them individually...

Cheers, Me.

For your foam over exposure, use an incident meter, and go 2.5 stops under it's reading...  Or narrow spot meter and 2.5 under.  Coming from the film days that is, I use a sekonic spot meter.

I used to take quite a few waterfalls and other 'nature' shots on MF and 35mm tranny.  Havn't been near the bush with my camera in years...  Should do that, given that NZ is clean and green  (Yeah, right).  Problem is that I can't see them selling well, and with young kids it's a bit of a mission getting away to enjoy photography just for the sake of it...

Nice PS work Miz, I would have stuck that one on the archive drive and forgot about it.