Hopefully I can upgrade to a 5d before TOO long, but the photographer earnings have been pegged for a few other things first.

You'll be buying the 24-70 first wont you? :-) That 28-135 IS will be not so hot on the 5D's FF sensor wide open. (as per your review comments.)  Or did you already get the 24-70?

I got the 20D, then spent up on lenses... When I'd paid the finance on the lenses I got the 10D and 1D bodies second hand.  I think I did things in the right order for the type of work I do.  Having the good glass significantly reduces post processing/editing time, and that is very important for the paper/sports stuff that pays for my 'toy' budget.

On a slightly different topic..

The biggest thing with good lenses is the improvement in out-of-the-camera image quality.  Contrast, colours and sharpness are all there.  If you're shooting for yourself or hobby purposes it dosn't really matter, you can spend 10-20 minutes per photo editing and touching up...  I'm doing three events this weekend for the paper, and expect to shoot 600+ photos.  I have to get 20-30 of them to the paper by 8am Monday, so they can pick maybe 6 to print.  If I miss the deadline, I don't get paid.  Simple.

This is also true if you're serious about micro stock / stock...   There's no doubting that a large portfolio is the way to go.  If you have to spend 20-30 minutes per photo and you want 2000 photos online...

Well you do the math.  But if your images only very slight editing you're going to get there a lot quicker, and your 'cost' price of yoru images will be much lower, getting into real profit quicker.

The camera body is slightly academic.  Pick the manufacturer you like, and then save, srimp, steal, beg so you can put good glass on the front!  (Unless you're shooting sports for money, get a 1D or d2x and just put up with the finance costs!)

Cheers, Me.  (As always, just my 2c worth.)

Hi-ho,

Yeah, I had that problem last night (This mornig for US timezone folks).  The FTP server will only work in passive mode, and not via my proxy so I had to use command-line ftp.

It was only one file, so not a big deal, but a little bit of a niggle..

..

Never noticed that msg before, one of their developers obviously has too much time on his/her hands..

'Me Too' 

Just got a download of an image that has only sold once before, the day after I uploaded it in January..

It all adds up....

Cheers, Me.

I'd say yes...

I've got 80 pics there, and it's done $45 since January..  It's slower than istock and shutter stock for me, but definately worth the effort if you're already submitting to another site.

If you're only going to submit to one site, either Shutterstock or Istock would probably be the better bet.

Cheers, Me.

I'm using a spreadsheet (in open office, Excel is a dirty word..)

I keep a column for each site and have status in there, P for pending X for reject etc..  have some hidden columns that give me stats to show reject ratios etc..  I also keep the title, description and keywords in there for each image.

On uploading I copy'n'paste the details to the relevent site as I've not had (up until now) an IPTC editor, although Istock dosn't seem to recognise exifer tags.

Works for me, but a small portfolio, and only occasionally uploading.  If I were busier with this endevour I'd probably have to get more organised and either find a tool or create a custom database to do the job, and possibly strip stats from the individual sites somehow.

Hi-ho,

In the scheme of things my portfolio dosn't earn all that much compared to some on IS...  Although I have had the best two months ever..  I first joined in November '04 but didn't really start uploading till around July 05..

my IS port: http://www.istockphoto.com/chellyar

I calculated the $/pic/year from the last two months earnings ($131.30) divided by the number of days (28+27=55) divided by the portfolio size (130) times 365.

ie: 131.30 / 55 / 130 x 365 = 6.7 $/year/image.

I've been keeping an eye on a few other users on IStock, graphing their # of dl's vs portfolio growth etc..  I wont share those stats as some people get a bit sensitive about that sort of thing..  But I do know that my portfolio is nowhere near as profitable as some other folks on IS...  I suspect a few of the high fliers are making a very respectalbe wage from there..

I noteiced that last night before I went to bed as well (11pm NZ) but it's OK now... (8:17 NZ)

Ya, Istock as over 27000 in the queue as well..

Any way we can tell the size of the queue at SS?

I have had this problem with Firefox but never with IE.

Hmmm,   that dosn't bode well for me, I use firfox on Linux  and was just looking at signing up at fotolia.. :-).  Not a single MS machine to be found in my house at the moment...