The initial rejection at iStock concerned and confused me.  Okay, my photo history is travel, people, friends etc, and I do not consider most of my existing stuff to be stock.  But I have always been pleased with the quality and composition.  The first three submitted to iStock were taken from existing photos, and were rejected.

I spent a couple of weeks reviewing and analysing, and then took specific shots for the submission process.  I discovered many things in those two weeks.  The most important one was the noise issue; experiments showed me that spot on accurate exposure with my D200 eliminated all noise, whereas even slight underexposure introduced noise.  I suspect I have had a habit of slightly underexposing over the years (impression of colour depth, saturation etc).  The three new shots that were accepted were all exposed very accurately, shot in RAW then converted to jpeg at highest quality.  What also suprised me was that in addition to noise being eliminated, the shots were also tack sharp and didn't need any sharpening at all apart from the standard default +25 in ACR.

So important lessons have been learned.  I now know I can produce top quality tack sharp and noise free images straight from the camera - whereas in the past I found everything very acceptable, I can now see a huge difference.

I have never bracketed exposures in my life, but I can now see why professionals would want to do that and I will probably bracket in half stops myself in future.

As a newbie to stock photography (but not to photography or to business growth models) and having spent a lot of time over the last month researching the market and reading/listening to views such as those expressed in these forums, this is my view of the future:

Each new agency wants to get as many images on file as quickly as possible.  Yes, they would like the best quality, but in the early years may have to sacrifice quality for quantity.  That makes it easy for 'new' photographers to 'sign up'.

But as their libraries grow, I believe the market will change from 'quantity' to 'quality'; the successful stock agencies will be able to become more and more selective, and the best of them will start to reject many more photos.

Gaining membership as a contributing photographer will become more difficult at these successful agencies, and the 'new' or lower quality photographer will find himself/herself being restricted to the 'lesser' agencies'.

Because of this, higher quality photographers will gravitate towards the successful agencies, and be gradually paid more for doing so, through exclusivity deals etc etc.  A price gap will emerge between the 'best' and the 'not so best'.

I believe IS is already nearing this development stage, which is why many are finding acceptance of images more 'difficult' than elsewhere.  SS may also be nearing this stage.

As with all business models, eventually the market will become dominated by just a few players, with most of the 'new' start-ups and lesser quality agencies falling by the wayside.  At the moment everything is new and exciting, and new agencies are popping up everywhere.

My own view is that in the longer term it will be important eventually to align oneself with one of the big agencies, probably on an exclusive arrangement.

Hi

I am a new 'observer' of the microstock market and have perused these forums quite a lot, just gathering views and information.

Fotolia have just started to accept my images.

However, the number of downloads shown for their top sellling images doesn't seem to square with their claims of 2 million images, biggest agency etc etc.

Perhaps I am missing something, but I go to Fotolia and see top downloads of say 300 for 'beach', then do the same search at SS or IS and find two or three thousand downloads for their top selling images.

It seems that there are so many agencies competing for a slice of this market that statistics they publish need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

At the end of the day, to make money a photographer must be with an agency that has the power to SELL, and to sell in quantity.  My research of Fotolia suggests that sales there are very small.

Anyone have an opinion on this?

Hatman (Australia)