In defense of the reviewer, it's not immediately obvious that those are chemical storage tanks behind him - they could be even grain silos. And yes, he might be an engineer, but he could also be any of a number of hardhat-wearing occupations. That being said, I agree that the image shouldn't have been flagged for keywords, especially since this is the area you specialize in.

...
I avoid taking pictures unless absolutely necessary if it isn't for stock.  I used to love taking pictures.

Yeah, I can say the same thing - taking pics is still fun, but it's no longer something I do in my off-time or spare time. Before I made the career jump, photography was a way for me to exercise my creative/artistic muscles and provided a regular and pleasant escape from the normal day-to-day stuff. I never saw it coming that I'd need an escape from photography, but like everything else, taking time off can pay handsomely. Finding a hobby as engaging as photography has proven to be a challenge.

Also, I've found that specializing in stock has the added downsides of working in relative isolation and a lack of camaraderie. If the feeling of being a part of a team is important to you, or if you enjoy interacting with clients, or you aren't strongly self-motivated, you will likely run into problems.

Canadians don't use distance/height/depth analogies use too much, but if we did it might go something like "100m ... that's about 1.1/2 hockey rinks deep!"

Congrats, and woohoo, too!

Exclusives get an additional 10% commission on ELs, so as a bronze exclusive you would have received $52*35/20=$91. But maybe you'd be a silver, which would mean $104. The highest possible commission on this sale is $130 (=$52*50/20).

Thanks miss Shady
Funny thing is i DID put a note for inspector in the description field pointing out this was a self-portrait.... seems they need to line up the team maybe...

I think some inspectors don't bother checking the description for notes. It would be awfully handy if iStock provided a message box for including notes instead of us having to resort to using the description.

I've often thought that (exclusive) contributors should be allowed to respond to a rejection by sending the inspector a message. If they allowed only two or three rejection responses per month it probably wouldn't bog down the system too much. I know this would be helpful for me when I get a rejection I don't understand, or when the inspector deleted some keywords he/she shouldn't have.

You need to explain what all those abbreviations mean, or at least put some meaning into them. Either that or add two more options: "Don't know" and "Don't understand the question".
As it stands I don't know what it is you're asking or why you're asking it.

I guess it's just me, but when I read stuff like "10 sales per month on scanstock with little less than 8K pictures online", "about 1100 images there I'm averaging a payout a year", and "I used to have 1-2 sales per month there with a portfolio of around 400 images.  I haven't had any sale since March though", the answer to "Is it worth a try?" is a resounding "Nope".

Maybe the search engine considers the addition of keywords as something bad, and the removal as something good.  It makes sense when people submit with few keywords to avoid a rejection due to them.

Yes, I'd agree that adding keywords might be looked at in a negative light, and removing them a positive one, but I doubt they have the resources/power to track keyword changes. It's likely they use only a single field in their database to indicate when a keywording change was made.

Quote from: sharply_done on May 24, 2010, 10:27

Yes, you have "stethoscope" and "white background", but you don't have "white" or "backgrounds", which you need because of the way iStock's search engine works.

Actually I tried stethoscope "white background", but I'm sure very few people would use the quotation marks.  And I didn't add the separate keywords because background alone doesn't make much sense.  Should I add both anyway to any "white background"?

Your keywords have to take into account how the search engine works, so yes, you should. There's also one big huge caveat: You will incur a search penalty once you modify your keywords - I'm guessing they do this to discourage/counteract people trying to game the system.

There's a really great comparison between the Canon 24-70mm and 24-105mm on The Luminous Landscape. Anyone who can't decide which of these lenses to get will know what to do after reading this: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/lenses/28-105.shtml

I mostly use the 24-70 and pick up the 70-200 when I need to get in tighter.
All this talk about the 24-105 has got me thinking about changing things up, though.

... Getty makes more profit on independent best-selling photos than they do mediocre-selling exclusive photos. But hey whatever, they have all the big bucks and they know what they are doing. <cough>

No, that's not correct. iStock profits the least  amount from licensing a non-exclusive image, albeit the difference in is marginal.

I don't think thats what the other two posters are saying.  If it was up to me all you people with good paying jobs would stick to them and stop sell your images cheap for pocket money. Then we Photographers who do this for a living could go back to making the big bucks, but thats not going to happen. 

Which is probably why sjlocke characteristically answered how he did - I'm sure that he's privately saying "Go for it, buddy - you won't regret it!"