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Messages - hairybiker777
26
« on: September 18, 2015, 23:04 »
I did all that stuff to begin with, to fit in with the iStock "controlled vocabulary"... "large group of people", "selective focus", "elementary age child" and so on. I very soon grew tired of it and for me at least, images without it don't seem to sell any worse than those that that have it. I still use "abstract", "backlit", "motion blur", "silhouette" and a couple of others that I'm guessing people might use as search terms, but that's about it.
27
« on: September 06, 2015, 23:52 »
I just tried this. I have an image that IMO is one of my better ones, shot into the sun with strong late afternoon light, and just the kind of image that I imagine the pre-review software will weed out as being sub-standard. When I resubmitted it with the "previously submitted content" flag set, it got rejected immediately with the exact same reason as the first time. I don't think SS have had human eyes look at it on either occasion. Extremely frustrating... I seem to have gone from near-100% acceptance to near 100% rejection in a couple of months. Sales there are down too! Luckily, this has coincided with a nice upturn for me at FT since the FT/Adobe love-in started, and all of a sudden images seem to be selling a lot more in the $10-20 range over there compared to predominantly $0.33 - $2.30 at SS. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away 
28
« on: August 18, 2015, 05:33 »
> What would exposure compensation do that you could not accomplish in Manual?
It would reduce the chance of over-exposure. The point I was trying to make was that I was shooting in an environment where the light levels were changing all the time - partly because of the weather and partly because I was shooting back and forth across a wide field of view, one end of which was pretty much into the sun. The action was fast moving - literally split-second stuff with surfers - and I didn't have time to be piddling around with the ISO setting, so I wanted to lock in the aperture and shutter speed that I needed, and have the camera worry about the ISO. I needed to avoid highlights blowing out so I wanted exposure to be safely "under".
29
« on: August 18, 2015, 02:16 »
Hi folks,
I often set the shutter speed and aperture that I want in manual mode, and set ISO to auto. I had a situation at the weekend, shooting the ocean in bright sunlight, where I wanted to be one or two stops under to minimise the chances of highlights blowing out. I found that I couldn't set exposure compensation... I could only set up a bracketing range, which meant multiple exposures for every one that I wanted to take. The light levels varied a lot across the area that I was covering, so there was no single "right ISO"... what I needed was to be x stops under, no matter what the light, with a fixed shutter speed and aperture and automatic ISO. Is there a way to do that on a 6D?
TIA
30
« on: August 18, 2015, 02:07 »
I had an initial rejection from SS and after feeling sorry for myself for a year or so, I had another go (or two) on the same account and got accepted. I don't they're so snooty as to care so much about whether an account has lain inactive for a long time or not.
31
« on: July 24, 2015, 23:48 »
Why don't you submit a few batches without the EXIF data and see what happens, then your assumed "software" won't see exposure time, ISO, aperture, etc.
Great idea. I wouldn't be surprised if they reject images lacking EXIF data though, certainly for editorial stuff. Whenever I've got the date wrong in an editorial caption, they're on it like a hawk.
32
« on: July 21, 2015, 21:41 »
Yep, driving me mad at the moment... I normally get nearly all my images through but I've been getting mass rejections, and it's not as if I'm submitting different or lower-quality stuff all of a sudden. Some made me wonder if software rejected them without a human ever slapping eyes on them... rejected for focus/sharpness when I'd shot on a tripod at f/22, focusing at 10x in live view. The images also contained some light trails which were a bit fluffy as you might expect, but anything that possibly could be sharp was pin-sharp.
The more that time goes by - and this goes for all of them, not just SS - the more I come round to the idea that they'll slap any old rejection reason on an image if they perceive low commercial value or they already have lots of similar images. My best one this week was from iStock, who rejected an abstract nighttime long exposure with a couple of blurry human silhouettes because it didn't have a model release.
33
« on: July 09, 2015, 21:19 »
I get a lot in the sea off NW Africa too! Guessing it's the Canary Islands.
34
« on: June 30, 2015, 20:48 »
Volume same, value up around 33%. Small port though... we're only talking a few more Big Macs, not early retirement
35
« on: June 12, 2015, 02:02 »
I wouldn't have down-voted it, but I seem to have lost my vote-down button altogether. It's an outrage!
36
« on: May 31, 2015, 02:07 »
Yep, chill the heck out Pete. I hope I never respond in such an over the top way to another user of this forum.
A couple of thoughts:
1) the sites you mention weren't always well-established; somebody had to give them a go in their early days when little was known about them.
2) buymyphotos isn't a bleed-you-dry / pay-you-peanuts site; the prices are set by the 3rd parties who create the "missions", and many of them are in the $50-100 range. It's at least worth checking out something that can generate the equivalent of 200-400 basic stock image sales in a single hit, hence my question.
37
« on: May 30, 2015, 17:28 »
It's a funny old game... I have some - I think - decent travel shots in my port, but they're outsold at least 10:1 by fairly mundane shots of public transport trundling around. That's one of the things I've learnt in my 2 or so years in stock... there's often a difference between what you would call your best work and what will actually sell... it's more about supply and demand than quality, at least some of the time. It's good to take heed of the agencies when they say they're short in a certain category.
It's a good idea to read some of the many tutorials that are out there, as there are some things that you might not do automatically... always shooting a scene in portrait and landscape for example, and leaving space for text. Some buyers need several images of the same thing and won't buy from you if you have just a single image, so submitting only your best shot can work against you. Once you start selling, you can do a Google image search to see where your work is being used - or not - and perhaps make changes accordingly.
38
« on: May 28, 2015, 21:38 »
I signed up and emailed them some questions / concerns a couple of months ago... never heard anything back from them and I don't see any new updates on the site in respect of the "missions" that they offer. Shame... it seemed at first like it had the potential to be a nice little earner, but I have no confidence in them since they didn't reply, and the site seems pretty poorly thought out in that it doesn't even extract keywords from your JPEGs (you have to enter them manually).
Is anyone else using this site?
TIA
HB
39
« on: January 22, 2015, 00:07 »
I just set up a site using Wix ( www.wix.com), which was free apart from the Paypal functionality and the domain name. It has galleries, shopping cart and so on. Wix has a bunch of different photography website themes, so you just start with one that is close to what you want, and modify it as needed. VERY, very easy. My site is www.nickwphotos.comHTH HB
40
« on: January 15, 2015, 02:44 »
Arrrg. They are finally starting to review my images, but they are getting rejected for not using a paper model release. My fault for not reading the submission guidelines close enough, but really? No Easy Release for DT?
They're a pain in the backside for model releases. They're the only agency I deal with who won't accept another agency's form. You have to use a generic one, or one of theirs. Fine, let the images sell on SS!
41
« on: January 12, 2015, 03:56 »
What model camera do you have? What ISO were you shooting at?
Getting back to your original question... there are numerous causes of grain/noise... having to brighten the image in post because the original was under-exposed is one possible cause and given the snow in the background of your shot, I wonder if that's the problem here. Spot metering would have helped there.
Alternatively, if your camera is a few years old and you were shooting at a high-ish ISO, grain might be inevitable even if you get the exposure right in-camera. Is the problem so bad that using noise reduction in post doesn't fix it up to an acceptable level?
42
« on: January 09, 2015, 17:43 »
Interesting to hear the complaints regarding review times. Although DT are my worst for sales, they're my quickest for review! As I work through my backlog, I'm routinely submitting 10-20 images daily and I typically find that they've been reviewed just a few hours later. A lot of my stuff is editorial, so maybe it goes to a different queue...
43
« on: January 08, 2015, 21:02 »
Funny how we're all so different. DT is far and away my worst performer (my other agencies are SS/IS/BS/FT) and the only reason I haven't dumped DT already is that they don't yet have my full port... I've been working through submitting a backlog of 400-or-so images that are already live with my other agencies, and I thought I should let them run with my full port for a while before making my mind up.
As a rough estimate, DT sales are running at about 1-2% of SS sales for me.
44
« on: January 08, 2015, 20:57 »
Well, I've tried with BS but I think I've reached a point now where the effort is just not worth it any more. After a year or so in the game and with around 400 live images, SS is far and away my best performer with IS sales running at about 50% of SS, and BS running at about 20% of SS.
BS can keep my current port but I can't be bothered uploading to them any more. Shame, as they were the first agency I went with...
45
« on: November 19, 2014, 17:41 »
Currently in the middle of my best ever run with SS. Mind you, I'm pretty low-volume... I'm talking about 10-12 sales per day as opposed to a more regular 1-4. I'm also 99% editorial so perhaps not a great gauge of how things are going generally.
46
« on: September 26, 2014, 15:40 »
You did an engagement shoot and hope to profit from those intimate, personal photos in a microstock environment?
I hope your model release explains that to them.
They're close friends of mine, and it was agreed at the outset. The lady has posed for stock images for me before... there's no sleight of hand going on here. In the end, I sent a few of the b&w images into SS (email to submit@) just to get some feedback on them. Their view was that it would be better to submit the colour images.
47
« on: September 25, 2014, 18:25 »
After a week of no sales whatsoever, I've had a few good - for me - days... if anything, better than before because I'm not getting any $0.25 sales now - everything is in the $1-2 range for me so far. Maybe the bloggers who only wanted XS are just * it up after sulking for a few days, and realising that iStock is still orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring a tog to get their shots...
48
« on: September 25, 2014, 00:13 »
I'm not a vector guy - don't know if that makes a difference - but I use WinSCP to do the upload and then go onto the website to set categories etc. Never have a problem with it.
49
« on: September 21, 2014, 22:01 »
Haven't sold a sausage with them since the changes. IS normally makes me about 50% of what I do with SS, but I haven't had a single IS sale while SS has carried on as before...
50
« on: September 13, 2014, 17:09 »
Still no decent detail on which channels our images are selling through in the new website. That's the one thing I was hoping for!
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