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Messages - hairybiker777
51
« on: September 04, 2014, 18:04 »
Voice control. I'm over having to take my eye away from the viewfinder to change things.
52
« on: September 02, 2014, 22:13 »
G'day folks,
I got around to creating some public sets today, mainly 'cause I'm sick of SS nagging me about not having any whenever I visit the site. Is there any great benefit in it? I see that I can track earnings by set, but has anything else actually changed? I mean - for example - are the tags in those images now open to search engines or anything like that? Will they show up anywhere they wouldn't before?
TIA
HB
53
« on: August 07, 2014, 01:33 »
D'oh. Senior moment = accidental post. Can't find a way to delete it now. Sorry!
54
« on: July 25, 2014, 05:10 »
Point taken Beppe, thanks for the guidance. The glass is deliberately dark... the people were recognisable and I didn't want to have to submit it as editorial. The colour cast has been fixed up, and the image has been accepted at SS 
55
« on: July 24, 2014, 19:41 »
> Were you shooting through a window?
No, it was shot from outside on another boat. That's Sydney for you though... when the weather is good here, the light on the harbour is really blue in the middle of the day.
56
« on: July 24, 2014, 19:30 »
Very nice too! Definitely has a bit more pop now, and looks more appealing. Cheers
57
« on: July 24, 2014, 19:10 »
G'day folks, here's a thumbnail and a 100% crop of an image of mine that was rejected at SS. When I quizzed them on it, I was told that it is a little under-exposed and the white balance is "a bit off", and advised to use levels / curves to fix it up. What do you think the white balance problem is? I can only think that the colours are on the cool side and that I should perhaps add a little warmth to it. I should add that the upper deck of the boat is light grey... maybe the reviewer was expecting white there, hence the white balance comment. Maybe not! I await and welcome your wisdom TIA HB
58
« on: July 13, 2014, 03:26 »
Cheers for that. Is there then an easy way to see which of my images are selling at IS across all streams? I see the balance creeping up all the time, but DeepMeta - for reasons you explained - doesn't give me the detail, and I've never managed to find a page on the IS website that clearly shows me per-image sales in date order...
59
« on: July 13, 2014, 02:16 »
G'day folks,
My balance at IS, as seen on the website, is roughly double the total of the 'royalties' figure in DeepMeta. DeepMeta actually has the correct total in its status bar but the royalties don't add up to the total. Shouldn't they be the same?
TIA
60
« on: July 05, 2014, 07:57 »
Getting a little better each month for me at SS, but IS and BS have both pretty much ground to a halt.
61
« on: July 04, 2014, 21:18 »
Sorry, I didn't phrase the question very well... I was trying to say that I'm going to submit them as stock photos. I've already presented them in b&w to the couple, and funnily enough, I did the red dress thing too!
What I was driving at was that IMO they'd be more likely to get accepted by an agency in b&w because these shots just seem to take on another life in mono, but I'm concerned that if I submit them like that then I might miss out on stock sales because I expect most buyers looking for shots of couples would prefer colour and do their own mono conversion (if they want to)...
TIA
62
« on: July 04, 2014, 07:07 »
G'day folks,
I'm getting ready to submit a bunch of portraits from an engagement shoot that I did for some friends recently. They look way better in black and white than colour, but I'm undecided about whether to submit them like that... I would imagine that most folks are only looking for colour portraits. What is the accepted wisdom in cases like this?
TIA
63
« on: July 02, 2014, 16:59 »
Funny thing is, I'm getting almost 100% acceptance at SS and FT seem to be - more or less - accepting only the images that SS are rejecting! In other news, I had my first sale at FT overnight and am now a whopping 1.4 credits richer
64
« on: July 02, 2014, 02:32 »
G'day folks,
How is everyone going with reviews at FT? I've just joined them and they're rejecting more of my stuff than all the other agencies I deal with put together! The rejection emails are so vague - "the image has one or more of the following (20-something) problems". How are you supposed to fix anything up when that's all the information you're given?
What's more, they don't accept editorial images. I don't see how I'm ever going to build up a decent sized port with them. I only joined because they're considered "big four", but they're more like "big pain in the butt" so far... even the category chooser is hard work. I don't see myself staying with them for long... I suppose I'll submit the rest of my port and give it a few months to see if there's any interest, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Dreamstime next for me... let's hope they're a bit easier to deal with.
65
« on: June 19, 2014, 20:33 »
G'day folks,
I routinely receive two copies of every "status of your recently submitted images" email from SS; any idea what's causing it?
66
« on: June 15, 2014, 06:29 »
meh, do the categories even matter?
I reckon they do. I often get sales pretty soon after an image is accepted and this leads me to believe that buyers are watching certain categories and keeping track of new images arriving in those categories... perhaps even receiving emails alerting them to new images in those categories. I picture these people who are on 25-a-day plans searching in that way and making sure they get their 25 images no matter what.
67
« on: June 13, 2014, 18:43 »
The images were finally accepted this week, without me having to change anything. No explanation - I just got emails saying they had been accepted.
68
« on: June 13, 2014, 18:41 »
Turns out there was a bug, which it looks like they've fixed now - I spoke to support about it. FWIW, it was going like this for me:
1) Submit. See messages about misspelling.
2) Submit. See messages about duplicate / redundant keywords.
3) Go to 2. Never reach a point where it says the changes have been saved.
There was a workaround; you could submit if you deleted the redundant keywords yourself. As I said though, looks like they've fixed it now.
69
« on: May 30, 2014, 19:17 »
G'day folks,
I'm unable to upload using DeepMeta at the moment... I get an error " 32700 - parse error, not well formed". Anyone else having this problem?
70
« on: May 29, 2014, 18:52 »
In my brief experience with them, it seems the thing they really don't like is areas of solid black... which is a shame, because backlighting and silhouetting is often a big part of my images. The habit that I'm developing is to send a polite email to submit@... asking for a second review and also asking them to explain exactly why they rejected the images. So far, they have always got back to me within a couple of days with comments that are positive and saying "it's a little under-exposed", "can you lighten the greys a little?" or something like that, and giving me some text to paste into the "note to reviewer" box when I submit a second time. I wish they'd do that in the initial rejection!
It's a bit annoying because IMO these images work better when the silhouetting is pretty strong, but it seems they want to see at least a little bit of detail in there, so that's what I'm doing. Funny that as others have said, the originals have already been accepted - and sold - with other agencies, but hey ho... if piddling about a little bit is what it takes to get images accepted as SS, I'm happy to do it for the time being. I'm just glad that my stock income only needs to generate a bit of coffee money for me, and isn't my main revenue stream... dealing with reviewers would frustrate the heck out of me otherwise. I guess I'm still just in that early phase of being happy that any of my images are good enough to be accepted, and getting a buzz whenever those $0.25s come rolling in. Those of you who do this for a living have my sympathy... getting images accepted is a bit of a black art and a moving target, no doubt about it.
71
« on: May 29, 2014, 16:57 »
G'day folks,
I have some accepted images at SS where I got the categories wrong at submission time, and I'm struggling to change them. Here's how it goes:
1) Start in Catalog Manager, double-click the image. A popup dialog appears.
2) In the popup, change the categories and hit the "submit&save" button. See the usual messages about misspellings, duplicate keywords etc.
3) Hit "submit&save" again, as advised. See a smaller set of messages this time (no warnings about misspelling).
4) Close the popup.
If I then go back into the image, the categories are the same as before; my changes haven't been saved.
If I come at it another way - via the batch that contains the image - I go through the same process but the edit page comes up in the main browser window rather than as a popup. When I navigate away after hitting submit&save, I get a message "All edits you have made so far will be lost. Please save your work by pressing the save work button". But there isn't a save work button - only submit&save.
I've tried Chrome and IE11. What am I doing wrong?
TIA
Nick
72
« on: May 27, 2014, 02:06 »
No doubt in my mind that at least some of these are automated, done-by-computer rejections. I just submitted a batch of 5 and found that the poorer ones (which still had a good range of tones) got accepted and the best one of the lot (which had a lot of silhouetting) got rejected for white balance / exposure. A second review has been requested...
73
« on: May 27, 2014, 02:00 »
Nik filters all the way for me. Although they're hosted in PS Elements 10 in my case, I hardly use PS for anything except straightening, cropping, cloning and tagging since I got the Nik tools. I use Viveza (contrast, structure) and Dfine (noise) on just about everything and frequently use Color Efex to add a bit of pop.
Although not always suitable for stock, the new version of Analog Efex is pretty good too - much better than the original version anyway. Still a bit of a resource hog though...
74
« on: May 25, 2014, 17:35 »
G'day folks,
I've just been accepted at SS and am starting to send them my images, which have been tagged for IS ("medium group of animals", "elementary age children" etc) because IS has been my main agency till now. Does that tagging style go OK on SS, or is it better to re-work everything for SS? I'm reading tips/blogs etc on the SS site, but am also keen to get some advice from the trenches...
TIA
Nick
75
« on: May 22, 2014, 23:13 »
Started this year. Not looking like I'm in for an early retirement, but it's fun learning, and my shooting and my post have both improved, so it's been productive too.
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