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Messages - hairybiker777
76
« on: May 22, 2014, 04:12 »
G'day folks, In the past, I've been advised in these forums that the best way to approach editorial captions is to do them to Shutterstock's standards, no matter which agency I'm sending to. SS have revised their editorial policy ( http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/announcing-shutterstocks-new-editorial-guidelines) so that you no longer have to supply the location and date a second time in the caption. In light of this, is the advice that I was given still good? FWIW, my other agencies are IS and BS... TIA
77
« on: April 14, 2014, 02:32 »
> Are all the numbers matching when you click Editorial only? Yeah, that's what I get... the date that DeepMeta defaults to when I click 'editorial' is the same date as in my editorial caption, and the country in the drop-down is right too. The date is the same as the date that Photoshop, IrfanView and Windows all say is the created date. And it must be right... the time that goes with it is 06:57AM and it *was* an early morning (for me) shot. I'm not up at that ungodly hour unless it's to shoot photos  I wondered if it might be down to something as minor as missing commas between city/country or month/year, but I see that I have plenty of editorial images like that already accepted at IS...
78
« on: April 11, 2014, 21:13 »
Thanks folks. No solution yet, but following your replies I got a hold of IrfanView and ran it over my problem images. EXIF and IPTC data both show the same date that I used in my editorial caption, so it looks like someone (or some software) at IS was having a bad day. I'll post again when it gets resolved.
79
« on: April 08, 2014, 02:45 »
Hey folks,
I've had a couple of editorial images rejected twice each this week, for the caption date supposedly not matching the EXIF date. I used the date that DeepMeta provided when I flagged the image as editorial, and I see the same date in Photoshop and Picasa, so I'm at a loss to know what's wrong. I haven't knowingly stripped or overwritten any of the EXIF data. I've logged a Scout ticket but I'm keen to hear whether this is a common problem for those of you who submit editorial images to IS. I've never had a rejection like this before, but these two images have both been knocked back twice, so there's something in there that they don't like...
TIA
HB
80
« on: March 25, 2014, 20:11 »
G'day folks, This photo of mine: http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-37187770-garden-island-naval-base-hammerhead-crane-sydney.php?st=7445407was taken at the Garden Island naval base in Sydney. My keyword tags include 'Garden Island' and 'hammerhead crane'. If I search using 'hammerhead crane' then iStock finds the image. If I search using 'Garden Island', it doesn't. This appears to be because 'Garden Island' isn't in the CV and so it gets broken down into two searches - one for 'garden' and one for 'island', neither of which match the image. The only way to find it is to put 'Garden Island' in quotes, which stops it from searching per-word. I don't imagine that your average iStock customer is clued-up to the point where they would know that terms outside of the CV have to be treated like this, so what's the best way to make sure the image gets found by a search? I know you can ask iStock for a phrase to be added to the CV... that seems the best option to me...
81
« on: March 17, 2014, 16:36 »
I'm having some weird experiences with them at the moment... I have some images that have been waiting for 8 days, but I put another batch up last night and some of them been approved by this morning. The rest of last night's batch are all still at pending status. I'm wondering if images in certain categories either get prioritised or pushed through to certain reviewers... maybe there's relatively little traffic in the categories that my accepted images from last night fall into.
82
« on: March 17, 2014, 02:50 »
> Yup, thats what I've started to feel too. Btw what software are you using for noise reduction?
I use Dfine (one of the Nik Software tools) most of the time. When that won't do it, if the noise is in some background object that doesn't matter too much then I'll blur it.
83
« on: March 13, 2014, 23:57 »
I'm not sure I agree entirely with the advice to always shoot at the lowest ISO. I guess it's different for everyone but I've found that camera shake and too narrow a depth of field have been more of a problem for me than grain in my images. There were plenty that I thought were great until I starting routinely viewing at 100%, at which point I found out that they weren't sharp enough, for the reasons above.
I was an obsessive ISO100-no-matter-what guy up to that point. These days, I go for f/11 - f/16 and 1/1000 - 1/2000 in a lot of my daytime work whether it's fast-moving or not, and I let the camera set the ISO to match. This means I'm often at ISO640-800 but it's not a problem in decent light, and certainly not when I run the images through noise reduction software. Bottom line for me is, software can often remove noise to the point where it isn't visible at 100%, but nothing is going to fix a blurry or wobbly image.
84
« on: March 11, 2014, 20:56 »
G'day folks,
Please can someone explain the best way to resubmit caption changes to editorial images using DeepMeta? I had a bunch rejected for incorrect use of uppercase in the caption, and DeepMeta won't let me change the caption... it says the caption can only be changed on images that haven't yet been uploaded.
I'm not sure whether I should add the same JPEGs to DeepMeta again, or if there's a better way to approach this problem. I imagine that I should add them again and use copy / paste to rows to copy the category information etc over from the rejected images to the new batch before sending them up again.
I took a look at doing it directly on the iStock website using their resubmit option, but it seems that I lose all the category information if I do it that way, as well as any tags that I fixed up in DeepMeta.
TIA
Nick
85
« on: March 11, 2014, 06:49 »
G'day folks,
I've been with BigStock for a couple of months, and I got accepted at iStock at the weekend, so I've made my first submission to them today. I've found two major differences so far:
1) iStock has a controlled vocabulary where various words and phrases all resolve to the same thing, therefore similar tags are unnecessary and in fact it takes more time to go through the submission process, as you have to confirm what each word means. BigStock doesn't have CV, therefore the more words you enter, the better.
2) iStock and BigStock do not agree on editorial caption format. One example would be that BS want the city and country in capital letters, while IS will reject an image if it contains words in the caption that are all uppercase.
For those of you who submit to multiple agencies with conflicting standards, how on earth do you go about it?!
TIA
Nick
86
« on: February 26, 2014, 20:37 »
G'day folks,
When photography is a hobby that occasionally makes money in your spare time from stock, portrait shoots, events etc, what are the pros / cons of registering a company and putting your income and expenses through it?
I'm spending a few $ on nice gear like everyone else here, and wondering whether I could make any of it tax-deductible by putting it through a business while I'm still on the payroll as a regular employee in a job that has nothing to do with photography. I guess it can't be as easy at that, otherwise everyone would be creating companies and putting cars, property and everything else through them, but I'm keen to learn how those of you who are semi-pro / earning an income from photography while still doing regular salaried work in another industry handle your finances.
FWIW, I'm in Australia...
87
« on: February 26, 2014, 20:19 »
I've been back and forth with BigStock several times about this, after searching for my own images and discovering that I couldn't find them if I was using words that only existed in the title and not in the tags. First BS assured me that title / tags / description are all indexed & searchable, then they said - quote - "our search algorithms vary"!
Luckily, I found a link that allowed me to add new tags to already approved images, so I've been round all my images and made sure that certain important words in the title now also exist as tags... I hadn't been able to find that page just by browsing around in the "my account" area.
For BS at least, it seems that it's only about the tags...
88
« on: January 22, 2014, 01:34 »
G'day folks,
BS have advised me that titles, descriptions and tags are all indexed/searchable. However, I have an image with a certain word in its title, and a search for that word returns no results at all. It's an Aboriginal place name, so maybe that's the problem... maybe words that aren't in their dictionary don't get indexed. Does anyone know for sure exactly which fields are searched when someone looks for an image? Does anyone have a weird word in the title for one of their images and they're able to find it by that word?
TIA
HB
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