In my opinion, helping doesn't hurt anyone. The thing is, if the person is talented and determined, he/she will achieve their goals no matter if you help them or not. They will find out about those "secrets" and "tricks" on their own, by trial and error, books, internet. By sharing some info you make their life a little bit easier, giving them a bit of a shortcut, but you're not changing a big picture. And for the people who are not able to find out about those "tricks" themselves, no amount of help will actually help. It's a no lose situation. And helping others actually makes you feel nice, instead of feeling like an a**hole:)

yup i heard about that before - i think there is even a law suit against Getty for selling images for such low prices (RM ones I think). I think it happens when a buyer gets a large number of images at once, kinda volume deal, similar to subscription model. Still, wouldn't that sale allow you to upload one more image?

Aww! I got that email too instead of a payment! I thought noone's getting paid but looks like it's selected few that have to wait till end of the month. Not cool....

Elena, after looking at your images, I cant imagine that you wouldn't do great at Getty. Your stuff is much better than what I have produced so far so definitely go for it.

Thank you for your kind words:) Will try it out, hope I'll have some statistics to post at the end of this year.

Thank you very much again stock shooter. About 10 for for free - this is what their email seems to be saying, I don't have any official links to that info. Maybe they just changed their policy (I remember looking this up a while ago and it was 10 for 250 deal). We'll see if this really works:)

Thanks a lot stock shooter, this is very helpful. It looks like now I can submit initial 10 for free, so I should try this out.

About a month ago I sent test submission to Getty and today got a reply. What I am offered is "Photographer's Choice Placement Fee Collections", which basically means you have to pay 50 dollars per image placement fee, before any possible earnings. Is it even worth trying out? With prices going down and sales being slow, will I ever see my 50 bucks per image back? Anyone has experience with this?
All comments are welcome,
Elena.

I felt successful when I was able to leave my corporate job and do this full-time, which was about a year ago. I feel successful when I get good acceptance rate on a batch or when I add a very good seller to my portfolio. I expected my returns to grow better than they turned out to be in 2008, but there was still growth, so it can be called a successful year. I have done absolutely NOTHING over the holidays, didn't even take my camera out - it's the first couple of weeks in 3 years that I have allowed myself to take time off. I was feeling pretty burned out too! I do feel much better now and hope to increase my downloads per image ratio - that would be a measure of success for me at this point. 

Quote from: Perrush on December 03, 2008, 05:21

Quote

I am confused. If I had your calibre as a stock photographer.
I would not put up with all this crappola, and pull out every single one of my images from IStock.
That would be devastating to Istock, Getty or no Getty.

600+ DL / day is what is preventing him to do so.

Actually we should all (non-exclusives) pull are entire portfolios.  I'm sure IS wouldn't like that.  But why aren't we doing that ?? -> $$$$$$

Perrush, thx. money talks ! loud and clear. toe the line and fawn. i guess that's it.
like the lyrics to a Jethro TUll song, "they've got you by the b#lls!"

Well with things going like they are I don't think any of us would be really affected money-wise if we pulled our portfolios from Istock. For me right now it's 10% of my income, and getting smaller! So if they really piss me off enough, I'll do it. It's not going to affect much my income at all. However, me pulling stuff off the site is not going to affect them too! Funny thing buyers don't buy the very best image the library has, but the one that pops on the first few pages of the search. I just had that with Fotolia - they f**k around with their search mechanism too, and I have this image of three red gift boxes that I hate - it was taken 3 years ago when I had Canon Powershot G2 and didn't know what I was doing. It keeps selling like crazy, although there are hundreds of much better pictures of the same subject. So i increased the price just for fun, to 2 credits for XS and 125 for EL. Guess what - after that it has sold 6 times a day PLUS EL.
So the point I am trying to make - Istock will be still fine without us (unfortunately) as long as they manage to bring sufficient number of customers to the site, and clients will be buying stuff that somehow correspond to their needs and easy to find. It would take a mass exodus of micro photographers from Istock to actually hurt them, but then again, with things going the way they are we may just see that...

Cool thanks - will take a look!

Thanks - that helps a lot. When I am expected to produce the purchase history for an image - is this on individual image/customer basis?

WOW:)
Love the photos from the shoot. The lighting in beautiful.
Timelapse was fun to watch - looks like very efficient use of studio time, too.

right,  it doesn't necessarily mean exclusive, I should have phrased it better. However, the fact remains - you do have to track the usage, let's say the image is bought for a book cover, they would want to make sure another book won't come out with the same cover (that's why I said - certain industry). And they do state in the article above that RM payments have been as low as 2.08.
I personally saw complaints on some forums that people would get 20 dollars for a 5 year book deal on RM image just because it's a "high volume customer". High volume means good for the agency, but NOT for the photographer, because all he did was sold his book cover RM image for 20 bucks (for 5 years!).
Now with RF it's totally different story since you can sell it as many times as you want, EL or some other "L" - it's still RF.