The G9 is noisier than my A620??? give me a break... I don't have the G9 but it's got to be much better than that camera.

The nice thing about that hack is that it doesn't mess with the camera BIOS or anything permanent. It's a small application that you load on your card and you have the choice to load it or not when you start up the camera. If you want RAW on any of the Axxx series cameras, this is the way to go.

I'm not aware that Alamy requires GF for upsizing. I've always just upsized in Photoshop and save as quality 12 JPEGs.

Tried to pass inspection at IS in August 2004... failed and came back a year later and passed with flying colors and have been uploading since August 2005, but haven't been able to give it my full attention so I still have relatively small portfolio, but have been giving it way more attention lately.

I agree... I started this microstock thing back in 2004 and had a Digital Rebel. I never got rejections for sensor performance, noise, artifact or the like. It was always for composition. If you really want to take this business seriously, upgrade your camera to a DSLR. Even a used 300d would produce much better results than a new point and shoot camera (except maybe for the new Canon G9).

I searched for "fractals" at Shutterstock and got 95,000+ hits! I had a quick look at some of the newest uploads, man is there a lot of crap uploaded as fractals. Looks like people are uploading randomly generated Apophysis flames. The ones I have been working on have taken me quite a bit of time to get right and then the hours of rendering time. Way more work than photography. I'm going to upload a few and see how they sell. If I don't get much after a month or so, I'll just do it for fun...

I hate up the dilution factor. We are all going to run into at some point (still not sure when that will be), but it's coming. There can't be endless amounts of uploads without equal growth on the buyer side of things. My sales have been flat at SS for over a year, but then I'm a slow uploader. This is probably why I do much better at IS and DT.

What's going on this month at IS? We've barely half way into the month and I'm closing in on the amount I earned in all of November. I'm getting downloads from all over my portfolio like people are discovering some of my slackers... anyone else noticing this? Did they change best match again?

This happens to many people. They have one photograph that carries their portfolio. The school photograph has over 350 downloads which is over half you downloads! That is lucky indeed. I had a similar photo that was getting a couple of downloads a day and got to about 150 downloads and then IS changed the search engine and I've had about 3 in a year...

Same here. I've never been a huge uploader and it it shows with SS. My downloads there are about half the revenue as IS....

Alamy does both RM and RF and is considered a Macrostock site, but because they are the only one that is open to the general masses unlike Getty or Corbis.

The price increases allow Getty to switch RF corporate customers to iStock.  There are millions of corporate accounts worldwide with big spending budgets - iStock doesn't need the once in a while or ordinary Joe customer.

Are you kidding me! That's exactly the market they should be going after, the millions if not billions of people that have an occasional need to put a paper together for something be it a term paper or church newsletter or whatever. Microstock has opened the world of stock to the masses and they really should advertise more to the mainstream...

Time will tell. I'm sure IS has done a huge amount of market research around this and wouldn't raise prices unless they thought they could maintain the downloads. There will always be the people that shop by price and those that go for quality. IS has always had the highest quality with DT right behind and Shutterstock way behind. We'll see in about 3-4 months what happens...

Things have been pretty flat or down for me since May of this year. Partly my fault for not uploading anything for six months and then starting to upload again in September. I'm only on three sites:

IS = 42% of downloads
SS = 28% of downloads
DT = 30% of downloads

Dreamstime had a really good month for me, it looked like it would almost catch IS in the last week of the month, probably because it is more geared toward the European market and it wasn't a holiday over there.

It also points out that these three all have some type of "staleness" factor in the search engine. Older images keep getting fewer and fewer downloads which I don't really think is fair since many of the images I take are more timeless and not always on the cutting edge of what is hip... So, keep the uploads going to keep your portfolio "fresh" and don't take a six month hiatus like I did.