Posts Tagged ‘microstock’
Written by astoner on 31 March 2008
March was a pretty dry month for downloads, only got two from Fotolia. I was successful at getting a couple more pictures approved at most of the sites. I got some images approved on Dreamstime which is a new site for me. I’m really trying to focus on getting good images that will sell as microstock images. Everything I’ve been reading says you can’t really make any predictions until you get a portfolio of 100 images, so that’s my goal, especially for IStockPhoto.
My average portfolio size is currently 43 images, and that doesn’t include the sites I don’t have any images on yet.
Allen
Tags: downloads, microstock, Photography
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Written by astoner on 24 March 2008
Well I finally got my email Welcome Back to Shutterstock, meaning it was time for attempt number four to get approved to what is widely considered the most profitable microstock web site. The selection of the first five photos was relatively easy, I was just going to use ones that had been approved previously. Counting my most recent fourth attempt the images have been approved 3/3, 3/4, 3/3, 3/4 and 4/4 time. Three of them have been approved every time and the other two have done well.
Three of the last five have been accepted at other microstock sites, here’s my favorite, it even has a favorable review on IStockPhoto. Unfortunately none of them were approved by Shutterstock.com so it will be another month before I can attempt again. Hopefully that will give me a chance to get some more photos that may get accepted.
My biggest problem appears to be ‘Poor Lighting’, which on some I can understand and control, but some of the outdoors one I think might be a little difficult to control. Over the next month I’d like to concentrate on getting some more marketable microstock photos which should hopefully assist in me getting approved at ShutterStock, to say nothing of getting more downloads at other sites.
Here’s a nice FAQ about ShutterStock which gives quite a bit of useful information.
Allen
Tags: microstock, Photography
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Written by astoner on 11 March 2008
I got a chance to shot some still life photos with my new lens over the weekend. I don’t have them all keyworded yet for submission to the microstock sites, but I thought I would at least put a couple of them up here. When I first started the photo session I was pretty impressed with the new lens. It was really FAST even at maximum aperture I was getting shutter speeds less then 1/100th of a second. I thought it was a combination of the new lens and extra lights I was using. Needless to say I was quite bummed with I downloaded the figures to the computer and realized I’d just spent a couple hours taking pictures at ISO 800! UUUGGGHHHHH! I had forgotten that I had set it up to 800 to take pictures at a cub scout presentation. I kept a couple of the pictures that I had because I liked them compositionally but most I just deleted. So I set the ISO to 100 and started all over.
My main subject for this session was eggs from our flock of chickens. The picture to the left gives a give representation of the various egg colors. And yes the second one from the left is a light green and the fourth one is khaki. We don’t have any white eggs in the house usually so didn’t have one of them for comparison purposes. We might pick up some white eggs to paint for Easter as our colorful ones don’t paint up quite as vibrant, although they do get a nice rick color.
Another subject was some of our dogs treats. He wasn’t too thrilled about not being allowed to have them until I was done photographing them but he made out okay in the end. The one thing I like about the dog treat picture is I was able to do a good isolation and left plenty of copy space at the top of the image. As I’m comparing them the isolation on the dog treats is much nicer than the eggs. I actually used the Magic Extract tool in Photoshop Elements to remove the background which is why it blends in with the white background of the page perfectly. The egg shot doesn’t do that.
Really just need to keep practice and maybe get some more lights.
Allen
Note: Of course if the page background isn’t pure white it won’t blend in.
Tags: dog treats, eggs, microstock, Photography
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