January 2008

I picked six of my best shots and uploaded them to PhotoShelter this morning. Hopefully they are good enough by their standards to make the cut. The ETA for a up or down vote is about a week. Wish me luck!

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I got pointed to PhotoShelter Collection by Cycling61’s great blog post on PhotoShelter and stockphotography. I have applied to PhotoShelter and I am in the process of uploading my initial images.

PhotoShelter Collection looks like it could be really good for photographers since I get to set my own price. They also use fotoQuote to help you set the price. Cycle61’s prices came out between a few hundred and $1000 dollars. If those are my prices then I won’t have to sell many to make my goal of $1000. they also handle news photos which is great since I plan to shoot some local pro and college soccer.

Designers and photographers should check out PhotoShelter Collection for sure!

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BigStock accepted my Elephant shot! I am totally excited! I got some skin in the game. I have about 6 other shots to upload and I am going to send them to BigStock for the time being, hopefully someone thinks they are good enough to buy.

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Went on a little walk around this afternoon and saw this fern growing and thought it looked cool.

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So far I have been rejected by iStock and Dreamstime. I only uploaded one image to Dreamstime and it was rejected for composition and poor lighting/exposure. When I look at the image again I can totally see that those reasons are valid. iStock rejected me with the old

These images are very similar in subject matter or style.

I had uploaded the elephant and 2 of my daughter. The ones of my daughter where taken at the same session and did have a very familiar feel but the trust worthy elephant shot was not. It is going to be a bit of a challenge to build a portfolio with a lot of variety in the next few months.

FYI here is the elephant shot.

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I collected a bunch of great links when I was investigating starting out in MicroStock. I hope you find them as useful as I do.

First check out what is most popular on iStockPhoto BigStock Photo and Dreamstime These will give you a great indication of what sells. Hint, people in suits with laptops! Select photos if possible to look at all the popular photos, otherwise you will see a lot of vectors.

Then read What is stock worthy

Designers are your main buyers, get into their heads with Think like a Designer

Compistion is key not only for stock but good pictures in general Really long article on composition

Get some good feedback on your images from critique forums - iStockPhoto Critique Forum and my favorite the Digital Photography School Critique Forum

I great overview on the market The Market for Stock Photos: Improvise Overcome and Adapt - New Game, New Rules

Then go show off in the OpenSource Photo Show Your Stuff forum

Finally hang out here and watch some amazing photographers show how it is done Strobist Flickr Group

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With all apologizes to Tom Petty (do I have to apologize to Nirvana now?!?!?) waiting just sucks.

I finally got off my butt and picked a few pics to upload to some microstock sites. I had to upload 3 to iStock to complete my application, iStock says that will be 2 weeks before they are done. I uploaded one picture to BigStock, they don’t appear to give any ETA and lastly I uploaded the same pic to Dreamstime who gave me a 44 hour ETA on a decision. To top this all off I am waiting for my scanner so I can get Model Releases scanned in since most of the “good” shots are of my daughter.

I guess that leaves more time actually taking pictures. I can see a lot of time is going to be spent simply managing my portfolio on all these sites. I see a big opportunity for someone to write some software to make this easier.

If you have any tips on managing multiple microstock sites at once, I would love to hear them via comments.

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Firefox

Simply put there is no better web browser on the planet. As a photographer the last thing I want to do is sit around and wait for the web to load. If you are using Internet Explorer you are wasting time. If you don’t have FireFox already
You need FireFox to use anything past this point.

FireFox Exif Viewer

This is a great addon to view Exif data of images on the web. Ever wonder how someone took a picture. Exif data records all the camera settings used to make the photograph. You can download it here.

Zoom Fox

Think you might have spotted a UFO, Bigfoot or the lochness monster in a photo. Download Zoomfox and zoom in nice and tight. Get it here.

Flickr Fox

I can spend hours browsing around Flickr marveling and all the amazing images. This handy plugin lets me do that while still pretending like I am doing actual work. Browse and search flickr photos in a sidebar. Flickrfox provides an easy way for Flickr group administrators to monitor their group pools. Get it here.

iStockPhoto Search Plugin

As you can tell by the title of this blog I am into stock photography. When I get an idea for a photo I run a quick search to see what other photographers have done on the subject already and how they are selling. This search extension gives you a handy search box where the google search box is. Get it here.

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