This is the last post of the Introduction to Microstock Photography series. I hope that this series has been helpful. In this post, I will go through the final set of examples.
This is a panorama of the Jerusalem city walls at night. The taking of the shot has an interesting story itself. I took this with my Sigma 80-400 4-5.6 OS at 400mm and 5.6. When I first submitted the shot, it was rejected due to softness. I was quite surprised at this because I used a tripod, mirror lock, and a remote shutter release. The tripod itself was on sturdy concrete. How could it be soft?
To my surprise, when I examined the shot at 100%, it was soft. The simple fact was, the Sigma was too soft at 400mm and 5.6. As a result of further investigation, I sold this lens because I could no longer depend on it. Eventually I will buy a new telephoto, but right now I rarely need one and I’m waiting for Canon to improve on their 100-400mm lens.
The next step I did was shrinking the size of the picture down. This often works when the shot is a bit out of focus. Shutterstock accepted the picture and it is a good seller. IStockPhoto rejected the shot – and it is an interesting point why.
In this post, we will continue with the examples we started earlier. We will start with what most people want from microstock photography…
This image was rejected for poor lighting. It is a complete isolation that took me some time to accomplish. I took this picture explicitly for stock. The result… I wasted my time. This is an example of why you should only take the pictures you like, rather than take pictures just for stock. If you take only the pictures you want to take, only the extra time spent adding keywords will be wasted if the image is not accepted or does not sell.
Interestingly, some time after this shot was rejected I post processed it a bit more and it was accepted.
