As many of you know, I spend some time submitting my pictures to various microstock sites. I currently submit to five agencies – Shutterstock, IStockPhoto, Dreamstime, Fotolia, and StockXPert.
Lately I have been extremely busy and have little time to submit pictures. As I slowly started submitting a few, I noticed something very interesting.
What I noticed is that IStockPhoto sales have slowed considerably in recent months. In the past, IStockPhoto vied with Shutterstock as my top site and a few times took the lead. However, that has changed now.
Today, IStockPhoto is fourth for me in terms of sales. Only StockXPert brings less. Another problem is that submissions take a long time on IStockPhoto due to their archaic upload system and their own keyword vocabulary. As a result, it takes me longer to submit to IStockPhoto than to the other sites combined. It is even more annoying that after submitting the photo my shot is rejected for a keyword that is pertinent. For instance I had a picture of Jerusalem rejected for using the keyword “Israel”.
Another interesting thing occurred when I was searching for some photos for a friend a few weeks ago. I was rather stunned that, despite their claim to having an advanced keyword system, I was unable to find the pictures I was looking for. I had much better success on Dreamstime and Shutterstock.
Therefore, I have ceased submitting regularly to IStockPhoto. It simply isn’t worth my time. I will not close my account there though and I will submit pictures that sell well on other sites.
However, the future of IStockPhoto right now does not look bright.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 12:53 pm. 1 comment
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.
In this post I will continue discussing the main reasons photographs are rejected from the microstock sites today. I have already discussed copyrights, noise, and focus. In this post I will discuss framing and bad lighting.
Framing
In simple terms, your picture must not look like a snapshot. A snapshot is typically defined as those millions of vacation shots that come out each year of random things. More specifically, a snapshot is defined as a picture that didn’t require thought and looks like it. OK, so maybe that’s not so specific.
In order to have a properly framed picture, you need to pay attention to the layout of the objects inside it. For instance, watch what is creeping into the picture. Very often trees and other things find their way into the picture. If you find a branch coming into the shot from the side, use Photoshop to clone it out. Over time you’ll find yourself able to notice this when taking the shot and reframe the picture appropriately.
If you are taking pictures of buildings, make sure the tops aren’t clipped off. Many stock sites will reject shots of buildings with their tops cut off – even very tall ones. In general the entire subject should be in the shot – though there are exceptions to this. Distracting elements also should not be in the picture. When taking photos of the beach, try to find viewpoints that have the least amount of garbage – then clone out the rest of the garbage in post processing.
Another interesting aspect of microstock photography is that very often the shot that sells the best has the subject in the center of the photo. This is against the rule of thirds and will make many artists cringe – but the truth is microstock photos are made to be sold – not to be admired.
In my previous post I started to discuss what types of things will result in a rejection. I started with copyrights and in this post I will cover noise and focus. Many of these will affect how you take the picture in the first place and in theory should improve the quality of your photographs.
I will start with a discussion of noise. What is noise? Noise are those little out of color specs that you see in an image. It is most common in pictures with a high ISO and an underexposed image. All microstock sites are uniform in their hatred of noise. While in some print and display formats (such as video) noise is sometimes desired, in stock photography it is universally despised. All images must be free of noise. The easiest way to avoid noise is to not take the picture with noise in the first place.
Read on for how to do this as well as avoid other common rejection reasons.
In this post I will begin to discuss the types of things that will result in a rejection. There are a number of things that will result in a rejection that include
Copyrights
Noise
Focus
Framing
Bad lighting
Not stock worthy
Similar images
Releases
Over the next several posts I will discuss all of these in depth. At the end of this series I will include a number of sample images. Today, however, I will touch on the extremely lengthy subject of copyright protection. I will begin by saying that this is an extremely complicated subject that I know little about. For instance, I’m not exactly sure what the differences are between trademarks and copyrights. However, I suspect that most of us don’t really care. What we do care about is whether we can sell a given picture. Therefore I will simplify this discussion into what you can sell photographs of, and what you cannot.
Well, to be honest, this month sucked! My sales fell considerably with approximately a 24% decrease. Right now, I’m not currently sure what the reason for the falloff is, but I suspect that it is seasonal. Last year between March and April at Shutterstock I had a 24% drop in sales. I noticed that the sales drop seems to affect all sites – not just a single one. If the pattern from last year holds, then I should see improved sales in May as last May was a very good month for me. The good news, though, is my real estate jobs have been picking up, more than making up for the slack in stock sales.
The following are breakdowns of how each site did.
I had thought due to the fact that February is shorter, I would have a more difficult time getting good numbers. This turned out to be far from the truth, as a I had a new best month ever. My previous goal was to make $250 this month, and I wound up with $321, breaking the $300 barrier for the first time. I have decided, however, to not set my goal in March to $350, but instead to set it at repeating $300. The following is how each microstock site did for me.
There has been much debate about sites such as Shutterstock and IStockPhoto and whether they threaten the traditional stock photography business. The issue is of extreme concern to many photographers, who fear that traditional licenses fees of fifty to several thousand dollars per image are threatened by fees as cheap as a few cents. Many of those who make a living from traditional stock photography fear that their livelihoods will be replaced by amateur photographers who don’t know the value of their own photography. Many of those who have debated on this subject have focused on the price difference – people are more likely to buy an image for a dollar than an only slightly better one for five dollars. However, from my experience I don’t believe the issue is that simple.
