It has been a month since my last blog! So what has happened? I sold 4 photos at Dreamstime.com! Hooray! It may be a small sales but a gigantic step for my confidence in pursuing a photography career. With only a small portfolio of 29 photos with Dreamstime, I must salute this micro-stock site for their capability to market each & every one of my photos expediently.
My first photo sale is a macro shot of a giant spider hanging upside down weaving its web on 10 April 2010! Even though I got only USD0.35 commission for the sale, I was ecstatic with a capital E! It was a tremendous boost for my battered mind. Thank you Dreamstime. Since then, Dreamstime have sold another 3 more photos for me!!
My first photo sale!!
My portfolio with my other agencies that generate sales is my image of a Tsunami wreckage with Fotolia. This is another great micro-stock agency BUT with an extremely strict QC!
Dreamstime & Fotolia quality control has been “harsh” in their selection & review but I am quite sure that it is for the better of budding amateur like me because there is no better way to improve and learn and produce better images then to be “punished” for all the minute shortfalls. Thus far my acceptance ratio with Dreamstime is 31.27% & Fotolia is 23.8%… meaning a lot of my images are rejected. Then again, there is no two ways about it, I only want to improve and capture the perfect image.
Main reasons for rejection by my micro-stock agencies are :-
1. Lack of composition! Or in anther word ~ BORING!! What I have learned from here is that stock photography is about having “The Concept” that can be derived from an image. It must be able to be used by advertisers for a whole wide variety of purposes. Any agencies can accept a bunch of technically perfect photos but if it is without any purposeful composition/subject, the image will just take up storage space… and no sales. This is not good for the photographer (moral will deteriorate) and neither is it good for the agencies (waste of space & advertising effort). So! Always think what is the image you are about to capture about. Does it have a commercial concept? Remember too, the advice and rejection received from the micro-stock agencies and factored it into your mind-set.
2. Failure to comply to the agencies requirement! At the initial stage, somehow, I became incoherent to rules & regulations set out by each & every agencies. I have no idea why? I mean the rules & conditions for submission is clearly stated on their upload page. So! I wasted my bandwidth to find my submission rejected… SERVE ME RIGHT! Most agencies have a size requirement e.g. Alamy require all images to be at least 48MB in uncompressed form (i.e. TIFF) before compressing to JPEG! What could be so difficult to produce a 48MB uncompressed file… Nothing exactly, so just processed your photos to the agencies requirement. Then of-course, certain agencies does not accept images that is smaller than 3MB of resolution (the pixel size of the image ~ just time the width with the height of your image to get the figure… simple? Yes! Then do it!). Other conditions of various agencies are mainly no upsizing of more than 5% of the original image & files cannot be bigger than certain MB. After 2 months of submitting photos to the micro-stock agencies, I have made it my second habit to check my image for the requirement. Thank goodness or I might just continue to be a cow.
3. Technically weak photos : soft focus, distorted pixels, chromatic aberration, over-sharpened, noisy, wrong colour cast, wrong exposure, just to name a few. Well! For those that did not have the opportunity to go to a photography school, here is where you start to learn from trial & error. The micro-stock agencies editor (QC) are trained professionals which follows a strict set of guideline. They have seen thousands of photo every month & knows what is good & what’s not! Use their rejection as a guideline to improve your next shot. I did! And I aspire to be an semi-pro in 12 months (that is about 7 more mths).
My tips for all budding amateurs like me : I learn that it takes more than just knowing about the using a dSLR camera! Photo editing skill or what the pro-photographer call “Digital Dark Room processing” using photo editing software such as Photoshop is essential for digital photography. While in the past (the film era), a photographer have the luxury of depending on a dark room technician to process their photos (unless you are a super duper serious photographer ~ which you would have a dark room lab in the basement of your house), in the digital era, photos are shoot and transfer to the computer for processing BY YOU!! And to get the best out of an image, all the editing processing skill is a incredible plus point. Go to a bookshop and purchase a copy of training manual for Photoshop software… like I did!
I have photos with Bigstock & 123RF too… go check out their web-site!
dSLR Photography 