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Andre,

 

You have been given some good advice and I agree with most of what others have written.

I do have a few things to add: I personally do not like RF and I hate Micro.

Over the years I have worked with the largest photo agencies around the world and most of them

are currently out of business....I have been licensing images via Alamy for more than ten years

and I can honestly say that I have 100% trust in Alamy.  The stock photography business has been

through a tough decade and it is my opinion that Alamy has done the best they can for their

contributors and for Alamy.

 

I must add, again my opinion, that you are shooting yourself in the foot by having your images available on Micro as

well as Alamy.  I have looked through a number of your images and in my opinion they are very good, bit over

over processed.  Your captioning is awful and makes your images almost un-licensable.

 

P.S. Alamy licenses over a decade old film scans frequently and I spend hours researching my captioning

and keywording before I upload them to Alamy.

 

Best,

Edited by Chuck Nacke
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2 hours ago, arterra said:

If nobody writes about the subject you photographed, it will not be bought. You can take a picture of a bat, only endemic to that little cave in Transylvania, but if nobody is interested in writing an article about this rare animal, well .......

Unless you write about it yourself.  It's been a few years since I wrote regularly for gardening and other magazines but it gave me an appreciation of the type of photography needed to illustrate my own work.  Editors like packages - it saves them time - and there is merit in submitting an article to a magazine and pointing to your Alamy photos (technical quality guarantee) to illustrate said article.

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52 minutes ago, arterra said:

 

I did that: mountain animal column/feature/ .... (what's the proper word in English? 

Cheers,

Philippe

Column/feature.:)

Also article, as you say, or piece if short. Report if from an exhibition or something like that.

Edited by spacecadet
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  • 2 years later...
On 24/08/2017 at 17:01, hdh said:

I uploaded this picture for fun only ... didn't think it will get sold ... but it was, after more than a year

G16CH6.jpg

 

now waiting for this one to sell :)

F6TA64.jpg

Someone on one of the micro sites took loads of pics of various garbage or rubbish & was on editorial due to labels brands on the items but they still sold.

Edited by dunstun365
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On 23/08/2017 at 13:46, Robert M Estall said:

Why would anyone buy your images from Alamy if they can get the very same shots from microstock for peanuts?  ( as Jill also said)

 

That's before you start looking at the inappropriate captions. I'm not even going to peek at the keywords

 

Don't underestimate the savvy of the buyers.

 

In any case, 7 months isn't much time in this business.

The buyers have to sign up for monthly subs on micro stock for quite a few pounds and they've complained when they cancel their subscriptions they get charged a whole lot more .  If they just downloaded a single image it wouldn't cost much less than alamy's  cheapest images but contributors get pennies ,sometimes a pound or two, certainly on a site called Sh______ &  people have been leaving there in droves recently. It's the greedy owners of these sites who are to blame as they must be either wasting a lot on marketing or keeping the extra money themselves. Surely there a more ethical buyers who want contributors to be decently paid for their work. 

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1 hour ago, dunstun365 said:

The buyers have to sign up for monthly subs on micro stock for quite a few pounds and they've complained when they cancel their subscriptions they get charged a whole lot more .  If they just downloaded a single image it wouldn't cost much less than alamy's  cheapest images but contributors get pennies ,sometimes a pound or two, certainly on a site called Sh______ &  people have been leaving there in droves recently. It's the greedy owners of these sites who are to blame as they must be either wasting a lot on marketing or keeping the extra money themselves. Surely there a more ethical buyers who want contributors to be decently paid for their work. 

 

You would hope there would be such buyers. But the ubiquity of (steadily improving) camera phones means everyone now has a high megapixel camera with them wherever they go. So free photos for the masses and a lot of people wouldn't be able to tell the difference, or believe there is not so much difference, between a camera phone photo and a photo professionally taken with 'proper gear'. This all conspires to devalue the work of professional photographers. Plus the market is saturated because it's so easy to meet the entry requirements for stock now compared to years ago. It's a buyer's market unfortunately.

Edited by Steve F
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On 23/08/2017 at 13:36, spacecadet said:

A page of images of butterflies with this caption

Alicante is a port city on Spain’s south-eastern Costa Blanca, and the capital of the Alicante province

may have something to do with it.

And unbelievably, after three years, the OP didn't bother to change the totally irrelevant captions!

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3 hours ago, Cryptoprocta said:

And unbelievably, after three years, the OP didn't bother to change the totally irrelevant captions!

 

Nothing new either on the 17th page.  And at least some of the butterflies are New World, not Old (zebra longwing, Owl Butterfly, Blue Morphio, probably some others).  Looks like a trip to Costa Rica or a butterfly sancturary. 

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This is an odd story; an experienced photographer with many really good photographs who made the one query on the forum and went off in a huff when he was told he should do more in the way of captioning. A lot more! The question is, how did he learn so much about photography with such little grasp of how this business works? 

 

These images don't appear that old and I don't object to the heavy processing look. Don't do much of that myself, but there is room for all. And yes, old images can sell. I was dead pleased to see an image I recovered from the days they were building the St Lawrence Seaway taken when I was lad. Must have been about 65 years ago. Kodachrome just about survived although the scan needed a lot of help.

Edited by Robert M Estall
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My last 7 sales have all been 2013 2014 2015 & 2016 a couple from 12 & 16, the last sale was an image from 2016 that I uploaded a week or so ago, it sold a week later, but I have hardly uploaded for a couple of years.

 

My last 9 zooms, all in the last month, 8 are from 2018 & 1 is from 2013.

 

As my last sale example shows, if somebody wants a certain image and there aren't that many on Alamy, it might sell, if you are trying to sell a photo of the Eiffel Tower, then you probably won't do it, but with your butterflies keyword and correctly captioned, you will stand a better chance, (I only looked at one page). 

CC

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It has been three years since this thread was begun and he has not returned to the forum since then. I doubt he is reading your suggestions at this point.

 

Paulette

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32 minutes ago, NYCat said:

It has been three years since this thread was begun and he has not returned to the forum since then. I doubt he is reading your suggestions at this point.

 

Paulette

Ha ha it was at the top of the threads with comments, but I see others posted before me and I didn't spot that, so that's my excuse, Thanks👍👍

Chris

 

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4 hours ago, ChrisC said:

...but with your butterflies keyword and correctly captioned, you will stand a better chance, (I only looked at one page). 

CC

 

Checked Alamy for Owl Butterfly (38 pages, including two of mine), Zebra Longwing (10 pages with one mine) , and Blue Morpho (43 pages).    I haven't licensed any orchid photos, either :).

 

Basically, I have had more zooms on my purse.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 22/07/2020 at 18:38, Steve F said:

 

You would hope there would be such buyers. But the ubiquity of (steadily improving) camera phones means everyone now has a high megapixel camera with them wherever they go. So free photos for the masses and a lot of people wouldn't be able to tell the difference, or believe there is not so much difference, between a camera phone photo and a photo professionally taken with 'proper gear'. This all conspires to devalue the work of professional photographers. Plus the market is saturated because it's so easy to meet the entry requirements for stock now compared to years ago. It's a buyer's market unfortunately.

The good news is that most of the photos I see on ebay & facebook posts for instance are terrible. bad lighting, overexposed or even blurred or foggy people had greasy fingers on the smartphone lens i think. NOTE: I qualified in design back in the 80's & see that the DSLR photos are better than they've ever been (even compared to film but smartphone pictures unless in the right hands have been terrible. However I've seen some realy terrible photos from Getty mainly on news sites how they even get accepted I don't know. Also my brother's on Alamy aka spacecadet. 

Edited by dunstun365
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11 hours ago, dunstun365 said:

The good news is that most of the photos I see on ebay & facebook posts for instance are terrible. bad lighting, overexposed or even blurred or foggy people had greasy fingers on the smartphone lens i think. NOTE: I qualified in design back in the 80's & see that the DSLR photos are better than they've ever been (even compared to film but smartphone pictures unless in the right hands have been terrible. However I've seen some realy terrible photos from Getty mainly on news sites how they even get accepted I don't know. Also my brother's on Alamy aka spacecadet. 

That's true. Most people are still terrible at taking photos. There's hope yet.

"Also my brother.... "🙃

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The oldest image I have licensed was taken in May 2009. Bearing in mind that I only started contributing in Nov 2008.

 

That image has been licensed five times in that period.

 

Allan

 

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