Keith Douglas

8 sales for $342 gross. A big improvement from the previous 3 months. Included two PU refunds with reinvoice for 4x the PU fee. Keith

Thanks for that Clare.

Here's a more positive outcome. I had a couple of Personal Use sales back in January. The images didn't seem to be the sort of thing you'd put on your wall (a hospital sign and an ambulance outside A and E) so I queried it with Alamy. Yesterday both sales were refunded and two new sales added at four times the original PU fee. So well done to Alamy in sorting it out.

A few weather photos in the Sun Online, 14 June 2019: TD7NPT amer ghazzal Pedestrians are hit by torrential downpours and heavy rain crossing Westminster Bridge, London TD7PAN amer ghazzal Pedestrians are hit by torrential downpours and heavy rain crossing Westminster Bridge, London TD7M6F DGDImages Flooded Old Padeswood Golf Course on the outskirts of the town Mold in Flintshire TD7M6D DGDImages Motorists travelling through flood waters on the A541 Mold to Denbigh Road near Lixwm, Flintshire TD7NW3 amer ghazzal Pedestrians are hit by torrential downpours and heavy rain crossing Westminster Bridge, London TD7NTB amer ghazzal Pedestrians are hit by torrential downpours and heavy rain crossing Westminster Bridge, London TD7M6B DGDImages Flooded business on the outskirts of the town Mold in Flintshire after the River Alyn broke its banks https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9290027/uk-weather-forecast-today-met-office-warning-rain/

7 sales for $165 gross. Below my recent averages on both. Keith

When I read Alamy's statement it makes business sense to me. They're reducing the time that they have to spend on non-productive activities (cleaning up the news feed) so that they can spend more time on getting the good images out to buyers. Whatever criteria they had used to achieve this there would be some contributors who ended up on the wrong side of the cut and were not happy. But I would argue that the objective measure they applied, i.e. have the contributors' images sold as news, is both as fair as any, and is correct from a business perspective. Yes, as a result, Alamy may miss out in the future on some news stories, but this has to be viewed against the cost of supporting a free for all where the overall quality was declining and more and more time had to be spent cleaning up the feed and finding the newsworthy images.

No, the correct response is what Alamy did "news access was limited to those who used news upload regularly and had made live news sales" Actually selling news images is the measure of success that is important to Alamy and so the criteria that they applied was the correct one. With a breaking news story 15 miles away from you (as you have told us), it's a shame that you didn't take the opportunity to get out there, get the pictures and show Alamy what you can do. Instead you spent time trying to make an issue out of your inaction and blame it on Alamy. Is that what a successful news photographer would do?

But if it's up to QC standards then just submit it as stock. I took some images at a comedy event on Sunday and uploaded an initial dozen straight away to Live News. Most of them were shot at ISO 25600. It's now 2 days later, well outside the Live News window. I have an update to the event, a report of it has appeared in the local news, and I have spent some time balancing noise reduction and sharpness in other images. I think they're pretty good and some might sneak through QC, but I'd rather not risk it. Submitting as reportage instead is a much better option, so that's what I've done.

Thanks for that find Adie

You have some good images, but you need more of them and more variety. You could also do with expanding your captions. What are the abandoned boats? What is their history? More details about location etc. You've only got 136 images which is a very small number. These cover a limited number of subjects, and I think this will further decrease the likelihood of you making sales. I don't know what the competition is like (at Alamy and elsewhere) for landscape images from where you live. Quite a lot of them don't seem specific enough to your island. Do you have scope to expand your range of images to include people, settlements, buildings, farming, vehicles, infrastructure etc. etc.?

Pretty much the same here too. They also use generic images from Google Street View rather than a picture illustrating the actual news story.

Not so. Tuesday morning, 6:35 am. I followed the police vans down the road to take the photos. There are other UK news stories too but I'm not going to do a detailed search as I'm not the one saying that there aren't any! Oh, and I was out an hour earlier to get weather pics, which is why I came across the story!

That was last week. You now need to be able to take the photo and upload it before the event happens: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47947745 😉😊

You can get it second hand in the UK for about £7 hardback and £15 paperback. I suspect that the hardback version is from 1978, and the paperback from 1997. Well worth it though.

But that's not what you've been told at all. You've been told to stop submitting images to Live News because your images weren't selling as News. There could be two photographers who shoot similar subjects - one who achieves regular sales, the other who achieves zero sales. Who would you accept images from? Is the successful news photographer going to get a scoop every time? No Is the successful photographer going to shoot 'soft news' subjects some of the time: Yes Is the successful photographer going to sell News images every time? No The anger of some contributors has been on Alamy for implementing a plan to improve the Alamy business. Do those same contributors question their own work and ask themselves why their News images didn't sell? What steps are they taking to improve their own news images?