John Mitchell

Still super quiet here. Same thing happened last month. The wind died down mid-month and didn't pick up again until the last week.

You may be used to microstock. Traditional stock photography has always worked this way. The client is invoiced and payment then has to be dealt with by the publisher's accounting department, which can take up to 90 days (or even longer).

It must be a cult thing. Just kidding, I'm sure that MAC's are every bit as wonderful as they are purported to be.

Being on a tight budget, I've always used PC's mainly because they are far cheaper than Mac's and less proprietary -- you can upgrade RAM, etc. easily and keep them functional. PC's are not as cool or elegant as Macs, of course, but they do the job well despite all the annoying Windows shenanigans that we've had to endure over the years.

According to the old rule of thumb of one sale per 1000 images per month, you aren't really doing badly for a new-ish contributor.

zzzz

Most of my Alamy income continues to come from a pool of older images, so I'm not really concerned much about volume any longer. I now realize that I could probably double the number of images in my collection and not earn significantly more income. If I were faced with 900 new images to process and prepare for Alamy these days, I'd probably go on another holiday, this time leaving my camera at home.

One of the reasons I opted out of NU a few years ago was because I was seeing what looked to me like regular editorial use licenses at super low prices. It would be enlightening to know what makes these sales "novel." No plans to stop uploading here. Alamy is still the best place in town IMO.

Actually, there will probably always be more left to squeeze because crowd is growing exponentially as we speak, and there doesn't seem to be anything out there to stop it.

Terrific image. "From the point of view of the natives, it's the tourists who are picturesque." -Eduardo Galeano

magazine use, worldwide, OK price Tepotzotlán, Mexico

I've had that happen as well. As I rework the tags in my older images, I'm discovering that I often didn't check the contains property box because at the time I didn't know what "property" meant. Actually, I'm still not sure what it means. I now check the property box if there is anything man-made in the image or if it was taken on private property. I had to Google "otiose". Should be a check box for that one.

I supply as much of the optional stuff as I can, especially the info about no. of people, property, and releases. It only takes a few secs...

By the sounds of it, the QC star system is in the same category as "discoverability" -- i.e. both of them don't mean a heck of a lot in practical terms.

The early NEX cameras came with a small removable flash ( HVL-F7S ). You can get one on eBay for under $30. It's fine for fill-flash. Sony also made a larger, more powerful flash for these cameras, but I never bought one since I seldom use flash. BTW, I found that I had to be very careful with the NEX-3 (basically the same camera as the NEX-5). Its contrast-detect AF system has a tendency to focus on the background (back focus). I initially had a couple of QC failures because of this. Often it's best to pick the focus point yourself with the "flexible spot" AF option or use manual focus.