Phil Robinson

I am encouraged by how many natural history subjects appear on this thread. I have always enjoyed taking them but have never devoted much time to them because they haven't sold - because I haven't devoted much time to them - because they haven't sold - because....... I am now doing more and trying harder. We'll see.

Not that funny

There are still some surprising whackworthy gaps on Alamy. I spend a lot of time lurking around Westminster and I am often surprised how few/absent are the pics of some MPs. The pic I mentioned above was of a Tory MP and I was amazed that there were NO images of him on Alamy before my two. Mind you, his name is spellt funny so he might be there somewhere misspellt.

Big Issue - three days after it stopped being a live news pic. Almost made the two hours standing in the rain worthwhile.

I had a Thailand museum display too! A prehistoric fly in amber - looks like it could be the same museum

I can't work out if it's Roger Moore or Lord Lucan

No, "two word search" brings up 169 results

I had one last week that only brought up two very similar pics of mine - if I edited more ruthlessly it would have been (and yes, it resulted in a sale)

This one has just shown up - I'd love to know what keywords the buyer was using to find it. [edit] Turns out it was for a jigsaw puzzle! Tricky one

I also send about 3000x2000 and JPEG quality 10 or 11 and upload as soon as possible. I get a lot of sales from pictures I take at news events but sell later as stock -- I don't get many live news sales (not as many as I'd like) Any news pictures I get that will make good stock, I redo later, spending more time on the post-production to get better quality images - and larger files. I then upload them and delete the identical 'news' versions when they drop off the live news feed. Only if the original news pics aren't sharp enough to get through QC do I leave them - after carefully re-captioning and keywording. I've sold a lot of portraits of politicians and pics of police like this that might not have sold in their original news versions.

No, Captcha, a fire hydrant is NOT a 'statue'.

I've had five sales from the tennis so far - all British players!

From the days of good old-fashioned medium-format transparencies. Nice to see the old ones selling occasionally.

I have been covering the tennis at Eastbourne for four years - this year I had my first live news sales (mostly because Andy Murray turned up). I have had small stock sales later but nothing in the news before. I was up against a lot of full-time sports photographers and was amazed that I got into the Times and the Sun. I am certainly not a sports photographer for 51 weeks of the year, but it seems if you get the right pics well captioned and uploaded VERY quickly, it is possible. I'm hoping Andy turns up next year too.