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New Beginner photographer from Canada


anna182016

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36 minutes ago, Richard Sheldrake said:

Thanks Geog,

 

Indeed a very good suggestion :-) (some of my first images have rather lacking meta data for location),  but this is a very good point, there is a market for a specific location. It is also a great point that even though UK and England are similar one does not mean the other to the engine

 

As far as I know, the location field is not searchable so you need to put an accurate location in the caption and/or the keywords.

 

Now talking about keywords, I had a look at some of your images and well you have an amazing imagination. Please take this as friendly advice by the way - I'm not flaming you as you are obviously a nice guy and are trying to be helpful to the OP here but yes, let's call it imagination. I should say I am a former professional geologist and can speak with some authority about geological keywords.

 

For example, image KC59R1is a picture of a shingle beach in Suffolk. You have somehow imagined the presence of biotite, feldspar, coal, granite, lava, lava rock, ore, quartz (possible), sand, sandy beach, macro, minerals (dubious depending on how you define mineral). You have some misspellings without the correct spellings so these are careless rather than intentional: geogoly, lanscape, and smooth peddle. Then you have the keyword lithosphere - you might as well have put in continent, continental crust, planet, solar system, universe and so on for all the relevance the word lithosphere has here. And you fail to mention flint which is the predominant pebble here.

 

As a second example, your image KBRCW3 has the following inaccurate or irrelevant keywords: animals (barely visible birds I think you mean but no birds in keywords), calm ocean, ocean, oceanic (this is the North Sea, not the Atlantic Ocean), sand, sandy (this is a shingle beach with pebbles), foliage, holiday, air, sunglight. But the one that I really wonder about is seastack - where is this in your image? And then ironically you say horizontal when you have a very slanted horizon, generally considered a compositional no no for seascapes. It should be a very simple matter to crop that image to make it horizontal. It is also underexposed for the foreground but could be easily improved.

 

Anyway, your inaccurate and imaginative keywording is not good for your Alamy ranking and could be quite annoying to a potential buyer searching for biotite or seastack.

 

 

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, anna182016 said:

Hello I am new! I am not sure if i'm doing just fine no income yet since i started in here. I am using Nikon D90 any advice how can i do better?

 

I think you could do some great and probably saleable pics of the little boy but you need to think about what you are doing when you are setting up a picture. Most of the pics look like snapshots with cluttered backgrounds and him either looking at the camera or looking too self-conscious. You need to plan the shots.

 

For example, the shot of him blowing bubbles JE2F83 could be vastly improved by shooting at an angle that enhances the visibility of the bubbles and making sure the background is uncluttered. Think about light and how the angle of light would enhance the visibility of the bubbles and how important the background is for this. Think about lens aperture and putting him out of focus with the bubbles in focus or vice versa. And don't shoot portraits in direct sunlight. Get action shots of him playing - running and jumping - but always think about light and backgrounds. Get lifestyle shots of him doing things. And assuming he is your son, sign model releases and upload the releases - that would definitely make them more saleable.

 

 

 

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9 hours ago, anna182016 said:

Hello I am new! I am not sure if i'm doing just fine no income yet since i started in here. I am using Nikon D90 any advice how can i do better?

Hi Anna, and welcome to Alamy! You've some really nice pictures, so just keep at it, make sure you add in lots of relevant keywords and accurate captions - you'll do fine!

(N.B. take note of what MDM mentions here, model releases give a picture far greater saleabilty).

Alamy is a "long game" - sales will not be fast, but are (usually) worth having, I think the average sales value here is still around $45.

Good luck!

Tony

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Alamy rank used to change every 100 days and was a rank for the photographer, not individual images. We never knew the exact way it worked but it was based on your CTR and sales. They started trying to use individual image rank by calling some images "Creative" -- which basically meant they were right for commercial uses and would supposedly bring more money. I don't think any of us know what is happening now. I do notice that the images for a specific subject where I have had sales appear high in search results.

 

Paulette

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40 minutes ago, Richard Sheldrake said:

Thank you taking the time to analyse the SEO on those images, they where the first images I uploaded and treated them as a test to see how the engine works (before I read the various releases from Alamy). I can't really see either of those images making any sales, hence I have adjusted my target niche. You must not make the mistake of looking at stock images through the eyes of a master of trade, I have for many years purchased stock images for several projects and I would not be annoyed if an incorrect result was displayed, I would only click on the one matching my requirements (which would not be a string of words but a certain mental image) and match it that way. Ultimately I have never gone more than around 200 images deep into a topic before selecting an image. 

 

I have heard of the "Alamy Rank" but can not pin down what it is! I can not imagine that the engine will have the self awareness to being manipulated with tags; it could possibly rank by how many times your image is displayed and clicked and then theoretically work out the relevance, but must likely it will just base it on sale rank and wording. Board key wording means exposure and exposure relates to sales.

 

I guess it is just that you were advising Anna about keywording and I noticed how poor the keywording is in those two images of yours - more evident because you don't have very many images. I felt I should just point it out for your own good really. Forget about master of trade - you don't need to have a PhD in Earth Science to know that there is no sea stack in that image and I genuinely wondered what a geogoly was (slow start to the day for me):). You are fortunate that  Philippe is no longer with us - that sort of keywording would have had him boiling over which he did regularly in relation to poor keywording. Anyway best of luck with your photography - as I said in my post above, I wasn't intending my comments as nasty but felt compelled to say something.

 

EDIT - and of course inaccurate keywording reflects badly on Alamy and the rest of us.

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14 hours ago, anna182016 said:

Hello I am new! I am not sure if i'm doing just fine no income yet since i started in here. I am using Nikon D90 any advice how can i do better?

 

Hello Anna, welcome on board. I am new too (despite the fact I joined Alamy in 2014 , I started to upload at the beginning of September 2017), so I can't help too much... I do not expect anything until at least 1500 images and one year of active presence. Do your best, vary the subjects and focus on the tags and descriptions. This seems to be the recipe... Good luck.

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23 hours ago, Richard Sheldrake said:

Thank you taking the time to analyse the SEO on those images, they where the first images I uploaded and treated them as a test to see how the engine works (before I read the various releases from Alamy). I can't really see either of those images making any sales, hence I have adjusted my target niche. You must not make the mistake of looking at stock images through the eyes of a master of trade, I have for many years purchased stock images for several projects and I would not be annoyed if an incorrect result was displayed, I would only click on the one matching my requirements (which would not be a string of words but a certain mental image) and match it that way. Ultimately I have never gone more than around 200 images deep into a topic before selecting an image. 

 

I have heard of the "Alamy Rank" but can not pin down what it is! I can not imagine that the engine will have the self awareness to being manipulated with tags; it could possibly rank by how many times your image is displayed and clicked and then theoretically work out the relevance, but must likely it will just base it on sale rank and wording. Board key wording means exposure and exposure relates to sales.

Several projects does not equate to the picture editors who search on a daily basis and who would certainly be annoyed with a library filled with badly keyworded images.

I continually learn from the more experienced people here, and always try to action the advice freely given by them.

My legacy images still need a lot of work on them which I will do in winter.

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Richard, you are making the mistake of trying to add irrelevant tags in order to max out the “discoverability”.  Your advice to Anna to do that is wrong.

If you can max out the tags that are only appropriate to the image, then fine. If not, then stop at 20, 30! Or whatever actually applies to the image. I often have “Oklahoma City,Oklahoma,US,USA,U.S.,U.S.A.,United States,North America, in my tags. That’s 8 tags, but they are appropriate. In others, I may have specific locations when appropriate. Yet being facetious, if I take a picture of my foot while in downtown Oklahoma City, showing only my foot and a bit of paving, it needs no location whatsoever. That image would have very few tags.

MDM’s excellent advice needs to be heeded. Have a dictionary at hand and if you’re unsure of a spelling, look up the word. 

Always remember that 30 strong, appropriate tags leaving you in the orange is more valuable to future sales than adding 10-20 more tags that don’t fit the image. You are shooting yourself in the foot when you do that.

I was working over a few legacy images of mine last night. One or two of them had 15-18 tags. I studied the tags, then decided I’d done it right and moved on. Nothing I could have added would help in searches, but only hurt. I didn’t tag well in the beginning and I’m trying to fix those, one by one. It’s more of deleting unnecessary tags than adding them.

I’m in the process right now of looking at my very early work and deleting duplicates and images that aren’t up to my present standards.  I expect my port will end up with a minimum of 500 fewer images. What I do think is that doing so will only help sales.

Betty

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On 10/10/2017 at 22:07, anna182016 said:

Hello I am new! I am not sure if i'm doing just fine no income yet since i started in here. I am using Nikon D90 any advice how can i do better?

 

Hi from a  fellow Canadian. You do need to bring up your keywording.  I randomly chose the BC Lions logo.  You should also have = cfl,cfl team logo,british columbia lions,british columbia lions logo,vancouver, burnaby,vancouver bc,vancouver british columbia,burnaby bc,burnaby british columbia,canada,canadian.

 

They hard part is to try and think like someone who does not live in BC.  Someone in the UK could be doing a magazine article on various types of football in the world.  Not everyone searching will know everything about the content in your image.  Someone could search "football teams canada".  You need to have the words to cover the searches.

 

It takes some practice, but over time you will start to think like a photo editor.

 

Jill

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