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Old guy, new stock shooter


MilesbeforeIsleep

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You have some nice photos.  I would crop less and leave room for copy space or make two versions of some photos.  I think the rule of thumb here is shoot one each horizontal, vertical, and canted, think about book/magazine covers and the like.  I have the Sigma 17-50 and it is a great lens, just watch for chromatic aberration and fringing.  You can create a preset in Lightroom to automatically remove CA upon import.

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32 minutes ago, Johnnie5 said:

You have some nice photos.  I would crop less and leave room for copy space or make two versions of some photos.  I think the rule of thumb here is shoot one each horizontal, vertical, and canted, think about book/magazine covers and the like.  I have the Sigma 17-50 and it is a great lens, just watch for chromatic aberration and fringing.  You can create a preset in Lightroom to automatically remove CA upon import.

Hey, thanks Johnnie.  Crop less.  Yeah, that's hard for me to do, but I'll work on it.  I understand the reason. 

 

The Sigma is a good lens (imo) in many ways, but with bright white (overcast) skies, it's sometimes a bear for chromatic aberration on the top limbs of trees.  I know how to use the manual CA adjustments in Lightroom, but in my experience, that sometimes leaves it obvious that  it's been (what the agencies call) over-processed.

Still, on a Canon crop sensor camera, it gives a full-frame equivalent of 28-80mm, which is a pretty good range. 

 

Thanks for chiming in.  

 

PS:  Let me ask one other question:  Do you think that ,  by living "across the pond" we are at a disadvantage selling on ALAMY? 

 

 

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There is a lens profile in Lightroom for the Sigma and when you create the preset include the lens profile and make sure to check the remove Chromatic Aberration and enable profile corrections under Lens Correction.  I had several QC failures when I first got the lens, but I have sold many photos taken with it, several taken within the first few hours that I owned the lens.  I think here in the US you may not sell the volume of photos that you could in the UK as the newspapers there use many more photos than the papers here plus TV stations and newspapers here get a lot of free content from the public.  I think you generally get higher prices here when you do get sales.  Many of your photos of historic sites could be sold for books which bring a higher price.  Your photos don't have to be fancy or exotic to sell,  just well done.  I think one thing you will notice here is that we all shoot just about anything that does and doesn't move and we are all still learning. 

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Hi Miles,

Johnnie5 has been with Alamy longer and has a much larger portfolio than I do, but so far my experience confirms what he said.

My sales of American subjects are fewer in number but have brought higher income than the European ones.

Cheers and welcome to the forum,

Don

...or Doug. I think every male of my surname also answers to that.

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6 hours ago, Betty LaRue said:

I have never heard it discussed here about flower patents. But you have raised a valid point. I would think a rose like “Peace” would be safe, it’s been around for a long time. If one knows that about flowers, all good. If they don’t, and new cultivars come out all the time, RM or RF editorial would be the safest way to go. For instance, “Knockout” rose bushes probably are still under patent.

Doug, thanks for pointing that out.

Although I have never heard of legal problems over selling photos of flowers, that doesn’t mean there have been none.

Betty

In the UK/EU it's Plant Breeder's Rights that affect the sale and propagation of patented varieties of plants.  There are no restrictions on the sale of images of protected plants.  Other jurisdictions have similar schemes,

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1 hour ago, John Richmond said:

In the UK/EU it's Plant Breeder's Rights that affect the sale and propagation of patented varieties of plants.  There are no restrictions on the sale of images of protected plants.  Other jurisdictions have similar schemes,

Thanks, John.

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Hi Miles, and welcome.  I didn't notice that anyone has mentioned this--you can enter your keywords (tags at Alamy) and caption in Lightroom, and they will be populated into those fields when you upload to Alamy. Most people do such keywording/captioning during postprocessing, partly so that they can upload to other agencies without too much duplication of effort.

 

I noticed that you have several images of a replica fort, and all of the captions refer to a statue, although only one of the images has a statue. I don't know whether you captioned in Lightroom or in the Alamy Image Manager, but I'll go ahead and point out something about using AIM:  it's a common mistake to accidentally leave more than one image selected when you're making changes; the changes then are applied to all the selected images. This can be a handy feature if a number of images have the same elements, but it can also be a pitfall. Just remember to deselect an image when you're done with it in AIM.

 

Bill

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51 minutes ago, Bill Kuta said:

Hi Miles, and welcome.  I didn't notice that anyone has mentioned this--you can enter your keywords (tags at Alamy) and caption in Lightroom, and they will be populated into those fields when you upload to Alamy. Most people do such keywording/captioning during postprocessing, partly so that they can upload to other agencies without too much duplication of effort.

 

I noticed that you have several images of a replica fort, and all of the captions refer to a statue, although only one of the images has a statue. I don't know whether you captioned in Lightroom or in the Alamy Image Manager, but I'll go ahead and point out something about using AIM:  it's a common mistake to accidentally leave more than one image selected when you're making changes; the changes then are applied to all the selected images. This can be a handy feature if a number of images have the same elements, but it can also be a pitfall. Just remember to deselect an image when you're done with it in AIM.

 

Bill

Hi Bill, thanks for the post.   I am using LR for captioning and  keywording, and you're right about the statue/fort anomaly.   Actually have two pics of the statue, but was being lazy by using the same caption for everything.   I'll go back and fix those---though some of those fort pics are kind of dark and muddy, and will take new shots as soon as I get back to that area.
 

Yes, I've also learned about having more than one image selected when editing in AIM.  Was very confusing at first.   The blue stars are also pretty hinkey, and require you to slowly and carefully click on them if you want them to stay blue.  At least that's my experience.

 

But on the same note, I've picked  up on a bug in LR Classic CC, whereby when you insert keywords into the metadata of an image--then proceed to the next image in a filmstrip (is that what it's called?), LR will pop that last set of keywords into the next image. 

 

Not a huge problem if you know about it, but something they will hopefully fix.

 

M--

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