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Bollington Well-Dressing

Bollington Well-Dressing

Originally uploaded by KaJo, LRPS

This week is the week of Well-Dressing in Bollington, Cheshire. We went over on Saturday afternoon to have a look at the plaques created for the celebration. The theme was astronomy, and each of the plaques was handmade out of flowers, clay, dried stuff (pulses, beans, corn) – evidently a lot of hard work had gone into them. It was a lovely walk around the town in the sunshine or a couple of hours.

KaJo has a new home!

KaJo’s photography blog has moved home, to a new blog, here: http://kajophotography.wordpress.com/

Please find me over there.

My first rejection…

I heard back from ShutterStock today. They require that in your first submission, 7 of the 10 reviewed images must be accepted. Unfortunately, 7 of my first 10 were rejected.

3 were rejected because they were of limited commercial value
4 were rejected due to excessive noise or digital artefacts.

So, now I have a much clearer idea of what standard and quality they are after. It is essential to view the images at 100% (or maybe more), remove all traces of noise (or better still, don’t shoot with any noise!) and really watch out for any artefacts. I suspect most problems were with my workflow and working with JPEG files. I’ve never had any need for higher quality than that, but i guess now I do.

So, for my resubmission, i’ll be selecting some alternative images that may have better commercial value, and for the remainder, taking the original RAW image, saving as a TIFF, and working on that, before finally saving as a JPEG as the last step of all.

Onwards and upwards, it’s all a good learning experience.

Also, today, i found another new stock site : www.picturenation.com I’ll sign up with them too.

Selling images via Micro Stock sites

I’ve decided to give this ago. As I have a little time on my hands at the moment, I’ve done a bit of research and signed up with a few microstock sites. The difficult bit will be selecting which images to upload, but at least now i’m clear on where i’m going to do it, and how.

So far, I’ve signed up for:

• Fotolia: http://en.fotolia.com/p/200767634/partner/200767634
  
• IStockPhoto
  
• ShutterStock
  ShutterStock – Check out My Gallery Here
• DreamsTime
  

I’ve also found some pages and software that look like they might be useful:

• Software for uploading to multiple microstock sites in one go : http://www.prostockmaster.com/
• Java script for resizing images : http://www.phototechniqueswiki.com/Article.aspx?articleID=34

I’ll update again when i’ve uploaded some photos for each of these sites.