About photo: Blue vase with sunflowers

You can buy the picture on top on these links:

• Buy the photo at Shutterstock
• Buy me at iStockPhoto
• Buy a similar photo at Dreamstime
• Buy another similar photo at Fotolia
  

As I already wrote I plan to publish here my best photographs according to the microstock sites. As a starter this blog is about my best earner ever photo. (This photo was my best earner between July and September in 2009, the it was superseded by a photo about a Hungarian highway.)

History: As you can see it follows my style of isolated on white photographs. I first made another photo about an orange vase that also sells really well. So I decided to have a series of vase photographs about our better looking vases we have home. This is the second in the series of vase photos and it recently became the best earner of my entire portfolio.

Content: I choose this vase as the second because it has sunflowers painted on it. It seems like stock buyers like sunflowers so I thought I give it a try to have my very own sunflower related image. These two sunflowers really pop out in front of the blue background of the vase similarly as real sunflowers would do with the sky as their background. Like the real sunflowers this image also shows their leaves, however the curvature of the rounded vase hides a leaf partially.

Technique: This photo was taken with no extra lighting as the sun. I put it in the shade of an A2 sheet of paper. Also I put another sheet underneath the vase, and that was it. I did the shading of the vase during my camera took the picture from the top of my stand.

My upload strategy

Originally I have only contributed to Fotolia. They were really patient because I have uploaded so many bad images and luckily they did not fed up with me. By the time I have joined dreamsitme and the others I have had several photos that were accepted by them so I used these photos to get accepted or have a look on how other sites perform with the same images. By march this year I was part of shutterstock, fotolia, dreamstime and istockphoto. I also have had some experience on how much time does it take to upload an image. I have read discussions on whether the upload times worth dealing with. However I usually see if someone considers a site worth uploading then they will try to upload to every site all of their images.

When I realized that some sites review images considerably slower than the others I decided that I will not submit there such images that does not have a chance. So I started to upload to only my two favorite sites Fotolia and Shutterstock. It is easy and fun to upload on these sites, and their review process is so fast that I practically don't waste any time by delaying the uploads to the other sites.

So here is how I work: first I upload to both fotolia and shutterstock in parallel. Then I keyword the photos at shutterstock, because they have more strict keywords policy. After they have accepted all my keywords and titles I copy these details to fotolia. At fotlia I rearrange the keywords to have the most important words in front. And then I submit the images at both sites. After the review finishes on either of the sites (e.g. fotolia) I upload the accepted images to dreamstime and stockxpert. If the other site (e.g. shutterstock) accepts some images that were not accepted previously, I also upload these to dreamstime and stockxpert. Finally my protfolio is not so heavy in sales so I have enough sales only on shutterstock to decide on the best pictures. So the most downloaded pictures on shutterstock go to istockphoto. I upload only the best of my pictures because the istockphoto's lenghty upload procedure. Currently I upload a picture when it reached 6 downloads on shutterstock.

I hope it helped someone, if you have an upload strategy to consider feel free to comment.

Fotolia's tag cloud and search results

I have started to play a little with fotolia's API. I thought it will be harder to get some useful data out of it, however it turns out it is a great fun to use their API. My only problem so far that they do not allow access to all the details on the contributor page (e.g. it is not possible to collect the credit earnings data on an individual image). I also had a technical problem with the user login that is required to access some more details about an individual contributor. Even though I am not able to access this data right now I am not going to press it harder to have a complete Java API. Instead I have started to focus on the stats I am planning to do. And thankfully these stats have nothing to do with the details you can get when logged in as a contributor.

My first trial on how can I use the API for improving my photography is to do a single search on every word in the tag clouds. The results will let me choose the keywords that are least used thus they are worth using. These keywords are the ones which are well searched but has the lowest competition: Laos, ships, wreck, lorry, nuclear, cables. So I believe the best picture you can make for Fotolia would be a nuclear aeroplane carrier wrecked near to Laos that is rescued by lorries pulling it off the coast with strong cables. OK this was the fun part.

I think the statistics might be useful for others too, so here is the entire table with the results:

Word from the cloud	Result number with the given search term
abstract	474639
adult	391461
aeroplane	7687
animal	267064
apple	63639
architecture	231558
art	388796
artistic	103662
asian	91753
attractive	387251
autumn	136617
baby	106735
background	1215977
ball	114731
bank	67915
bar	59474
bath	39187
beach	196972
beautiful	795328
beauty	723581
black	522012
blue	825436
boat	80536
body	191913
box	72334
bright	252399
brown	293568
bubbles	18666
building	219207
business	532649
businessman	103433
cables	4245
camel	4353
car	68069
cat	42961
chair	41408
chinese	48275
chocolate	53370
christmas	204301
church	82433
city	176029
clock	28908
close	170458
close-up	333882
closeup	317549
cloud	143778
clouds	144985
coffee	81804
cold	136037
color	582343
colorful	246727
colour	121638
colourful	52380
communication	148925
computer	189182
concept	297522
conceptual	84237
container	42900
contrast	35591
corporate	120485
couple	102150
dance	43843
design	477125
detail	187274
diet	201798
digital	119039
earth	90043
eat	162627
education	102992
element	113168
emotion	96372
england	25131
euro	38425
europe	137412
exam	12820
expression	170603
eye	132349
eyes	175234
face	430993
fashion	337929
female	698202
field	164149
finance	110678
fish	76783
flower	389416
flowers	130401
food	605394
fresh	418976
fruit	256382
fun	310592
garden	205273
gift	154507
girl	637715
girls	97486
glass	247302
golf	13905
graphic	223569
grass	242782
green	785660
hair	291919
halloween	27933
hand	338792
hands	305858
happy	487771
head	163523
health	379428
healthy	478027
holiday	453015
home	207421
horse	37515
horses	10061
hotel	42942
house	198186
houses	17190
hue	8397
human	259340
illustrated	14203
illustration	599161
india	18695
interior	71289
internet	131033
iron	42292
isolated	1017834
keyboard	43280
lady	272808
landscape	288477
laos	2188
laptop	76442
leaf	238279
leaves	123692
light	345880
line	121801
london	11925
lorry	3804
love	292563
macro	321267
mains	4067
male	283680
man	395532
massage	22978
metal	184531
mobile	45632
model	288051
modern	282430
money	135345
moon	20261
mouse	20337
naked	34700
natural	362542
nature	926853
network	43299
new	140556
night	91234
nuclear	3884
nude	23280
ocean	182247
office	218516
old	288378
orange	262735
outdoor	181237
pain	21897
park	153525
party	180518
pattern	326242
peace	67999
people	607619
person	547142
photo	84595
pictures	7157
piggy	4765
pink	195723
plant	335411
portrait	493059
pose	115890
pound	7815
prayer	15442
pretty	429187
project	15255
rainbow	29635
red	794417
reflection	182065
render	86682
rendered	13095
restaurant	113335
river	98444
rose	80663
rural	82517
sand	130866
saving	11403
sea	321684
season	231173
security	68477
sex	23606
sexy	239721
shadow	100105
shape	220202
ships	3495
shoes	24100
shop	48950
shopping	56435
sign	208787
silver	91483
skin	184817
sky	528451
smile	393893
smiling	282110
snow	130357
space	139370
spring	291685
star	84974
stone	157637
summer	522733
sun	261161
sunflower	15821
sunny	114855
sunset	78561
support	34304
sweet	251855
symbol	331583
teacher	12413
technology	227710
telephone	45844
texture	286721
thailand	18810
time	65216
tint	6448
training	48937
travel	316605
tree	357604
trees	357604
trust	12948
two	102863
up	115776
urban	102896
vacation	250911
vase	12711
view	151774
wall	113257
water	492384
weather	60250
wedding	87243
whiskers	6395
white	1444849
winter	191020
woman	798790
women	271044
wood	215094
work	221185
wreck	3518
yellow	468039
young	736731
youth	216241

Welcome to my blog!

Hi everybody,

I am new Hungarian member of the microstock community. Previously some people really liked my old pictures, so I decided I give it a try. I have found a fotolia advertisement on a photography webpage, and without any investigation I have started submissions to Fotolia in last October. Back then I have just submitted the photos I made prior I made the move towards microstock. By the time I finished uploading my favorite pictures almost a month passed.

However I have had a high rejection ratio, so I decided to choose a different direction. I have started to read what kind of photos Fotolia would accept. I have gone through several thousand messages in my favorite forums. Since I am doing photography as a hobby I did not want to investigate purely on the microstock photos I will take in the future. Then I had a look on my current equipment: Nikon D90, kit lens (18-105VR), Nikon 50 mm F1.8D. That's it I have to choose a direction with these items.

It seems like if you want to go for microstock you have two basic options take photos of people or not to take photos of people. The first option I don't like because I cannot tell where my photos get published. I don't want those men and women I photographed placed in an environment they would not like. With people out of the picture I have had to consider my equipment for the further directions, and finally I came to the idea that I will take pictures of isolated objects.

Isolated pictures however needs better lighting. And as you have already seen I did not have any lighting equipment so far. So I decided that I will go for hot lighting because I can use that also for shooting film (my other hobby), and of course I also choose it because it was cheap for a starter. I have got 2 pieces 500W incandescent lights with stands.

After some experimentation in January I have started to take photos in late February. By this time I have joined Dreamstime and Shutterstock. I have passed the shutterstock application procedure with the top images on Fotolia.

Finally here are my current galeries in the order I have joined the agencies:

• Fotolia
• Dreamstime
• Shutterstock
• iStockphoto
• StockXpert
  

I hope you will like reading my blog, later on I plan to publish my best pictures, the evaluation of my sales progression, and the making of my current photos in progress.