Coop up on istockphoto

Woohoo!

My shot of a juvenile Cooper's hawk in my back yard got accepted to istockphoto :)

Yeah, it's the little things that excite me...

Alex Albrecht Likes Canon Over Nikon

I just finished listening to a podcast interview of Alex Albrecht (of Diggnation fame, one of my favorite podcasts ever), done by iStockphoto.com. At the end, they did a "choose one of the two" sort of thing.

When presented with choice, Nikon or Canon, Alex picked Canon. w00t!

They Accepted Me!

Dear Shelly (phlyersphan),

Welcome to iStockphoto.com, the designer's dirty little secret. Congratulations, the iStockphoto administrators have determined that your images are commercially and technically ready for iStockphoto.com."

Yay!

The application required 3 samples, none of which could come from their over-popular categories (like, flowers - which of course I have been taking a lot of pictures of!) I sent in my rubber duckie picture and butterfly, which were accepted right off the bat. I had trouble with the third photo.

I had submitted a night shot of a tiki torch with a palm tree in the background, but I hadn't looked carefully enough at it. Since I was hand-shooting at night, I used ISO800, and there was a lot of pixel noise in the dark shades in the full size of the image. D'oh! It looked so cool in the smaller size :) So, I submitted a flower, and flowers aren't allowed. So finally, I looked at my shot of the rock path from the NC State University Arboretum, and realized that it needed some blue flags photoshopped out of the top right corner. It took me a while to get it right - I'm way new to post-production. I pulled it off, though, because they accepted that photo as my third sample, and I'm ready to rock!

Time to upload those pics to my collection there! I'm excited :)

iStockPhoto

I completed an application to contribute photos to iStockPhoto.com today. They claim to be "the world's fastest growing independent library" of royalty-free images. Their prices are cheap to buy stock photos, and you can contribute photos to sell as well.

The application requires you to input your contact info as well as a scan of a government-issued ID, then complete a quiz on their submission guidelines and submit 3 sample photos. The application review process can take a couple weeks to complete.

We'll see!

I found out about this web site through a book I read - The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby. I really enjoyed this book. It's a book built on the premise of real world shooting. It is based on what the author would tell you if you were out in the world on a photo shoot with him. It's an easy read, as it's light on theory and big on practicality, and the author has a sense of humor that I enjoyed. Good stuff. He mentioned iStockPhoto.com in his book, so I checked it out.
I'm not really in photography to make a career out of it or anything, but it sure would be exciting to say I sold a picture!

On an unrelated note, I had to attend a photo shoot at work yesterday for a piece that will be in the local newspaper. The photographer had a Canon camera (and what appeared to be a big honkin' professional long lens). I was too shy to ask for any details on his rig, but I sure was curious! "Hey, what's that lens you're using? What settings are you using? Any advice for a n00b?" Nope, I was a big chicken instead :) He hand-held the camera for all of the shots, which were basically composed of a group of people pretending to be in a computer class.