Featured Stock Photo – Potluck Buffet

Stock Photo – Potluck Buffet

Well I finally got a sale: the first in 4 days. I haven’t see this in years. I had my best month ever in October, averaging 8-12 sales a day on week days and around 5 in the weekends, but despite all the present unfixed bugs at Istock, they felt the need to rethink the way keywords work, mess up indexing AND add the weirdest Best match algorithm yet, which considerably pushes down successful,expensive files and the majority of E+ to the very bottom of portfolios. So… I haven’t sold anything in 4 days and I’m extremely bitter about the situation. Do I trust they will fix this? I wish I did. But the more these things happen, the more I think they don’t know what they’re doing anymore. They appear to just be trying things out live without thinking that there are real people hanging in the balance. It feels like the site has become so complicated that the least of changes creates a domino-effect which they can’t foresee.

So I’m taking some time off. I’m definitely stopping uploading: indexing issues certainly make that decision easy. I also can’t stand looking at an unmoving balance. It’s the most disheartening thing after working hard all year and almost tripling my portfolio. I was making progress. But now, with a reckless pull of a switch, it’s all gone to hell. So I’ll be back if this gets fixed. Until then, I’ll go do something else.

Oh today’s photo: well it was shot quickly at a family reunion last summer. I really liked the salads made by my aunts and cousins. I did the brined roast beef which was also excellent. This is a simple shot, so there isn’t much to say about it. Anyhow, I’ve got to pull myself away from the computer and reconnect with real life. Have a great day everyone!

Featured Stock Photograph – Elderly couple laughing at a newspaper article

Stock Photograph – Elderly couple laughing at a newspaper article

I’m back at work on post production for the many, many shots I made at the 2012 Istockalypse in Berlin. This one just made Agency so I’m delighted to share it with you all today. Lovely work from the two models. They look so natural and intimate, it’s hard to think they only met each other a few hours prior. I was fortunate enough to work with them way beyond my allotted 20 minutes since strangely enough they were under-utilized after I did my time. Plus they kept hanging around me so I guess they liked my style. I’ll make a special lightbox for Ingrid once that feature returns on IStock.

It’s been 10 days since the big 2012 update introducing the cash sale on Istock. I’ve had a few of those and so it’s probably a good move on their part. Prices appear to be high, but of course it’s meant to show new buyers that they’d be better off buying credits and in doing so to come back to the site for further purchases. It’s all good marketing.

What’s not so good is the way the update was pushed without proper testing and quite a few unexpected bugs showed up. Reporting for contributors is now dodgy with cash sales and a large chunks of “views” not showing up in the latest sales screen and people have reported concern over bugs preventing people from completing sales. Some have also reported wrong commissions made on cash sales under a foreign (non US$) currency.

My top two ego-driven selfish concerns at the moment are these:

Bring back the Zoom function at once! My sales above medium size have decreased a great deal since this was taken away.

Bring back the lightbox option! Maybe they want to lead buyers to enjoy the new cart function… still, it’s not that practical.

Featured Stock Photo – Candid Mature Man Smiling in Stowe

Stock Photograph - Candid Mature Man Smiling in Stowe

Sorry for the short lull in updates: with all the fuss about the last search engine change at Istock last week (in short they pushed new photos all the way to the back which made a few contributors, including myself, shy away from uploading), I took it easy and worked on other things. But now that they’ve reversed their decision, I’m back at it. So here’s a new shot that was shot a few summers ago in Stowe, where we did a quick family gathering that turned out to be quite disastrous. I rarely shoot candids, but I did that day, and here’s one of them. I love Benoît’s expression on it and the composition is quite different from what I do usually, so I thought it’d be an interesting one-off, so here it is. Post production was tricky because the face was quite underexposed (the sun was hitting the building hard in the background while Ben was in the shade and wearing sunglasses) but I pulled it off quite nicely in the end.