Jeremiah Tolbert

I men­tioned recently that I’ve been dip­ping my toe back into the iStock­Photo waters. I had a cou­ple more pho­tos accepted.  Nothing that will really sell, but  mostly I just want to get them to accept the pic­tures because it means at least by one sub­jec­tive mea­sure, I’m get­ting bet­ter and learning.

Here’s a recent “learn­ing experience.”

I have this fan­tas­tic por­trait of a jack rab­bit that I sub­mit­ted.  Good Easter stock maybe.  Only prob­lem is, I shot it at ISO200.  For those of you that don’t know, ISO is a kind of light sen­si­tiv­ity set­ting.  You can crank it up from 100 to, really high on some cam­eras, only 3200 on my cam­era.  The only prob­lem is, tak­ing ISO up intro­duces noise to the pic­ture.  And iStock hates noise.  They hates it precious.

I uploaded the photo as it was with a minor amount of noise as a test to see how much they would accept in an oth­er­wise good image.  Unsurprisingly,  the image was rejected for arti­fact­ing.  So I ran it through a noise reduc­tion program–the best on the mar­ket, I am told–and resub­mit­ted it.

It got rejected today for “over-​​use” of noise reduc­tion result­ing in a loss of detail.  I looked at that thing for 20 min­utes com­par­ing noise and no noise to see what “loss of detail” other the removal of noise that they did not want, and I can’t see it.  I sim­ply see no detail removed with the noise.  Just noise.  I clearly haven’t devel­oped my eye for noise, or my mon­i­tor isn’t good enough.

The les­son here is sim­ple.  If my pic­ture is not absolutely per­fect com­ing out of the cam­era, throw it in the trash.  iStock has no inter­est in any­thing that has been manip­u­lated, espe­cially if you’re a nobody.  Of course, the bigshots get spe­cial treatment–they’ve earned it.   Don’t waste time on sug­gested cor­rec­tions either, because you’ll never fig­ure out what the sweet spot is for them.

I won’t be wast­ing any time on resub­mis­sions in the future unless it’s per­fectly clear what needs to be done.  Better to just try and get a per­fect shot in cam­era. Which is harder than it sounds, but it’ll be less frus­trat­ing in the long run.

Lately, I’ve been work­ing in par­tic­u­lar on my focus and expo­sure.  Basic stuff, but with dif­fer­ent lenses you often have to relearn this stuff.  I’ve been using the his­togram view on vir­tu­ally every shot I take and adjust­ing expo­sure with expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion until the his­togram has the typ­i­cal look with no clip­ping.  Broad dynamic range, basically.

Focus is a lit­tle harder, espe­cially when work­ing with a long lens.  I don’t want to or have time to always set up a tri­pod when I’m shoot­ing.  I’d been rely­ing on chimp­ing (pulling the photo back up on the camera’s LCD) and zoom­ing in close to see if the photo is sharp. Also watch­ing my focal lengh com­pared to my shut­ter speed and try­ing to keep it  The prob­lem is, I still end up with images that aren’t tack sharp.  The zoom fea­ture only goes so far before it’s worth­less and not actu­ally rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the image. I don’t mind a small loss in sharp­ness in oth­er­wise tech­ni­cally decent pho­tos.  Most would never, ever notice that it’s not as sharp as all that.  But iStock’s reviewer have eyes like a hawk.

The one thing I can say about try­ing to shoot and sub­mit stock is that it’s teach­ing me to be a more tech­ni­cally skilled pho­tog­ra­pher.   The down­side is, some per­fectly good images will never see the light of day out­side of my blog because of it.

Truth is, with mil­lions of pho­tog­ra­phers gen­er­at­ing bil­lions of pho­tos, there’s only room in the stock world for per­fect pho­tos.  Not close to per­fect, just good pho­tos.  Perfect.  Tack sharp, per­fectly exposed, well com­posed, of an amaz­ing sub­ject.   Manage that and you’ll be fine.

I’ll just keep tak­ing pic­tures until they take my cam­era away, either way.  I have to get bet­ter with prac­tice, it’s like a law of physics.