Eggs and baskets

As the saying goes, you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket. Well, that's what I'm doing right now with PhotoShelter. Not to mention its a growing basket and they're still working on getting the word out.

Now I know I don't have a ton of stock quality pictures available yet. Still, I believe I should investigate another avenue for sales. Following this line of thinking I have applied today at Alamy.

Alamy has some interesting requirements. The most interesting is that they want the images that you submit to be 48MB+ when uncompressed. Well my Rebel XT is a 10MP camera, you can see a disparity there. Here's where it gets strange, they have no problem with you resampling, all they care about is the quality in the end result.

So I picked four and upsized them and shot them up to Alamy. Now it's time to sit and wait through another approval process.

More images accepted

I just got an email from PhotoShelter, six more images accepted. Seven declined. That still should raise my acceptance rate. It also gets me over my next threshold. I hit 20 pictures! Still, that's not much in a field of thousands. What is it I always say? Oh yeah, gotta keep shooting.

So what made the cut? Click on the pictures to see them on PhotoShelter.

What didn't make the cut? Well, my little ducky friend below, some pictures I took of unlit fireworks (I think they didn't like the tablecloth I used as a backdrop, it had wrinkles). I'll try reshooting them on white and see what happens. A picture of my son grabbing a flower. Also declined were a variation or two of the shots above.

The kindness of strangers, the perils of shipping

Last week I was poking around Craigslist looking for some flashes to augment my current one flash. I stumbled across a pair of Nikon SB-28s for $35 each. I know I shoot Canon but since these would be off camera, the brand doesn't matter. If you follow Strobist at all and have been out to ebay, those things normally go for around $100. I emailed the person, they were in the Spokane area, to see if she'd be willing to ship. Unfortunately I was too late, they were snapped up by locals.

So I continued my search. A few days later I found a gentleman in Oregon selling an old film Canon with a 540EZ Speedlite. I shot him an email and no one was interested and they were still for sale. He was asking $50 for the set. I asked him if he'd take $50 shipped for just the flash and he accepted. We discussed what I was after as he had some other equipment. I sent him the money and began the wait.

Saturday was the glorious day. I opened the mailbox and saw the key to the parcel mailbox. Woo hoo! I grabbed the box. It was quite large for only having a single flash in it. I went inside and immeadiately tore it open. Then I was confused. I found the flash. I also found a book on lighting for products. There was another item too... it turned out to be a 430EZ Speedlite. I got two flashes and a book for $50. That's an amazing deal. The flashes showed some wear on their cases but otherwise looked great. LCDs intact, etc.

I grabbed some batteries and tossed them into the flashes to test them. The 430 fired off, no problem, the zoom motor worked, everything was great. I grabbed the 540, inserted the batteries. Nothing, no dice, the flash wouldn't even power up. This is the one that's supposed to be working according to the Craigslist add. Damn! I tried the batteries a few more times, no dice, I did research online. I just couldn't seem to get it to power up.

So now I have a 430EZ that works great and a failed 540EZ. I emailed the guy who sold them to me. Hopefully he insured the package or there is some trick to this older flash to get it going. However, I don't feel ripped off, why would this guy send me a second, working flash if he was trying to dump crap on me, and why include the book. A local used camera shop has 430EZs for ~$50 so if I can get the 540 working too I made out like a bandit. We'll see what happens.

Batting .500 for the day

Another day and more approvals at PhotoShelter. This time I had a 50/50 approval rating. I took a couple pictures of some lots prepped for new home construction. One of my rejected shots had a big puddle that was reflecting the sky. I wonder if they didn't like it or if they just didn't consider it as good as these and didn't want to saturate the search with all the same style image, just different views. Of particular interest to me is that I finally got some pictures accepted with non-blue skies. Post-processing on these was a pain, it was hard to determine exactly how to set things. Perhaps next time around I'll try doing some HDR images to keep detail on and above ground or maybe I'll finally pony up for a GND filter.

If you're interested on licensing these images, click on them to go to their pages on PhotoShelter.

So what was accepted yesterday

Three shots from Tulip Town when we visited the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. Of note is the fact that I had uploaded more. Not a single picture that included other people or ANY horizon/sky was accepted.

Here are the shots. Clicking on them will take you to their pages on PhotoShelter.

The last picture was taken here in Issaquah. This is from a rails to trails conversion just down the street from my office.