A major part of submitting to microstock agencies is captioning and keywording your images in ways that provide relevant details and optimize them for search engines. Sites that accept editorial content often require that they contain “newsworthy” information, which sometimes means adding relevant facts to the caption. Of course, when your images have political content, relevant terms can get controversial.  I had an exchange with a certain agency’s selection editor over the following caption, which included this tidbit to add context to an Israeli soldier praying at the Western Wall:

Despite claims that they’re “the most moral army in the world,” human rights abuses persist.

I would like to cite the agency’s response, but my request to do so went unanswered and all of their emails had that legal confidentiality disclaimer language at the bottom. So I quote only my response to their objections:

I appreciate that [your agency] has accepted my images for its archive. However, I would appreciate some clarification of your comments regarding “non-factual” caption information. If you mean that I should avoid non-controversial information, I can understand why [your agency] would make such a requirement. You are in the business of selling images, and may not want to offend potential customers. However, the information in my caption regarding the Israeli military is entirely factual: “Despite claims that they’re ‘the most moral army in the world,’ human rights abuses persist.” I cite the following sources to substantiate my statement:

Fact: Numerous Israeli leaders have made this well-known claim regarding the morality of the Israeli military.

“Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressed, on behalf of the Cabinet, complete trust and appreciation for the IDF and its commanders. He emphasized that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, since it copes with situations that no other army has come across.” [link]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israeli citizens know the truth, that the IDF is a moral army without peer, either qualitatively or morally.” [link]

Fact: The U.S. State Department, United Nations, and numerous internationally respected human rights organizations, including organizations within Israel, have condemned the persistent record of human rights abuses committed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF):

“During the year IDF soldiers and Border Police officers were indicted and convicted for abuse of Palestinians.” [link]

UN Human Rights Council denounces recent Israeli military actions in northern Gaza [link]

“The coalition of nine human rights organizations, which included Physicians for Human Rights, the Israeli section of Amnesty International and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, charged that Israel’s conduct “constitutes a blatant violation of the laws of warfare and raises the suspicion, which we ask be investigated, of the commission of war crimes.” [link]

I could have cited many more sources citing the Israeli motto that they have “the more moral army in the world.” I could have also cited many more sources demonstrating as fact the persistent pattern of abuse by Israeli soldiers—including testimony from many soldiers themselves. And yet, seemingly contrary to their own policy, the response suggested that I should only mention human rights abuses if they were in the actual photo—even though their own guidelines recommend adding “newsworthy” information to add value to the images. Oh well, agree to disagree?

The issue came up again recently with another agency regarding keywords rejected for an image of the Israeli separation barrier surrounding Bethlehem. The rejection notice:

We regret to inform you that we cannot accept your submission, entitled Israeli Flag and Separation Wall … for the following reasons:

The following keywords used for this file do not appear to be fully relevant to the subject.

{[ Apartheid,  Separation,  Segregation (Racism),  Segregation (Racism),  Separation]}

Some of the keywords used for this file do not appear to be fully relevant to the subject.

Of course, these terms are highly charged. I myself generally use less charged terms: “separation wall” or “separation barrier” to avoid the mental shut-down with the audience that can occur with terms like “apartheid” and “segregation.” And yet, all of those terms are completely valid, applicable, and present in the discourse on this topic—and potentially used by clients searching for such images. My guess is that most of the people publishing images of one of the ugliest aspects of the Israeli occupation of Palestine are critical of the wall, and might actually prefer those terms.

This issue also surfaces in the most basic of identifying information: location. Several sites require that you include the “country” where the image was taken. Some only provide a drop-down menu that contains “Israel” as an option, but not “Palestinian Territories.” Even so, for the caption dateline in locations in the West Bank or Gaza, I generally use, for example: “BETHLEHEM, OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES.”

This gets trickier in Jerusalem, and I haven’t been entirely consistent. Some sites only require the city (and not the country) if it’s famous enough. Then,  simply “JERUSALEM” will do just fine. For others that still require a country, I go case-by-case. Though none of Jerusalem is internationally recognized as Israeli territory, I generally go by east and west. For example, in an East Jerusalem neighborhood like Sheikh Jarrah: “EAST JERUSALEM, OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES.”

I feel more conflicted about the Old City, which I believe should be administered according to the UN Partition Plan as an international city. I often give subtle preference to one side or the other according to the significance of the site itself. For example, at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, “JERUSALEM, PALESTINE-ISRAEL.” At the Western Wall, “JERUSALEM, ISRAEL-PALESTINE.” Not the best system I’m sure, but none of that territory belongs to Israel according to international law, so I can’t bring myself to just put “Israel.” And ultimately I believe that city must be shared under some kind of agreement that sets it apart from both nations, so it will always be hyphenated in some way or another. Kind of like an egalitarian marriage that needs to figure out how to combine or share last names in a way that’s sustainable and elegant, there’s no perfect solution, so I’m always open to suggestions and feedback.

So I was a little shocked when, within days of posting my “Secrets of Editorial Microstock—Revealed!” post, I was contacted by the PR firm representing BigStock, who wanted to dialogue about my criticisms of their site. I was surprised because my site doesn’t get a ton of traffic, which means that either a) My modest volume yet professional quality is finally getting noticed, or b) BigStock is getting its money’s worth out of their PR firm.

I welcomed their responses to my various complaints, and clarified some of my experience with their batch tool in my follow-up post, but here’s their point-by-point response to my original criticism. I have to say, I’m not that surprised by anything here. I complained that they reject images that sell great on Dreamstime and Shutterstock—they stand by their “high-quality” standards. I complained about slow review time—they say they’re making improvements. …. And so forth. My major complaint continues to be about sales. But now that they’re using TWITTER I’m sure the downloads will be skyrocketing.

Bigstock’s Image Selectivity:

Bigstock’s approval rate for images is on par with other top online stock photography sites.  Our image customers are seeking high-quality images on a large variety of topics and our goal is to service their needs on behalf of our contributors.  If there’s ever a question or concern about a specific image that hasn’t been accepted, or if there is a feeling that an error has been made, contributors can contact support with their concerns and we’ll provide guidance.

Review Time:

We typically approve images in one to three days . This can vary if we see a surge of upload activity within a specific week. We understand that short approval times are critical for editorial content.  We recently added additional reviewers as well as an additional review coordinator to shorten  the amount of time from upload to approval.

Uploading Process:

Bigstock’s new uploading tool retains most of the functionality of the old process while providing better batch tools and more flexible options for selecting images. We also added keyboard shortcuts, such as the ability to use the tab key to cycle through the entire metadata editing process. Our category suggestion tool was moved, but we’re seeking ways to consolidate. We’ve also launched a new “quick view” for upload and earnings data. While many contributors have told us that they are happy with these improvements, we do appreciate and respond to feedback sent to feedback@bigstockphoto.com.   Additional features are coming soon.

Sales:

We’ve made major investments in marketing and infrastructure to expand Bigstock’s global presence  We’re pleased to report that since March, we’ve launched a redesigned website; new online, e-mail and print ad campaigns; a redesigned newsletter; a trade show presence; regular Facebook and Twitter updates; as well as two new blogs, “The Upload” for contributors and “The Download” for image buyers.  We see ourselves as partners with our contributors and many exciting things are underway to support Bigstock’s growth.

Thanks for the opportunity to share our news and enhancements with you. Stay tuned for more updates to come.

I should begin posting running totals of sales like my buddy Laryn Kragt Bakker. His (far more impressive) stats tell the same tale–BigStock is in last place. I’m not trying to beat up on BigStock, but with limited time to process and upload, I’m starting to measure that time according to ROI. And right now, it’s just not worth it.

Some addenda to my recent post on microstock editorial intricacies. For starters, within days of that post, Shutterstock released a beta batch edit tool that absolutely rocks. A huge improvement over their older, much more linear process. I only wish they let you submit some pix but wait to edit others later, as Dreamstime and BigStock both do.

In the process, I also discovered that though I prefer BigStock’s previous batch tool, their  current one is about the same as Shutterstock’s new one (which make sense since Shutterstock owns Bigstock). It’s less intuitive (to me) than their previous one, which left all fields populated by your first choice, even if you selected more than one image, which made it easy to edit multiple images with the same basic info. Shutterstock’s tool is still superior because it at least populates matching fields when multiple images are selected (e.g. if the captions match), while BigStock’s just leaves all fields blank when multiple images are selected, and allows you to overwrite them. I like to have something to work with, rather than doing a lot of copy-and-paste, since I’m often uploading many images with same or similar captions—especially with editorial images—when the same caption applies to multiple images from the same event.

Also, as an experiment, I uploaded batches to the following sites one evening. Here are the results:

Dreamstime: Uploaded at 5pm – response by 5am the next morning (12 hrs)!

Shutterstock: Uploaded at 5:30 pm -  response by 8pm the following evening (27 hrs).

BigStock: Uploaded at 6pm – response two full days later (48 hrs).

I should also mention that earlier in the week I uploaded just two images to Shutterstock at 9am and got an approval response by 10am—1 hour response time! Wow!

My fundamental approach to microstock has been not to shoot for microstock’s sake, but to use microstock to compensate me for photos I was shooting anyway but may not have had a designated use for. There have been a few shoots I’ve done for purely mercenary purposes—photos of the Supreme Court and the U.S. Capitol, for example, that I might not have taken otherwise. But in general, this means that I have yet to ask any subject of any photo sign a model release that is required for any recognizable person for “royalty free” licensing most common on microstock sites.

Instead, I submit photos that contain recognizable people under “editorial” licenses, which are allegedly less marketable, but until I’m willing to stage smiling interactions between brightly lit businesspeople, I’m eschewing microstock’s most wanted images in favor of stuff I was interested in anyway. In DC, this has meant a lot of marches and rallies, which have sold at a steady trickle under editorial licenses.

However, each microstock site has its own idiosyncrasies when it comes to editorial photos, and you can save yourself a fair amount of frustration by mastering the various requirements of each site. At this point, I’m only aware of three major microstock sites that even accept editorial images: Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and BigStock. I have been submitting to all three for over a year. Here’s what I learned:

Shutterstock

Shutterstock requires a model release or editorial license for any “identifiable person.” In other words, if there’s a person in the shot, but they can’t be identified, it can be licensed as RF. There’s obviously some gray area there, but if it gets rejected, you can always resubmit as editorial. There’s also the requirement that any editorial shot be “newsworthy”—again, rather subjective, and apparently much of this can hinge on how you caption the photo. Here’s where Shutterstock is a little annoying, but I’ve gotten pretty good sales from them so it’s worth it. Click here to read their forum thread on editorial caption requirements. Here’s my summary:

• Follow the dateline format they require and then repeat the date in the caption itself. Yes, it eats up half of your 200 character limit on redundant information, but if you don’t, they’ll scold you and ask you to resubmit. Here’s their example: “JACKSON, NJ – JUNE 16: Singer Deborah Harry performs onstage at Six Flags Great Adventure June 16, 2008 in Jackson, NJ”
• Pictures don’t need to be recent to be newsworthy. If your image is not recent, reference a current or ongoing events, or throw in some fact or figure relating to the image that makes it relevant now and forever. For example, I’ve uploaded images from 2002 of Israeli soldiers in the Occupied West Bank.
  
• Shutterstock also requires name, age, and town/area of residence for any children. This is enforced unevenly, as some of my photos containing unidentified children have been approved, and the line between child/teen/adult is not completely clear. But I’m more likely to get ID info if there are kids involved. Here’s an example of when I did collect the info: “WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 21: Daniel Rogel and son Daniel Rogel Jr. (4) of Silver Spring MD stand with some 200,000 immigrants’ rights activists on the National Mall on March 21, 2010 in Washington, DC.” 

Despite some of Shutterstock’s inconvenient requirements, they review editorial submissions super-fast, often within 24 hours, sometimes faster. They also seem to allow more latitude on quality issues like sharpness, camera noise, etc. for especially newsworthy shots. I was kind of shocked that they accepted many of my U2 concert photos that were shot with my point-and-shoot Canon Powershot.

Dreamstime

Dreamstime has hazy requirements similar to Shutterstock regarding “recognizable” people, but here’s an example of a rejection message:

The main subject of the image (or part of it) is one or several persons, model release documentation is required even if the face is not visible.

Their captioning requirements are much less strict than Shutterstock’s, but they do require that you include “editorial info” such as event-related links or links from news sites. That usually means a quick Google News search to find a recent article relating to the content of the photo—either directly, as in the case of the many protest rallies I’ve shot—or indirectly, such as finding an article about current events in the West Bank to go with photos I took there years ago. I just paste the URL in there and it works just fine.

Dreamstime has no ID requirements in their captions, so no need to get name/residence info for their sake, but if I’ve collected it anyway to submit to Shutterstock, I’ll include it in my Dreamstime caption. Their length limits are also more relaxed.

Dreamstime also allows you to send a “priority review” request through their “contact us” page, so that editorial images get reviewed much faster than RF images. Paste in all the image IDs for your breaking news editorial shots into the contact form and they’ll get reviewed pretty quick. There are even $5 bonuses for “In the News” images that they feature.

BigStock

I’ve stopped submitting any photos to BigStock for the following reasons: Picky, picky, picky. Slow, slow, slow. Cold, cold, cold (as in sales). They have consistently rejected photos approved by Shutterstock and Dreamstime, and despite such high standards sell very few of my photos that they do accept. They also take a very long time to review images, and there’s no way to request expedited review for breaking news events. So I got tired of having my photos rejected for bogus “out of focus” or “composition” reasons when those same images were accepted and making decent sales on other sites. It just wasn’t worth my time. For a while their only redeeming feature was a great batch caption/category/keyword submitting tool that was superior to every other microstock site. And then they redesigned their site. And despite the aesthetic improvement, the upload process is no longer as awesome. Oh well. They were acquired by Shutterstock a few months back, but other than the site redesign, I haven’t observed any difference in sales or general viability.

Others

It’s also worth noting that a few other microstock sites that don’t accept editorial images have fairly forgiving requirements for what constitutes a “recognizable” person. Both Fotolia and iStockphoto seem to be OK with people appearing in RF images, as long as their faces aren’t visible. For example, both Fotolia accepted this photo of a kayaker in Trondheim, Norway, even though I didn’t swim out and get a model release from him.

Maybe if I just got more industrious and started getting model releases, this would all be moot. But somehow I don’t thing these guys would cooperate…

As pledged at the end of last year, I have finally upgraded to a full-frame Nikon D700 in preparation for my three-year assignment in Palestine and Israel with Mennonite Central Committee (read that post for all of my excellent reasons for the purchase). I took it out for a test spin at church this last weekend, and was delighted that the Sunday school class was learning about planting seeds in good soil—both the biblical parable and literally planting vegetable seeds to plant in a garden plot next to our new church home on Hunt Place. Here’s my favorite pic that I’ve also submitted to Dreamstime and Shutterstock:

After marching through my existing digital archive last year, I embarked on the daunting task of scanning my entire negative film archive—more than 15 years of color and black and white negatives. I started with color, which was smaller—only about 10 years’ worth, and have now begun scanning black and white. Here’s my color workflow. My B&W is still under refinement, as I contemplate the best solution for removing dust and scratches. Unfortunately, the miracle of ICE, which automagically uses infrared light to somehow sense and eliminate blemishes from color film does not work with the silver emulsions of B&W film. So sad. BUT, ON WITH COLOR…!

1. Scan in NikonScan

• I scan directly in NikonScan—rather than doing a Photoshop import scan—because this allows you to save scanned images while another scan is in progress.
• Scan at maximum resolution
• Leave curves alone, unless you need to tweak to avoid clipping in the histogram
• I leave multisample scanning in Normal (1x) mode—for my purposes, higher settings just seem to add a lot of processing time without significant improvements in quality. I did a bunch of side-by-side comparisons to come to this conclusion.
• I also only can at a bit depth of 8 rather than 16 like all the purists out there. For my purposes (primarily freelance journalism, microstock), I can’t justify the additional hard drive space.
• I use the following ICE/ROC/GEM settings:
  • ICE=normal (I don’t find higher settings make significant difference)
  • ROC=0 (ROC is supposed to fix faded colors from old negs—which hasn’t been a problem for me)
  • GEM=3 (GEM reduces the appearance of film grain. This can introduce artifacting and loss of detail if overused, so I set it at 3 for a happy medium)
  • Note: using any of these settings significantly increase processing time–though I find that the results from using ICE far outweigh the time I’d spend retouching in Photoshop with the clone or heal tools.
• I didn’t discover Nikon Scan’s batch feature until I was done with the bulk of my color archive. That was frustrating. But it took some fiddling to figure out that you have to set the settings for each frame before they’d stick during batch scanning. Still not quite sure what I did to make it work right, but here’s the forum thread that I read to help me figure it out. Nikon scan also has pretty good naming options in batch mode that are real time savers, allowing prefixes, suffixes, and sequences with a selected number of digits. Now if I could only get all those evenings back I spent single scanning. At least I got through all five seasons of Lost on Netflix instant viewing…

2. Save as TIFF

• Though I swear by RAW formats when shooting digital, I’m not convinced that it’s necessary or an improvement over lossless formats like TIFF when scanning.
• TIFF also embeds metadata when retouching in Lightroom, eliminating the need for XMP sidecars required for RAW (NEF with NikonScan) formats

3. Import to Lightroom

• Make all color corrections, adjustments, levels
• Add captions, keywords, etc.

4. Export JPEGs for online archive, microstock

This tip is probably obsolete for most of my photographer friends shooting digital nowadays, but … I just discovered that a 55mm lens, aperture wide open, makes a nice loupe if you don’t have a real one handy. That is, looking directly through the lens—not with it attached to a camera.

I’m doing a lot of scanning these days, so it’s critical to be able to check sharpness, etc. before popping the negative into the scanner or you end up wasting a lot of time previewing when you can just click “scan” if you know it’s good. Look for a post on scanning workflow sometime soon. It’s definitely a work in progress.

I’ve just recently been approved to submit photos to both iStockphoto and Veer. Though neither accept editorial submissions—which are my bread and butter—I have a fair collection of royalty free qualifying images that I can experiment with. I’m just getting started, so it’s hard to say if the sales will be worth it, but my motivation is spurred partly because they’re owned by Getty and Corbis, respectively, two major stock houses that one would assume would do a good job of supporting their microstock stepchildren.

First impressions: both are extremely picky compared to my top-selling sites Dreamstime and Shutterstock. It took a couple of rounds with each to get accepted as a contributor, and I’ve gotten a lot of rejections on the basis of “artifacting when viewed at full size”—sometimes on virtually noiseless photos taken at ISO 400 in broad daylight. Sometimes images from the same series seem to be somewhat arbitrarily accepted and rejected. Both are also hard core about “chromatic aberration”—something that can’t always be fixed in Lightroom. I sometimes feel like they’re trying to get me to buy better cameras and lenses.  But I’ll stick with them for a while to see if the sales make up for the hassle.

Other first impressions: iStock’s user interface and upload process is so stupid terrible that there seems to be  a host of third party software offerings to make it halfway reasonable. For example, on using their basic upload tool (they don’t offer FTP!) keywords and other IPTC data were not automatically imported, or imported only on a sporadic basis. User forums confirmed that this was a pervasive problem. Wow. I’ve been using the free software Deepmeta to manage my iStock uploads, and it works pretty well. Veer’s interface is considerably better—and quite elegant—but their batch processing is still pretty lousy compared to sites like BigStock (the best processing backend, in spite of lackluster sales).

BTW, my Fotolia sales are pretty crappy so far. I think the sites that accept editorial stock will always do better for me, but I figure the experiment with other sites is worth it, even if they only send a trickle of income my way.

Here’s one of those posts I wish someone else had written before our trip to the Middle East last spring. I had to figure this all out myself. So, you’re traveling to Israel as well as several neighboring Arab countries who don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. Turns out, these countries have chosen to take out their ideological differences on hapless travelers by barring entry to folks who have Israeli markings in their passports.

The solution used to be that you could request that Israeli border officials stamp a visa on a piece of paper kept in your passport until you exit Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. When we checked official web sites before our trip earlier this year which said that they still do this. But friends who live and travel in the region said they are not consistent in responding to such requests, and will sometimes not stamp your passport at all–which is OK for travel within Israel proper. But if you plan to pass back and forth between Israel and Occupied Palestine–which means passing through Israeli military checkpoints–not having a stamp can be a problem.

So, bottom line, you need two passports: one for Israel to stamp, and one for traveling to Arab countries, such as Syria or Lebanon. Syria will even look to see stamps from neighboring Arab countries like Jordan, so don’t hand them a blank passport just for them as if you dropped out of the sky with a new passport–they’ll know why–and want to see your Jordanian entry stamp, for example. Israel doesn’t seem to mind getting an unused passport, even if you’re crossing the Jordanian border and don’t have Jordanian stamps.

Try Googling “second passport” and you’ll get lots of broker services that want to charge add-on fees for facilitating and expediting the process. But for you DIY types who want to make a direct application to the State Department, instructions are hard to come by.

There is no application for a second passport, per se, but buried on page 3 of a State Department PDF, under the heading, “U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual Volume 7 – Consular Affairs,” are these relatively simple steps:

1. Fill out a regular passport renewal application
2. Include a signed letter saying why you need the second passport, which for some reason needs to include your promise that if you lose it you’ll report it to the nearest embassy. They give an example of such a statement.
3. Include your current passport, but plaster it with post-it notes saying something like “APPLICATION FOR SECOND PASSPORT, DO NOT DESTROY, PLEASE RETURN”
4. Two passport photos
5. Your fee, currently $75 if you already have a passport.
6. The State Dept. recommends you use a traceable delivery method such as UPS. I do not recommend FedEx.

That’s pretty much it. Give them at least four weeks to process it, though you can pay extra for expedited applications. Here’s the official U.S. passport site, which has other info and details you may need. Also, don’t panic when your second passport arrives without your original. The original is returned separately.

It was annoying to look at my photos from the recent Iran Vigil here in DC to see lots of wierd lens flare action from the candles. I had seen this kind of behavior before, but never this bad.

After a little Google research, I tried one solution that was recommended–remove the filter. It’s pretty much a rule of thumb to slap a UV or skylight filter on every lens you own to protect the multi-hundred dollar lens with a far less expensive filter to protect from dust, scratches, and breakage. However, as my research indicated, these can also cause the unsightly flares by adding an extra layer of reflective material.

this week: look ma, no flares

last week: one item of flare

So at this week’s vigil, with great trepidation, I removed the filters and–look, ma, no flares. Click here to see the entire gallery. Of course, you wouldn’t want to do this in circumstances where there was more danger to your lens, but at Dupont Circle, in a fairly calm vigil (only partially interrupted by chanting supporters of the Shah–really? the Shah?–that is sooo 1970s), I felt I could get away with it.

My research also indicated that possibly more expensive filters would also be flare-free, so I’ll have to do some more digging on that, but occasionally slipping them off for beautiful night shots of candles or other single light sources doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal. Easier than Photoshopping out those nasty flares…