I'm so excited that I just reached my first payout amount today. I've started at the end of October 2007 probably with the same reason why many others here join. For the love of photography and the excitement that people want to use my photos for commercial purposes. I've learned a lot from the people here on forums and blogs. And for that I am very grateful. Dreamstime has given me a new view point of photography that I've never been exposed to before. I think my photography is getting better with the help of Stock photography and Dreamstime which was pleasantly unexpected.

I know it probably took me longer than average to reach this point compared to the other photographers on this site but I hope this will give other newbies encouragement to continue striving for that first payout....

When you look at food photos, they may seemingly seem simple. But there is a lot of work and thought behind each photo. See the video below, and you'll know what I mean.

You Tube video on the art of food photography

Seems like there are more lights and reflectors than taking portraits of people. The difference is that in portrait photos, most people want their skin to look smooth. The more the diffuse the light source the better. However, in food photography, you need to see the textures of the food. So you need a combination of diffuse and direct light sources. But more importantly need to make the food look delicious.

Since currently, I don't have any models to take photos of, I decided ...

I've been taking wedding photos for friends and family for a couple of years now as wedding gifts and as a favour to them. I'm not a professional wedding photographer but I do enjoy shooting weddings a lot. I'm still relatively new in Stock photography so back then I shot more documentary weddings with people in the photos. Unfortunately most of my friends and family don't want to be online as my models so it limits what I can upload here :(.

But I'm very excited about the upcoming weddings this year. A lot of my friends are getting married this summer, so I'll be shooting some more weddings. This time, however, it will be different. I will have a stock photographer mind set. ;)

Weddings are perfect ...

I'm still very new at this whole stock photo industry so I'm trying to learn as much as possible. I've only been at Dreamstime since the end of October and have learned a lot from the message boards, blogs, and other photographer's portfolios. Anxiously waiting to get enough sales for my first pay cheque. Yeah!

The difficult part of stock photography is determining what will sell. At the beginning what I did was to look at the most popular photographers and get an idea what is selling for them. And I do encourage the newcomers to do so. However, generally these photographer's portfolios are HUGE so it's overwhelming to look through their portfolios. And since these photographers also have a large portfolios,...

As I browse through this site and try to improve my skills in stock photography, I realize a lot of the most popular photos are not really photos at all. But rather a concept that was converted into a photo by combining a few photos together in photo editing software. These photos generally have a big impact even viewing in thumbnail size and are "Surreal" Below are some of what I'm mentioning.

Surrealism is defined as from dictionary.com "a of art and literature developed principally in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/surrealism

And ...

As you can see from my profile, I'm relatively new at this. Up until recently, I've uploaded photos I've taken on vacation and weddings and special functions. But I figured in order to have a diverse portfolio, one must also set up or fabricate shots. It seems that the most popular photos are the ones that are set up and not just random shots during vacation. Below are a few of what I mean.

What's common about these above photos are all of them are well thought out. Lighting is controlled. The whole photo is "set up".

So instead of just snapping photos of things around me, I going to give it a "shot" (pardon the pun) to set up up photos to be used ...

I finally decided to make a collections. I'm still very new

at this so not sure if I've done this correctly. I decided to make a "Everything Eyecare" collections since I know it's difficult to narrow searches down unless you know very specific terms. If you were to search for eye or eye doctor, you'll end up getting a lot of photos of eyes or medical doctors instead of optometrists/ophthalmologists. Even if you searched for optometrist, you'll get a lot of photos of medical professionals holding or using otoscopes (for ears) labeled optometrist or using ophthalmoscopes backwards. So hopefully this collection will make it easier and quicker for developers. The collection is probably not as extensive as it should be, but should include all aspects ...

I know it's probably nothing new for most people here. But to me it's very exciting since I'm relatively new here. I have 3 photos in this month's health care category and I am already very happy since it's the first time entering an assignment. My photos are slightly different in that most health care photos are from a third person viewer. Mine are from the perspective of the patient. Whether that makes it a good stock photo, only time will tell.

And if you like these, please give me a vote. I know this may sound like an election campaign...hehehe Good luck to everyone. The photos in this month assignments are very good. Thanks in advance.

http://www.dreamstime.com/health-care_winners-42

Ok. Take a long breath before reading the next sentence. Have you ever took a photo and thought to yourself that the subject in the photo would be a good stock photo and when you finally downloaded it into your computer and finally viewed on your monitor that there are brightly coloured objects in the foreground or background that are very distracting? Ok, you can breath again. (long run on sentence I know)

There are a few ways you can fix this problem. One is to retake the photo but this is obvious a lot of trouble if you are already not at the location. Another way is to obviously clone out the object in photoshop. But this takes time and a lot of work and doesn't always look natural at the end. Also sometimes the distracting object is actually important in the scene but it's the ...

First of all let me say that Dreamstimes strict acceptance criteria definitely shows in the quality of stock on this site. Bravo!

Now that is out of the way, let me share a tip with you to help with acceptance of your rejected submissions.

I'm sure everyone has had this type of rejection before:

"This image is overfiltered. Its use for the potential designers is limited because of this, therefore the image is disqualified as a RF stock-oriented image. Please upload the original instead."

This is especially easy to get if your doing night photography which automatically gives you more saturated colours ("over filterer look") during long exposures or when your shooting skies with a polarizer.

So before you start from scratch and throw all you post-processing ...