I've dipped a toe into the world of microstock and I think the water is warm. The big daddy of microstock is istockphoto and I now have 8 photos for sale there, with another 14 in queue to be reviewed. I've only been with them a week and in that time I've learned:

• There's no excuse for not viewing your photos at 100%... I'm not embarassed to say that many of my photos, at 100%, do not cut it. they are either out of focus, or the focus is ever so slightly off (ie i've focused on a person's elbow, instead of their eyes). You can't always tell when the image is downsized to 600x400 pixels, for the web, but you can definitely see it at 3,000 pixels. I also found plenty of dreaded purple fringing! That would be the photo equivalent of the dreaded lurgie


• Don't take it personally. Half your photos will be rejected (acceptance rate runs 50 to 70% for experienced photographers, but there is a much lower acceptance rate for newbies.)


• Big sellers? Business concepts (business people shaking hands, at "team-building meetings" and so on). How many of these in my portfolio? The answer would be n.o.n.e.


• It was a mistake to shoot JPG rather than RAW at the beginning. Those early images (2004!!!) have been opened and re-saved a few times since I first shot them, and each has been rejected by istockphoto for artifacts and degraded image quality. With RAW there is always an original, non-degradable file to refer back to.

My plan is to keep uploading the max (15 a week) and see how it looks at six months. My super-secret plan is to make enough at microstock to get from Tehran to Ulan Bator in the 1992 Ford Fiesta, but I'll save that story for another day.

BTW, I'm also at fotolia and will be uploading to sodapix shortly.