Why does light get stretched when reflected off water?

Here's a couple of photos that illustrate how light reflects off the water.

In the first, the lights are 'stretched'. Note that the lightning bolt also casts a reflection off the water in the same way as the apartment and street lights.

In the second pic, the light sources are not stretched:


So what causes the difference in the way water reflects off the water? Use of a circular polariser? The stillness of the water? The angle the picture is taken?

I suspect the relative angle is important. The first photo was taken of buildings at least 200m away, the second was taken of trees some 30m away. I suspect the smaller the angle of the light source relative to the camera lens, the larger the apparent stretching of the light across the water.

If this is true, this is bad. In order to get an unstretched reflection of lightning off the water, the photo must be taken from close quarters!

Progress to date

I haven't really made a great of progress yet towards my stated goals since my last post. However, I have taken a few photos. Actually a lot of photos. Surely the laws of probability dictate that one or two of them are worthy of submission? In the meantime I've posted a fraction of them on flickr.com:



New York


US East Coast


Canada East Coast

In other news, the good folks at www.schmap.com have agreed to post my bumble bee photo on their website to promote tourism in and around Canberra. I'm a little surprised anyone could put Canberra and tourism in the same sentence but there you go. And how exactly a bumble bee constitutes a reason to visit Canberra and surrounds is beyond me. However, the gesture is much appreciated even if the pecuniary gain is $0 and my 'net profit' for the year remains in the red.

Progress Update

It's almost mid-October.......I think a progress update is due.

September
Last month was quite a month for me. I think my efforts since July-August started paying dividends - I got a massive jump in earnings. I earnt a total of $27.32 across all sites (!!!!!). Comparatively....(as my below post indicates)....in August I earnt a measely $11.

In terms of goals, that almost got me to me to the $30 mark....which I'm hoping I'll earn in at least one month from now till the end of the year. Let us see what the next few months bring.....although i have a sneaking suspicion I'll be lucky to hit 30 (seasonal demand is decreasing from now till Dec).

Portfolio
Last month I didn't add very many photos to my portfolio. I think one reason is that I worked 2 out of the 4 saturdays....not leaving too much time for photo-taking. I ended up submitting around 5, and only 1 or 2 got accepted at each site. These are the ones that made it:








Training
I was talking to a colleague at work who had recently started getting into photography....and he said he'd joined some Photography courses. After a little enquiry and some research, I ended up deciding to join too - Camera Skills at the Sydney Community College. It's a bit pricey......but I think it's exactly what I need - while I consider my layout/composition to be relatively decent....my technical skills with the camera are shameful. Eight classes of technical photog jargon should get me up to speed in no time!! I may even post some interesting learnings..... :-)

End of Year Goal

Ok.....so I finally get around to it.

The target.

Goal, aim, milestone.....stake in the ground. As you will.

As aspiring microstockers, there needs to be a goal we set for ourselves. The reason for the goal may differ, but the common aim is for it to stretch us more than we would typically like, yet not so much that it is unachievable.

As far as microstocking goals go, I think there are two key indicators that can be used - Earnings, and Number of approved photos. The former is the ultimate indicator of success, but can be subject to seasonal variation in demand, price policy changes at the major sites and changing credit/subscription ratios of downloads. The latter doesn't indicate the profitability of your portfolio - a large number of photos in a niche market may not yield good return - but does provide a stable, consistent measure of effort.

Current achievement:

Below are my current portfolio sizes across the various MS sites:

• iStockPhoto: 36
• ShutterStock: 40
• Dreamstime: 61
• BigStockPhoto: 80
  
• Fotolia: 74
  
• 123rf: 89
  

On average, that comes to around 60 photos / site. My earnings last month were $11, and the average over the last 6 months has been $9.50.

Goal:

To hope to progress further, more quickly....I aim to achieve the following by 1st of January 2010:

Approved photos:

• iStockPhoto: 50
• ShutterStock: 55
• Average across all sites: 75

Earnings:

• Sep 09 - Dec 09: At least one month with $30 sales
• Jul 09 - Dec 09: Average of $20 / month

As an additional goal, I also aim to upload at least 3 videos to iStockVideo (and thus pass the test to become a regular contributor). Given my new Nikon D90...I owe it to myself.

.....

So there you have it.
My goals to achieve by 1st of January 2010.

What are yours?

Looking for your image on the web

I was thinking about a couple of my images which I've posted on www.flickr.com. They're been viewed a fair number of times and I figured that they might have been re-used elsewhere on the web.

Turns out that Tineye scoures the web (over 1 billion images and counting) for images and stores a 'digital footprint' of each. You provide your photo and it will look for the same image, even if cropped or altered. Examples here.

It didn't find my images (not even on flickr.com) for any number of reasons:
1. it hasn't crawled the entire web yet
2. the photos were added since the last time it crawled flickr.com
3. the Tineye web-crawler didn't crawl over particular parts of an otherwise public website which contained a robots.txt file.

Anyway, food for thought given our endeavours...

Commercial vs. Editorial photography

I had just had one of my photos rejected by Shutterstock and was investigating whether submitting it as an editorial photo would get it approved, when I came across this article (linked to in the Shutterstock FAQ) on Commercial vs. Editorial Stock photography.

From the article:

In short: commercial stock photography offers high upfront money, but questionable artistic reward and little opportunity for long-term photographer/buyer relationships.

Editorial stock (photo illustration) receives lower fees, but the photos enjoy longer shelf-life and multiple sales over the long haul. Editorial stock is generally more introspective, sensitive, and universally appealing, and eventually can become historically significant. And the nature of most editorial markets, with less turnover of personnel, provide photographers with opportunities for long-term sales associations with buyers. All that marketing homework has a chance to reap more mileage.

It then goes on to talk about the appeal of editorial photography.

Given that I'm not inclined towards studio shots, and find myself increasingly attracted to the candid/artistic aspects of photography........found the article quite interesting.........

Neutral graduated filters

I haven't bought any filters yet though I probably will soon. I have used the Graduated Tint feature in Picasa which does a pretty good job. I've taken a photo and added slices of various graduated tints to illustrate what Picasa can do.



Slice a: added default colour tint
Slice b: increased the shade (amount of tinting)
Slice c: increased the feather (the degree of merging)
Slice d: changed the angle of the horizon (by clicking to left or right of centre)
Slice e: picked a new colour
Slice f: combining all the above - see final photo

It begs the question: why bother buying the filter if it can be done in Picasa? I think the real filter provides greater freedom e.g.:
a) you can tilt it 90 degrees (which you can't do in Picasa without rotating the picture first
b) you can take the shot, preview it in the field, and adjust settings as necessary (rather than get home and find Picasa can't produce the desired result)

Graduated filters are commonly used to reduce the contrast between ground and sky. Pretty important on sunny days or when you want to bring out the features of good-looking clouds.

Useful links

Thought it might be useful to aggregate all the useful urls we find:

Microstock industry
Dan Heller's blog: Microstock industry analysis
Microstock Diaries: Lee Torren's observations about microstocking

Status check

Ok. So I thought I'd do a status check.

Since this blog is about keeping track of our journey into photography - with microstock photography being a key component - I thought I'd take..stock..of where I'm at.

The Facts:

- Started microstocking in July 07
- First sale in August 07
- Submitted 20 to 60 photos across various microstock websites from July - November 07 (5 months)
- Thereafter, made no submissions till July 09 (1.5 year hiatus)
- Restarted submissions in July 09
- Currently submit to iStockPhoto, ShutterStock, Fotolia, 123rf, Dreamstime, BigStockPhoto

The Money:

One of the reasons I got into microstock was that it was a way of making money out of something I like doing. Over time, I've come to realise, that probably more than the money itself - it is the knowing that someone likes my picture enough to *pay* for it, that gives me the biggest kick. The more they pay, the more they like. The more I like. :-)

Nonetheless, pure earnings are an important indicator for me - despite their seasonal fluctuations - and I hope to eventually reach $1,000 a month....though $100/month is a more achievable short-term goal. It will be difficult, no doubt - with more microstockers coming on board all the time, but nothing ever worth achieving was ever easy....as someone said.

So here are my earnings per month: July 07 - July 09

The Reflection:

As you can see, I started with a bang, but the earnings slowly dribbled. Despite the same number of photos being available, the earnings reduced fairly significantly. I attribute these to three things:

• Search algorithms. I've come to think that microstock website search algorithms are somewhat biased towards newer photos (e.g. ShutterStock), or photos of people who are active contributors (e.g. Dreamstime).



• Lack of Submissions. Carrying on from above, I am sure my 1.5 year hiatus detrimentally affected my earnings. It is not a necessity however - Lee Torrens over at MicrostockDiaries is yet to see that problem after 7 months of non-submission.



• Increased Competition. More and more people are entering the microstock world - and not only amateur photographers, but professionals as well (us microstockers are putting them out of business). More people, more photos, more competition. (luckily though, buyers are increasing as well).

Hopefully, now that I am submitting once more, that line should start going upwards a little.

As for the spike that earnt me $50+ in one month, that was an extended license sale over at LuckyOliver, which has since shut up shop. I'm still working on replicating those types of sales...

In need of a good photo editor

Any recommendations for a free photo editor? Photoshop, Lightroom, GIMP? I've used Picasa and Paint.NET which are useful but there are better alternatives...

Need to be able to process jpg, RAW and possibly TIFF formats.

A blog is born

And from the depths of one's imagination and desire to derive an alternative income source that might one day supersede one's day job, another blog is born. No ordinary blog mind you - more of a means to goad its creators into taking their interest in photography a little more seriously.

Step 1: Create a gmail account. Check.
Step 2: Create the blog. Check.
Step 3: Dislike the blog title and change it. Check.
Step 4: Think the blog's url looks more like a typo than a name and change it. Check!