Being Your Own Microstock Customer
 
The above picture was one of many I took in outstanding conditions of air quality, bright sunlight, in a tourist venue, but with minimal people and cars flashing or interrupting the shadows, light and reflections. Â I was fortunate to get the background without the usual morass of office workers, freight vans, smog, distractions, or cloudiness that comes and goes.
When you become your own Microstock editor, that’s when you derive a sense of value and satisfaction from your work. You can really see the benefits of Microstock photography that you can concretely draw on for your own projects. I recently got tapped to write a series of articles for a city where I had visited. It just so happens I ponied myself up a sweet bonus with my Microstock artillery of archived images.
I had gone around exhausting my batteries and working to the last byte of my memory cards to get every last image. One of the days was so hot it was real dedication not to throw both hands up in the air and head for the nearest iced coffee and wait until the temperature fell below 90 degrees.
Why was I wracking myself to get the pictures in those conditions? Because I was on a roll. There was just too much value coming through the camera to stop. I was in the right place at the right time. With all the heat, nobody was out and traffic was light, so external reflections were at a minimum.
I really felt the Microstock vibe that day, I was getting a lot of shots that “said somethingâ€. This is what the Microstock fine print says, even if they don’t always have the most direct way of bringing the concept across. By trusting my own judgement (after reviewing the Microstock fine print numerous times) I knew what to keep and what to discard.
I submitted quite a few pictures for the assignment but always kept the rest. I stored a lot of files online. The best part was being able to skip to the file editing and extraction phase and to submit the file of images without having to even step over the threshold. the cost of the Kodak Gallery after a year more than repaid its nominal fee.
