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Officially an iStockphoto Contributor

Sony Xperia SP. I guess the 'SP' can now stand for "StockPhoto". The StockPhoto smartphone. haha... 

BANZ....no wait...it should be DOUBLE BANZAI!! WOOHOO! Because, not only did i became an iStockphoto Contributor, but i had 2 photos approved, ready to be commercially sold! Haha...what more can i say? This calls for a double celebration!

My Experience as an iStockphoto Applicant
It was dreadful having to wait for the result. Lots of time and effort were put in as i had no prior knowledge with regards to anything to do with photography [or rather stock photography]. I rarely take photos except maybe only once a year just to update my Facebook profile picture. And as for places of interests, people, events or festivals...i very rarely take photos of them. Sooo...nearly zero knowledge.

All i had was my ability to learn, my ability to know whether a photo looks good or bad and my Sony Xperia SP smartphone which has a 8MP camera. Unlike the Z series which has a 20MP camera, i had to make sure every picture were as noiseless as possible . I had to learn almost everything from scratch, go through lots of trial-and-error and not having a digital camera was going to be more challenging.

After what seemed like a month of research, countless attempts of photo-taking to get 3 awesome photos with almost-perfect elements of a good stock photo, and some photo-editing to get the elements perfected.......I FINALLY MADE IT \\(^^)//! Had i been rejected at the application phase, it would be extremely demoralizing and i would have stopped right there all because of me not having a digital camera. Nevertheless, i thoroughly enjoyed the learning process. It was exhaustively fun i got to say. 

But before thinking of the possibility of failing, i did come across other people's experience on the internet. Some even failed with a DSLR camera and their photos looked so much better than mine - clear, sharp, fine details with beautiful colors. There was one applicant who had 3 wonderful photos but had to retake at least one or two because the style or concept was the same across the 3 of them. When i read that, my eyes literally went "(O_O)" with great disbelief.

Having seen all that during my research, it was certainly discouraging. But when i first came to know that iStockphoto was accepting stock photos taken with a mobile phone, i had to give it a try. I had to give my best 3 shots for 3 photos.

Alright! Enough story-telling. So here are the 3 photos that i had submitted for my application:


I apologize for my horrible [or incredible] watermarking skills for the one with "HanzG" all over. Well...it's a photo of a private property. So i had to make sure that its only used for the sole purpose of showing my photographing skills to iStockphoto. For the time being, i have no intention of getting rights for it to be sold for commercial use. Hence, the overwhelming watermark. So that it will be impossible to remove them. I would have followed iStock's style of watermarking. But i have no idea how to. haha...

I'm not gonna explain how or why i choose those 3 photos as my submission for the application test. They just simply came to mind as i thought about it and my only goals were to have 3 photos that look good enough and are valid enough as a stock photo. So if not for these 3, it would have been any other 3 photos of something else. However, if you are interested to know more about applying to be an iStockphoto contributor, you may want to pay a little visit to this website.

The 2 Approved Photos
Nothing else left to be said. All i did was to re-submit them for approval. Except for the one of a private property. And i waited for about nearly a week and the results were out. Haha...as you can already see from the above picture, the ones that got accepted are the 2 photos with iStock's watermark. Click on the picture for the links to both of them:

          

Will that be all?
Hahaha...of course not! You can expect more photos in the future. But i'm afraid for the rest of this year, there won't be any more as i have many other important things to attend to. Just to let you in a little secret to make up for that tiny bit of disappointment: You know iStockphoto don't always approve photos. So what do you think i will be doing with those rejected ones if they are as good as the above two? =)

Until then, stay tune for my next post. Thanks for reading.

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