East Norton

Today went on a walk to East Norton with Rad. We went on a walk there a few weeks ago in July, when it was cloudy, hot, the fields were full of nearly ripe wheat and there were loads of tiny midges everywhere that kept going on you all the time. This time it was cloudy, reasonably cool (t-shirt weather after you've walked for a bit), the fields of wheat were either harvested or ploughed, there were loads of fields of beans and there were no midges thankfully.

Obviously, we did a different walk to last time, although we still set off from and arrived back at the same place. When we were having our coffee after the walk, there were a couple of business men walking down the left side of the road (in the actual road, the pavement was on the right side of the road). It was weird because they were just walking down a country road towards the village, and there wasn't anywhere further up the road they could have come from (unless they arrived on a bus, there was a bus stop a few hundred metres away). Weird as well how they walking in the road rather than on the pavement. Also weird for them to be visiting the village.

We had lunch when we got home, and then I spent the afternoon and part of the evening organising/processing the pics that I took. Since the weather wasn't good for photography, I just used my Panasonic FZ5 for the photos, not worth the effort to use the heavy D200 if the photos aren't going to be up to much anyway. The FZ5 also works well in low light weather like today where its large DoF even at wide apertures (due to the crop factor) and Image Stabilization come in useful compared to the D200.

Later in the evening I checked my spleenmail and got an email from Photoshelter saying that they have closed the Photoshelter Collection, and won't be selling stock anymore. It's funny because just a couple of weeks ago they were saying how they could challenge Getty, and now they say they are giving up partly because Getty has the market sown up

1. Stock photography is a slow growing market dominated by a single player
There was a single moment for a company to capitalize in stock photography, and Getty took it. The use of stock imagery isn't growing fast enough to create a displacement opportunity, and Getty is far too aggressive (and smart) to allow secondary players to displace them in any fashion.

Apparently the main reason they gave up is that they needed some more funding and were unable to raise it. Anyway, I spent quite a while saving all their 'School of stock' articles to my PC, and then after that I read their FAQ about closing and it said they would actually keep all the 'School of stock' articles live on the Photoshelter archive website. Oh well, at least I've got them in case they change their mind and get rid of them in the future.

Also on the FAQ, it said that the forum will be removed on Fri 12th September (today), so if you want to get other members contact details etc. then you can message them through the forum today (11th September). It does seem that they sent the email on 11th September, but I only received it today, when the forums had already closed! I didn't want to get anyone's contact details but would have liked to see if there was any good info on there that was worth saving.

After that, I checked Alamy who Photoshelter recommended as the nearest alternative. They say they require files that would be 48MB when uncompressed, and should have pixel level sharpness. I loaded up a file from my 450d (12MB) and it was about 37MB uncompressed. So I uprezzed it to 48MB, and it doesn't look too bad, although obviously not as sharp as the original. Anyway, if a 12MP is bordering on acceptable, images from my D200 or cropped images wouldn't be, they'd be too soft when uprezzed so much. I had a look at jupiterimages.com as well, but couldn't see how to upload to them. I think probably you just upload to a stock site they own (like stockxpert) and then they add the best ones to their collection. Anyway, I don't want to submit my nature images to a microstock site since my images are probably quite niche, so selling maybe 1 pic for $1 a year, of which I would probably get 10¢. I think I would probably be best just uploading them to sites like Flickr and deviantart, then have a portfolio website for myself that they can link back to so people can contact me if they are interested (unlikely).

Anyway, I have been meaning for a while to upload some more pics to photoshelter for a while, but never got round to it, so I am glad I didn't since the whole process is quite lengthy.

After watching Battlestar Trashlactica with Mac I went to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Tangerine marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
After walk snack: 2x choc chip cookies; coffee.
Lunch: West Country Mature Cheddar cheese sandwich; grapes; mince pie; slice of cherry madeira cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Slice of Pepperoni Pizza; Slice of Cheese & Tomato Pizza; chips; peas. Pudding was strawberry crumble with custard and cream. Coffee; Roses.