Recently I signed up for some stock agencies and their policy is to send in ten of your best images and have them reviewed. If seven are being selected you are in, if not, you can try again… Much to my surprise there were more images turned down than I had anticipated. Puts you right back on your feet again doesn’t it? The good part is that they provided reasons for having turned down the images so I can correct and try again. At the same time this is a great learning opportunity! These stock agencies are asking for high quality images and if mine are not up to speed then my editing needs to get better! Most of the images I sent in for review were edited in an older workflow than I have nowadays so it could pay off to try to re-edit them. Time to get it right! It’s all about the details.

Some of the remarks were about copyright; having logos (that I missed) in the frame, these are fairly easy to remove with the content aware tools in photoshop. And some others were on noise of sharpness. One was about sun flare and the artifacts my lense made. Some remarks are more difficult to interpret because of my personal view of the image or that the lighting circumstances at that moment actually were very special and it appears that the color balance is off (especially during the blue hour for instance) It is difficult that you cannot correspond on this with the agency but hey, if they were allowing correspondence on their feedback they would be discussing for centurys with photographers.

The different agencies have different standards so some of my images were turned down by ‘agency A’ but got accepted in ‘agency B’. Not a big a deal but I’m the kind of person who elevates the pickiest to the standard; if they get accepted there, then they will be accepted (almost) everywhere right?

Anyway, I just wanted to share the following ‘before and after’ images and maybe you can let me know me which one you like best? Some of the changes are really subtle (or not even visible due to the resolution) and some more drastic Also because my taste and tools in editing have changed. I’ll be re-sending these and others to the agencies and hope for the best…

In the mean time; follow me on Facebook for the latest updates!