Comments for Backyard Silver

Comment on Review of the smaller Microstock sites by admin

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:03:00 +0000

Yes, you are right. I used this recently when I came across my Lightroom Keyword problem described elsewhere, and I needed to add a new keyword into all my uploaded, but not submitted files. You can select multiple files and add one new keyword, you can correctly identify a keyword with multiple meanings, and then save the results to that group of files in one step. Whether it is worth spending a lot of time playing with your files in Veer is a different question though – it is a middle tier site with middling earnings for me.

Comment on Review of the smaller Microstock sites by Brad C

Brad C — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 22:46:58 +0000

I though that Veer was a simple as you describe above, and it can be, but you can edit each one as you upload and refine the keywords (similar to how iStock looks for clarification of double meanings) and they also suggest keywords based on yours… So you can get a bit more complicated with Veer if you like

Comment on Fun with wine glasses and a hard drive by Chris Willemsen

Chris Willemsen — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:46:33 +0000

Thanks for the information. Chris

Comment on Fun with wine glasses and a hard drive by admin

admin — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:21:06 +0000

Hi Chris

There are two ways to get a nice clean white background. The one I use here is to have a white card about a meter behind the glass and have one flashgun firing directly at it. The aim is to set the power of that flashgun so that the white completely over-exposes, but is not too blown out otherwise you start to get halos around the edge of the subject. For a larger white background (behind a person) you can use a white cloth and two flash guns to get more even light. The other method is to use a translucent piece of plastic and light it with flash from behind.

Getting really bright daylight lamps is not easy – the big flourescent ones are not that bright compared to flash. I bought some Canon 550EX flash guns on eBay. The 550 is not a current model and so used versions tend to sell for less. My ones were about $200 each, but there are smaller flash guns that would work. The more powerful flash guns let you work at half power so they charge up more quickly.

{Edit} I’ve now added an article to the blog about how to create an isolation against white

Steve

Comment on Fun with wine glasses and a hard drive by Chris Willemsen

Chris Willemsen — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 09:40:43 +0000

Thanks for th einformation but I always stuck with the question,how to get the nice white background as you have here with the glass of beer. I have a nikon d300 and a sb900 flash and a light cube. the 2 lights deliverd by the cube are useless. what is a better option,to buy to daylight lights or add some cheep flash lights. can someone give me advise ?

Comment on Lightroom Keywords not exporting to JPEG by Examples of stock photographs | Backyard Silver

Examples of stock photographs | Backyard Silver — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:10:59 +0000

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Comment on Review of the smaller Microstock sites by gemmy

gemmy — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:06:44 +0000

Thanks steve for sharing your interesting information with us. I try to read all of your new stuffs… hope to see more stuffs soon.

Comment on Lightroom Keywords not exporting to JPEG by admin

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:21:08 +0000

Les, thanks for all your help on the Microstock forum,and thanks for your comments above. I agree wholeheartedly about not changing things directly in the LRCAT database – hence my use of it as a way to find the incorrectly set keywords. As it turns out, the idea you came up with to export the keyword list and look for [ brackets] is an even simpler solution. I left both there in case someone wanted to go through the database route if they have hundreds of keywords to edit, but that is at their risk. At least backing up the database allows you to try the result, but I agree it would be difficult to find all implications of a change. The reason I changed the keyword in two steps was that I thought my experiment showed that just making it lower case didn’t result in a any change, but I only tried it once. As it turned out, this was not the problem anyway!

Thanks for the clarification about the hierarchy. I did find a couple of those and they were capable of supporting different formats.

Steve

Comment on Lightroom Keywords not exporting to JPEG by Les Howard

Les Howard — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:36:38 +0000

“Lightroom can only hold one copy of a keyword in its database however it is capitalized” is true for the keyword list shown in your examples but is not true in a more generalized hierarchical LR keyword list. For example you can include “Paris” as a city under “France” and also as another city under “Texas” which is also under “USA”. At the same time you could have “Bologna” as a city under Italy and “bologna” as a food product. However, if you have a flat keyword list, “Paris” and “Bologna” could only occur once as you stated. When you add “Paris” to a file, LR is supposed to ask you which one you mean – much like using the iStock CV. I saw that in an article somewhere but I’ve never actually tested it myself.

I also wonder why you needed to edit the keyword twice, first changing the spelling, then changing the switch setting and correcting the spelling. My testing shows you could have done both in one step in your example. [Note that fixing an incorrectly spelled keyword is not so simple if the correctly spelled keyword is already in the keyword list].

It’s interesting to look at the LRCAT in an SQL browser but I don’t recommend using that method to alter the database. When you manually change something, there may be other things that need to change as well that LR automatically takes care of but you know nothing about. I was a computer programmer for 30 years and I wouldn’t think of doing such a thing knowing what goes into the design of a complex database like the LRCAT.

Comment on Zoonar – coming back to life as a viable stock agency? by admin

admin — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:59:44 +0000

I certainly agree that micro sites have low prices, and I am sure many of the buyers are moving towards sourcing their images from those sites. Us poor contributors are in a bind – we would prefer that buyers pay what we think the images are worth, but many other contributors are putting great images on the microstock sites and so the buyers gravitate to them. As you probably see from the rest of my site, I’ve given up fighting against the crowd and joined them, and I upload my images to all the sites from Alamy, Panther, Zoonar down to start-up sites like “All you can stock” In the end, I get a lot of sales, not much per sale, but overall the money is growing as I get more images online.

Steve