Accepted

It's official: I'm improving as a photographer.

One of my goals for my photography business is to build up a sizable percentage of our monthly income from selling stock photography. My favorite, and I believe the best, site in the industry is iStockphoto. To begin submitting your work to iStock, you must first pass an application procedure, which involves submitting three pieces of your work for them to evaluate as stock.

I bought my camera back in April of 2009, and a couple of months later (about seven months ago) I uploaded my first three images for my application.


I was rejected immediately. About three weeks later, I tried again, with what I felt were better images, and I was upset to find out I was rejected again.


At that point, I sort of wrote off iStockphoto. Or rather, just stopped thinking about trying to get in. But I kept shooting away.


Around November, I started looking into creative use of off-camera flash and got a bunch of equipment lent to me to fool around with. I had a lot of fun, and even produced a few doggie portraits and a set of promotional shots for my brother (who just landed a jazz gig and needed some shots to promote with).


After that shoot, I took a look at my growing body of work and thought, "This is a LOT better than the stuff I was doing five months ago. So, I returned to iStock, uploaded three samples and two were accepted. I threw in another that I had taken in the last couple of weeks, and bam - success.

"Congratulations! The iStockphoto administrators have determined that your files are commercially and technically ready for iStockphoto.com. Please begin uploading at your convenience. "


I'm really excited to have grown as a photographer to have passed this first hurdle. I also know that I have a LONG way to go before I am adept at consistently and efficiently creating great art and usable commercial stock, but as someone who is reinventing themselves after a life devoted to math and science education, this feels really good.