Technical Issues: Killing
the Gremlins before
They Kill Your Pictures
Good subjects and careful composition will be entirely wasted if
your pictures are rejected due to technical faults. In this chapter,
I’m going to help you identify the faults in your pictures that are
most likely to lead to rejections and share some of my own tips
and tricks to kill those technical gremlins with the minimum of
fuss.
Rejections for technical faults and imperfections can be very frus-
trating. There are long threads on the forums of the microstocks and
on independent forums that are started by disbelieving photographers
who simply don’t see why their images have been rejected for technical
problems, and after so much hard work! Some complain that their
rejected image recently won a competition or that they have had
images like it accepted at a traditional library without complaint. But
having run a small stock library myself, I know just how easy it is for
photographers to turn a blind eye to sometimes obvious technical
faults.
Mistakes can of course be made, particularly when tens of
thousands of candidate images are being assessed weekly by the
microstock libraries. Generally, however, the libraries tend to get
it right most of the time. If your image is rejected for technical
reasons, you will just have to learn from the experience, painful
as that may be.
The bad news is that to be a successful contributor to the
microstocks your images need to be technically perfect. The good
news is that it is often reasonably easy to achieve near-technical
perfection. Follow this and other advice in this book, and you
should see your acceptance levels skyrocket and your income
dramatically increase.