Panoramics Revealed

San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff

I used to do all my panoramic stitching's manually. I've watched many programs come and never found one that can do quite as good as a manual stitching would produce. I found one that was absolutely amazing but took almost as much time to tweak the images as it would to do manual stitching (unless it was a really insanely large number of photos).

Walnut Canyon, Flagstaff

Recently I was introduced to Microsoft ICE. I'm skeptical, of course, because if you know me, not so much of a Microsoft fan..... Much to my surprise I reluctantly have to give Microsoft 2 thumbs up... I know I know, a year ago, 2 years ago, 10 years ago, you all know I would rather break my thumbs off than give any kudos to Microsoft, however, Giving credit where credit is due...

Wupatki Indian Ruin, Flagstaff

Microsoft ICE, I believe, is the most efficient and ACCURATE panoramic stitching software I've used. I'd love to start revisiting many of my favorite photo's that I've been saving up to stitch together, ones that were too difficult to do otherwise and I didn't feel like taking time to do. The images you're seeing are some of the first posts of my New Photo's, taken from our vacation to flagstaff with my wife's side of family...

San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff

As soon as I get my data recovered from my crashed hard drives (all my work is on those drives), I will be reworking some of my previous panoramic images and see how well the stack up!

Sunset Point, Arizona

Stock Photography

So you want to get into stock photography? It can be a great way to earn money. I went on an adventure a year ago and discovered the stock photography business. I haven't "gotten rich" off it, and it's not a get rich quick scheme. However, I can say that I've earned a bit of income from it and I haven't even put forth much effort. So I'm going to review my experiences and hopefully we can help some of you adventurous photographers find your niche in the stock photography market!

My experiences have been diverse. Some stock photography companies are much more difficult to break into than others. So I'm going to go with the ones that have earned me the most, down to the ones that have flat out rejected my work, which I primarily believe is because the quality of my glass was not "L" quality.

Unfortunately my hard drive crashed a while ago and all my images are on that drive, because my backup drive is also trashed... Note, don't buy Western Digital hard drives again. I'm working with them however to get the data recovered, it's unclear if it's going to cost me yet or not.

So on to the reviews :) By FAR the best return in the little amount of time I've invested has been DreamsTime.com Stock Photography. My most popular image is definitely my Panoramic of Horseshoe Canyon in the Grand Canyon. I Highly recommend signing up with this company as you will see a return quickest with them as well as get better approval ratio's.


The second one I highly suggest is BigStockPhoto.com They have a decent approval rating and will also give you a quick return on your time.

There are other Stock Photography websites, which I will be reviewing later. Some include iStockPhoto.com, Stock Exchange, stockphoto.net, stockphoto.com, fotosearch.com, everystockphoto.com, corbis.com.

I highly recommend checking out the first two first, and then go to the rest!

Happy Stock Photographing :)