After a long, fun and educational journey, I finally hit the mgic number of 250 downloads and have become an exclusive contriubutor at iStockphoto.com
Being a husband, father of two young girls and friend of several survivors, I could not be happier with the photo that was purchased to reach my goal, Men Showing Their Support for Breast Cancer Awareness.
I had the pleasure of meeting up with fellow iStock photographer Josh (Doxadigital) to shoot some of his specialty, city skylines. In this case, my home town city Tampa.
After we went to Channelside for dinner at Bennigan's, we set out for Josh's favorite place to shoot while he is in town. After a few pointers, the time was upon us for the short window we had to shoot.
Here is a sample of my first time shooting downtown skylines like this:
I posted in an earlier blog post that when shooting photography for iStockphoto and seeing your images sell, you often wonder where you photos are being used.
When I received notification from iStock Administration months ago about my Bald Eagle being used in a Designer Spotlight I was excited, it was my first image found in use.
Today however, I am ecstatic thanks to fellow iStock photographer Jennifer Byron. She sent me the above cell phone image (taken by Darryl himself) of my photo of Darryl as a boxer on the (top center portion of the cover page of) Minneapolis Star Tribune.
It doesn't hurt that Jennifer just sent me an e-mail saying "Just so you know, your photo will be seen by over 300,000 people today!!!" Ok, I will admit, I have a huge smile on my face right now!
This morning I finally reached a huge milestone on iStockphoto and received the 200th download of my photographs. That leaves me just 50 downloads shy of a bonze canister and being able to go exclusive on iStockphoto.
I find it kind of ironic that my 200th download was of my 200th photo to be accepted into my portfolio as well.
I have officially changed my iStockphoto user name from my name Joe_Martin to CJMGrafx. This should help to better brand myself with my web site, e-mail, twitter and other on-line content.
A special thanks to iStock photographer FuzzMartin for his input into this.
Another milestone for me and something I wanted to have accomplished before the end of 2009, photo #200 was accepted into my iStockphoto portfolio. I hit the milestone with 24 days left to go.
I ordered my new business cards from Moo.com the middle of last week. To my surprise, I got a phone call from my wife this afternoon to tell me they had already arrived... seriously? I asked her.
I thought she was kidding because she knew how excited I was to get these new cards. I wasn't expecting delivery of the cards until the end of the week. Needless to say I am very excited and even more pleased with the quality of these new cards.
Here is the info side of the cards, the back of the cards are 50 of my images (4 cards containing each image):
This is actually the design comp. so the grey outline represents the trim line so I knew where the bleed area of the purple would be trimmed.
business cards, company, photography in Photography I finally decided it was time to convert my web site to a better host, one that could also house my blog so I only had one site to maintain. After researching choices I have chosen to go with Squarespace as I really like their ease of site building tools, build in "modules" and the fact that their pricing is decent didn't hurt either.
I am sure there may be better hosts out there, but most of the companies I found that were better came at a much steeper price point. I am finding a couple limitations with the site package I got, but I can always upgrade at any time, so I am not too worried about it.
In the mean time, I will be continuing to figure out all the choices I have to get my site looking and acting the way I want it to.
With the many photos being uploaded from the recent Mini Lypse, my iStockphoto portfolio has reached the 150 photo mark.
I'll admit, I am a bit behind on the number I wanted to have uploaded for the end of the year, but I am uploading at a more consistant pace these days.
models, photography, stock image in iStockphoto 
