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Like any community, the iStock forums have evolved their own peculiar vocabulary of acronyms and terms. Here are some of the more common ones for newcomers and oldtimers alike.

AOTW
Artist of the Week. A weekly honor bestowed upon a contributor who has stood apart from the crowd for some reason. See xOTW.

BM
Best Match. Best Match is one of the search results sort algorithms,  the one that seems to cause the most forum angst. It’s powered by a super secret recipe, the details of which are often the subject of speculation in the forums. Thanks, Karen, for reminding me to include this in the list!

BME (also BDE)
Best Month Ever (Best Day Ever). Commonly seen in the “How were your monthly stats?” threads that tend to pop up as soon as a month ends somewhere in the world. See WME.

CN
Creative Network. Your list of iStock friends, contacts, lovers, and idols.

Crickets
The crippling near-silence that follows a failed attempt at humor, trolling, sympathy, or other forum reaction.

CV
Controlled Vocabulary. This is the lexicon of official tags (keywords) in use on iStock images.

DOTW
Design of the Week. The weekly showcase position in the Designer’s Spotlight. See xOTW.

DL
Download

EL
Extended License

ETA
Edited To Add. Fixed a forum post? Add your little “ETA: ” message at the end to let others know what corrections you made.

F5
The F5 key on Windows machines is the page refresh key. iStockers tend to wear the F5 key down to a dull shiny nub when new announcements are on the horizon, when they’re on the verge of a milestone download, or just any old time, really.

FIOTW
Free Image of the Week. Each Sunday, a new image is offered to the community as a free download. To have an image added to the pool of images considered for the FIOTW honors, please send a sitemail to JJRD. Free downloads do not add to your download count for your next canister, but it does earn you some cool visibility. See xOTW.

H*ck
Once, long ago, there was a splash page on iStock that depicted a character uttering the just-past-censors word “F*ck”. Folks felt that, asterisk or not, this may have been too racy, so it was amended to read H*ck. The splash page eventually vanished (was it a 404 page? a contest? I don’t remember…), but the near-expletive lives on.

HHUR
Heart Heart Unicorn Rainbow. Peebert-only.

IOTW
Image of the Week. Each week, the site admins select one of the newly uploaded images as Best-In-Class. On Sunday, the champion image takes it showcase position on the front page. Along with this honor comes a cool little icon, and a week’s worth of front-page visibility.

Lypse
iStockers tend to congregate, descending on a location like a swarm of photographic locusts for the purposes of camaraderie, cameramanship, and consumption of comestibles and … uhhh… booze. Get togethers planned and executed through iStock HQ are known as iStockalypses. Those put on by the community members are known as mini’lypses.

OP
Original Poster, or Original Post (Thanks Mikael!)

Pimp
Generally frowned on in the forums, this is the act of putting one of your own images into a thread discussion (other than into a thread devoted to critiquing, that is). There is a weekly sanctioned thread devoted to themed pimping, however. See PTOTW.

PTOTW
Pimping Thread of the Week. A weekly forum thread (found in the iStockphoto Discussion area) devoted to letting members pimp their favorite images around a given theme.

UL
Upload

Wiki (v)
To wiki a file, in iStock parlance, is to click the “Report Inaccurate Keywords” link to notify the admins of a poorly keyworded image. Wikiing a file puts it into “Keywords Under Review” status, which prevents further wikiing, but does not impact search results.

WME
Worst Month Ever

xOTW
Something of the Week. See IOTW, DOTW, FIOTW, AOTW, PTOTW

The Three Tiers
Accidental Lighting is typically found in the work of newcomers. It essentially means the lighting in the image was not intentionally designed. This kind of lighting typifies the “snapshot” kind of photography. Images shot under Accidental Lighting are shot without regard to (or even awareness of) light source, light quality,  or color temperatures. They are likely to be over- or under-exposed.

A lot of folks might read that previous paragraph and conclude that Accidental Lighting means ambient lighting. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ambient lighting can certainly be designed and modified to suit the needs of the image. Accidental lighting is just those lighting setups that haven’t been intentionally designed. Accidental Lighting can just as easily happen with artificial lighting. In fact, most snapshots use those tiny on-camera flashes. That is both undesigned light (Accidental) and not ambient.

It’s important to note that these images shot under Accidental Lighting are not necessarily bad. There may be very good images that were shot under Accidental Lighting; they simply happened on to favorable conditions. The factor that makes it accidental is that the scene wasn’t intentionally set up to capture good lighting.

The next tier of lighting is what I call Exposural Lighting. This is “get-the-job-done” lighting that has been intentionally designed to give proper exposure, but little else. An image shot under Exposural Lighting will be properly exposed, but the lighting doesn’t contribute to the feel of the image. It’s lighting that would be suitable for reproducing a document.

Again, Exposural Lighting is equally likely to be found in either natural or artificial lighting setups. In fact, the most common blend of the two - outdoor daylight images with fill flash - is a great example of Exposural Lighting. In those images, the lighting was intentionally chosen only to ensure the subjects are properly exposed.

Finally we get to Intentional Lighting. This is lighting that has been designed by the photographer to suit the image’s compositional and emotive needs. Images shot under intentional lighting will likely be properly exposed. Beyond that, though, the lighting was chosen to help tell the story. The lighting design has become a tool for the photographer to tell the story. The photographer using Intentional Lighting is able to give his images a mood. He uses lighting the way he uses his set, subject, and props - to create a feeling of warmth, of starkness, of fear, of happiness, or whatever the point of the image is.

Images shot under Intentional Lighting are not automatically good images, of course. There are plenty of examples - in photographic lighting or composition, in graphic design, in product design, etc - where the design was intentional but still bad.  But at least in Intentional Lighting, the photographer created the image to get his intended result.

OK, but so what?!
I mention all of this as a way for you to think about your own work. I can’t look at your image and say whether it was an Accidental Lighting setup or an Intentional Lighting setup, because the main difference between the two is the photographer’s intent, not the end result of the image (”Of course it’s overexposed and lit with the on-camera flash! That’s my artistic vision!”). The only one who can assess the image and put it into these tiers is the photographer himself. If you’re honest with yourself about your work, you’ll put it into the tier where it belongs.

It may seem that I have a bias toward moving up the tiers, and that’s because I do. The most successful photographers (and I’m not speaking solely of the most financially successful ones) are those who can control their lighting to achieve the results they’re after. Does this mean one must use strobes, speedlights, or other artificial lighting to be successful? Absolutely not. In fact, I’d argue that those who can be intentional about their lighting and create Tier 3 images using only ambient lighting are stronger photographers than those who can only do it with artificial lighting, but that’s a discussion for another time.

My challenge to the photographers out there reading this is to push yourself up the tiers. If you’re currently shooting with no regard to lighting (and this includes using Auto-Everything on your camera), push yourself to figure out how to start managing the light for exposure. If you’re currently doing that, your task is to learn how to set up your lighting to achieve a specific mood in your image. If you are currently able to do that, your task is to make sure you can do it in both a natural light and an artificial light setting. And if you’re currently able to do that, you can leave a comment in the notes field below and tell me what the next tier is.

It’s true what they say about working with children. You’d better be ready to go when they are, because you only get a few minutes before they are ready for something else. Ordinarily in a model shoot - especially with untrained models - I find I have to keep shooting and shooting in order to get the variety of looks and expressions I’m after. This little guy gave me these five expressions over a span of 8 shots. We were done in under 3 minutes, and about 60 seconds of that was my own monkeying with lights. I don’t even get that kind of signal-noise ratio from static product subjects.

Then again, nobody promises to take static products out for ice cream afterwards…

There are still some tweaks to make: I have a few legacy details in the blog css to revisit, and I need to rewatermark the sample images on the site so that they all use the new Myerson Photo logo, rather than the old stylized “EM” logo. I hope the new look goes over well!

Step 1: Get yourself a box.
Step 2: Don’t throw away the old vinyl liner from the shower curtain.
Step 3: Try not to cut your fingers with the utility knife.

That’s about it. I took a large box (24″ x 30″ x 24″), and cut away the top and a side. I also cut a window in the front to shoot through. Over the open top and down the open side, I draped an old vinyl shower curtain liner (My wife was kind enough to save for it me, rather than throw it away, when it became too disgusting to keep using). As you can see, I opted for the hand clamp method of connecting shower curtain to cardboard.

Inside the box is some posterboard to create my white sweep.

In the setup photo above, you can see the box setup works fine with just a single speedlight. The sample image below was shot with a single speedlight coming through the top of the box. I experimented with a two light setup - one above, and one from the side - but frankly one light does the trick here. If you can afford some noise reduction (that is, if you don’t plan on submitting to iStock, or if you plan to downsample before submitting to iStock), you can drop the speedlight power down to about 1/4 and bump up the ISO to make up for the exposure difference. That allows you to save on speedlight batteries, and have a nice fast recycle time.

The box I used allows for a set up large enough to shoot products anywhere from very small to the size of a small cat. My cat is largish and uncooperative, so you’ll see no shots of her here.  This would be a great set up for an eBay photo shoot, or even for a catalog of smallish objects. The big downside is that it’s a big box that doesn’t store well; there’s no way to collapse it down. The upside, of course, is that it was basically free because I used found objects. If I had to buy the box and the vinyl, I’d have been out maybe $15.

I was speaking, of course, to the older elementary class at Casas Ninos Montessori this morning. They’ve been doing lessons around the subject of photography, and asked me if I could bring some equipment and talk for a little while about what I do and how I do it.

It was a lot of fun. We talked about different light sources that photographers can use (Flashlights? Sure! The moon? Why not!), about light modifiers, about shutter speeds and aperture sizes, and a whole lot more. The kids were really into it, which made it a real pleasure for me. I even set up some lights and let the students take turns taking pictures of each other.

Next week, I’ve got another speaking engagement lined up as well. I’ll be presenting my talk on photography composition  to the Sunflower Photography Club, a hobbyist photographer club located not far from here in Oro Valley. That should be fun as well. I’ve given the composition presentation a few times to various photo groups and it’s generally well received.

I bought “affordable” (which ironically was not), “value”, and “superhero”, which link to various parts of the myersonphoto.com site.

It’s maybe a silly way to blow a few bucks, and I have no doubt that this will launch the careers of two young grad students from Ireland. If it nets a few more hits on the site for me, than great. If not, at least it’s fun to see what words have been redefined, and which are still going by their old tired definitions.

Once the image is approved and available on iStockphoto, you’ll want to maximize exposure. There are a few ways to go about this: keywords, lightboxes, and cross-promotions are the biggest ones currently available to you.

Keywords
We discussed keywords some in the first post, so I won’t spend too much time on it here. Instead, I’d like to propose a couple of great ways to help think of keywords for your images. The first is to try to find the image yourself. That is, do a search on iStock the way a customer might. Think of how a customer might start that search, what keywords might he use, which ones would he exclude with a Boolean search string. Imagine, for instance, you have an isolated shot of a toothbrush. Pretend now that you’re a customer looking for just that - an isolated toothbrush, nothing else. A search for “toothbrush” reveals 1500+ other toothbrush shots. As a customer, the first thing I might do is remove all of the shots that also include “Dentist” and “Brushing”. That brings the count down to a more reasonable 500 images, and should provide good reason to avoid using related keywords. If you had included “Dentist” and “Brushing” as keywords, your image would now be part of the 1000 images removed from my result set. Be the customer. It will help you think of words that should and should not be part of your set of terms.

The next handy tool for keywording is the Suggestinator at iStock-apps.com. It’s a simple tool that lets others suggest terms for your images. It’s easy to use, and generally reveals some pretty good options.

Finally, iStock has started to encourage keyword requests in the Critique Forum. Start a new thread there, with “:KEYWORD:” in the thread title, and get lots of great suggestions. I did it recently for this rocket ship illustration, and was rewarded with maybe a dozen new terms, all of them appropriate and accurate.

Lightboxes
Lightboxes are collections of images on iStock. There are two kinds: public and private. Public lightboxes are curated collections of files all around a specific topic, such as “Families”, “Coffee”, “Mountain Climbing”, well you name it really. Any topic that has images on iStock probably has a lightbox or two around it as well. The files in the lightboxes are the ones that the curator feels best suit the theme. They may be those images that have the most sales among the images that fit that topic, or those that have the fewest, or those that the curator likes best, or those that were contributed within a given time frame, etc. Curators are free to add whichever images they like to their lightboxes, and are really under no obligation to add any at all. If you find a public lightbox that you feel might be a good showcase for one or two of your images, send a polite sitemail to the lightbox manager and ask if they would add yours to it. Some will, some won’t. Showing up in the lightbox may help visibility, or it might have no effect at all. It’s hard to know, but early on, it’s fun to try to increase visibility, so why not go for it.

Cross-Promotion
This is a big one. Cross-promotion is simply providing customers with a link to see some more of your relevant images. In the description field of your isolated toothbrush image, you can give folks a link to see your other dental hygiene images. I wrote a pretty thorough tutorial on how to set this up for your files, which can be viewed here.

Any other great ideas for getting found on iStock? Leave me a note in the comments or send me an email, and I’d be happy to add it here!

The yellow cast on the left side (camera right side) of the models’ faces has always kept this from being an image I can truly be proud of. It’s time to finally fix that. Using Hue/Saturation, this is one of the easiest fixes we can do.

I opened a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I could have just performed the Hue/Saturation adjustment to the existing layer, but I am a firm believer in the “exit strategy” philosophy: make sure that any changes you make to the file are non-destructive, and can be undone. Or more importantly, make sure they can be partially undone, as we’ll see here in a moment.

The key to this fix is the drop down menu in Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation dialog box. Rather than adjusting the hue and saturation for the entire range of values in this image, we can use that drop down box to select just the ones we want to modify. In our case, that’s the yellow values. Select “Yellows” from the drop down, and you’ll see the color range selector at the bottom of the window will now indicate the smaller range of affected values. There are three sections to that range indicator: the left fringe, the middle bar, and the right fringe. Input values (those colors above the selection indicator) will be affected by the slider actions and become the output values indicated on the color bar below the selection indicator. Those input values above the left and right fringes will be modified to lesser degrees than those values above the middle bar - from 100% for those values immediately adjacent to the middle bar, down to 0% for those values at the end of the fringe (marked with a rhombus shaped handle).

If that last paragraph was a little kooky, try playing with the sliders yourself to see what I mean.

With the proper input value range selected, I pushed the saturation all the way up to +100. This gave me a good sense of what values would be affected. I had to tweak the fringe sliders somewhat to get the range just right. Once I did, I could start making the real edits. I dropped the saturation down, increased the lightness, and slid the hue over a few degrees to make the last traces of yellow turn more red. Here’s what that gave me:

Not bad at all, but as you can see, it took out too much of the bride’s skin tones, leaving her much too pale. This is where adjustment layers have direct adjustments beat, hands down. I just masked out the adjustment layer, to allow more of the bride’s original image coloration to pop through:

Voila! All traces of the offending yellow wall have been removed in just a few easy steps.