Christophe Testi: Alamy

Showing posts with label Alamy. Show all posts

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Happy Chinese New Year!

Canon 20D - 70-200mm L - 200mm - 1/650s - f2.8

To celebrate Chinese New Year here is one of my picture that recently sold on Alamy.

Chinese New Year is the longest and most important celebration in the Chinese calendar. The Chinese year 4705 begins on Feb. 18, 2007.

Chinese months are reckoned by the lunar calendar, with each month beginning on the darkest day. New Year festivities traditionally start on the first day of the month and continue until the fifteenth, when the moon is brightest. In China, people may take weeks of holiday from work to prepare for and celebrate the New Year.

A Piggy Year

Legend has it that in ancient times, Buddha asked all the animals to meet him on Chinese New Year. Twelve came, and Buddha named a year after each one. He announced that the people born in each animal's year would have some of that animal's personality. Those born in pig years tend to have excellent manners, make and keep friends, work very hard, and appreciate luxury. They are very loving and make loyal partners. Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ernest Hemingway, Alfred Hitchcock, Mahalia Jackson, David Letterman, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were all born in the year of the pig.

Monday, December 11, 2006

My First Sale with Alamy!

Canon 10D - 17-40L - 17mm - f11.0 - 1s

What a good surprise this morning when I found out that my "Sun Beam entering Antelope Canyon" sold on Alamy! Exactly 2 months after being accepted with this stock agency based in UK.

This sale is worth thousand of sales with microstocks, so hopefully there will be many more to come!

Antelope Canyon is the most-visited and most-photographed slot canyon in the American Southwest. It is located on Navajo land near Page, Arizona. Antelope Canyon formed over the course of millions of years by erosion of the Navajo Sandstone, primarily due to flash flooding and secondarily due to wind erosion. Rainwater (especially during monsoon season) runs into the wash that Antelope Canyon is part of, picking up speed and sand as it rushes through the narrow passageways. Over time the passageways are eroded away, making the corridors wider and smoothing hard edges in such a way as to form characteristic 'flowing' shapes in the rock. Upper Antelope Canyon, called Tse bighanilini, "the place where water runs through rocks" by the Navajo, is the most frequently visited by tourists, due to two considerations. First, its entrance and entire length are at ground level, requiring no climbing. Second, beams (shafts of direct sunlight radiating down from openings in the top of the canyon) are much more common in Upper than in Lower. Beams occur most often in the summer months, as they require the sun to be high in the sky.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

My Pictures now on Sale at Alamy!

Canon 10D - 17-40mm L - 40mm - f6.7 - 1/90s
Kodachrome Basin State Park, Utah

Alamy is one of the leading Stock agencies with Corbis and Getty Images. I sent my first submission of 10 pictures back in February and all were accepted. But since then I did not have much time to build up my gallery, or even enter keywords for my approved images!
After all that time invested in Micro-Stocks I decided to go a step further and sell some of my best pictures in "Right Managed" with Alamy, and I sent another batch of 94 pictures. To my surprise 92 of them were accepted. One was rejected because I sent the wrong size, the other one because it was too soft...
All Pictures were taken either with my old Canon 10D, or 20D, with the canon 17-40mm L lens, and then up sized to meet their minimum size requirement. They do not have yet an online upload system, so I had to CD a DVD for my first submission, and a CD for the second one.
Here are a few pictures that I'm selling with them: