Obsidian Stock Submission Guidelines:

So you want to submit your images to Obsidian Stock? Great! It’s easy to do. Just follow these five steps:

Step 1: Email us! We want to know who you are, what you shoot with (digital or film), what your experience is in the realm of photography (professional or talented weekend warrior?) and what your main focus and strengths are (landscapes, commercial, stock, etc.). Even have a website with a portfolio? Include the URL so we can go check it out. Emails with image attachments are unfortunately no longer accepted.

Step 2: After we’ve had a chance to review your email and possibly even website, we will invite you to upload what you deem to be 50 of your very best shots as low-resolution jpegs to our staging area. You'll first need to register and create a login (the approval to be added is instant). The images should be no bigger than 750 x 500 pixels, 72dpi jpegs. They do not need to be captioned or have IPTC info at that time.

Step 3: If we like what we see and feel your images are marketable, we’ll email you a contract, edit the images on the staging site, and ask you to submit the high-res versions to us via CD or DVD (Note: Please make sure to read up on our image size, quality and IPTC requirements before submitting any high-res images to us). If we don’t think your images are an appropriate fit for our agency, we’ll let you know too, and tell you why.

Step 4: If you live in Central Oregon or happen to be in the area, let’s get together for coffee! We always like to meet our potential contributors face to face. At that time, we’ll be happy to answer any and all questions you might have about your contract and about shooting for stock.

Step 5: After the contract has been counter-signed by both parties, we’ll then keyword and size your images according to our conventions, and upload them to our website where they can be bought 24/7.

Obsidian Stock IMAGE SPECS

Are you wondering what kind of images to submit to Obsidian Stock? Well – we are an Oregon-based agency, looking exclusively for images of, from and about our beautiful state! Go cruise around our website a bit. We think you’ll pretty quickly get a good idea of the type of images and the kind of quality we are looking for.

As a general rule though - the more unique, the better! Example: please think twice about submitting images of generic ducks and geese – unless the images are utterly outstanding, the light is sensational, and the animals are doing something other than swim or eat. Have a shot of a shy Oregon beaver though? We’d love to see it!

If you have an image featuring a recognizable person, we expect you to have a model release. If you don’t have one and cannot obtain one, we’ll evaluate if the image is marketable for editorial usage. If so, we can accept the image into our library, but please be aware that it will be specifically labeled with “editorial usage only” which can greatly restrict its overall sales potential as it won’t be sellable for advertising use.

The same basic principle goes for images of private property. And just in case you’re shooting high-end horse races or similar - please be also aware that valuable horses and other animals can be considered ‘property’ and are therefore required to have a property release from its owner for an image to be marketable as stock.

We are happy to provide model and property release templates for you use – just ask!

Last, but not least: All images at the Obsidian Stock website are sold under a non-exclusive Broad Use license. Please don't submit images that are currently under an exclusive license with a commercial client or publication.

IMAGE QUALITY CONSIDERATIONS

Aside from strong composition, image quality is paramount to an enduring and highly sellable stock image. Please be aware that Obsidian Stock only accepts digital file submissions – either from digital cameras (only 6 megapixels or better) or from very sharp, very clean slide scans (if you have built-in Digital ICE in your scanner, please use it). Image scans with noticeable dust or lines are automatically rejected – and no, we don’t clean them up for you either. We have not had any luck with scans from negatives, so please don’t submit those - unless the image is truly a once-in-a-lifetime shot.

Obsidian Stock requires all high-resolutions submissions to adhere strictly to the following guidelines. Please double and triple-check your dpi and image size before you burn that disc – anything that doesn’t match our guidelines will get rejected.

Images should be in TIFF or unmanipulated JPEG format - no PSD or PNG

Images need to be at 11 inches x 17 inches print size. If you have cropped the image to fit your artistic vision, please make sure the short side of the file is still at least 11 inches.

Make sure your dpi (resolution) is set to 300 – not 240, not 260, not 359. And if you scan your slides, make sure you resize from 4000dpi to 300dpi!

End files should be around 50 megabites – if they’re larger, check your bit-size and make sure it’s set to 8, not 16.

We reserve the right to reject any image if it doesn't stand up to our quality standards.

STREAMLINED PHOTO SUBMISSION THROUGH IPTC

To make tracking and organization easy for everyone involved, we have embraced the wonderful world of IPTC. What is IPTC?

The IPTC (International Press Telecommunication Council) is an organization that was created in 1965 to develop, publish, and promote industry standards for the interchange of news data.

IPTC data is information is embedded in the individual file and allows photographers to describe and document their images. It contains fields such as “Author”, “Description”, “Keywords”, "Instructions", and “Copyright Notice”.

Obsidian Stock requires that photographers add two pieces of IPTC content to their submitted high-resolution images:
descriptions with location info
model/property release info

Photographers need to fill in the sections highlighted in orange.

This helps with filing, tracking and keywording, ultimately making the image show up in more and concise searches. The better and more detailed your IPTC descriptions are, the more sellable your image will be! Adding the info is easy too. Here are the steps:

In Photoshop CS1:
In your File Browser, highlight a file, right-click on it, and select “File Info”. In the field "Description", input your detailed image info. Choose "IPTC Status" from the menu on the left, and input “Model release on file with photographer” in the "Instructions" field. If you have no releases on file, just leave the field blank. You're done! We do all the rest.

In Photoshop CS2:
The same as above - except you can batch the info input by selecting the chosen images with the "Shift" or "CTRL" key, then marking the check box in front of the desired field and - bam! - the info is applied to all images!

A FEW TIPS

This is the voice of wisdom speaking. Listen closely and learn!

Whenever you can, shoot in the RAW format. Then interpolate to 300dpi, and save your file as a TIFF or PSD. This will give you the most flexibility when working with your images and the highest image quality retention.

Invest into a color-calibration for device for you monitor. This will make sure that both you and the rest of the world (i.e. us here at Obsidian Stock) see the same colors. We can recommend the Spyder from Colorvision, available around $70.

When shooting stock, always take a vertical and a horizontal shot – even if either doesn’t necessarily make the most perfect composition. Reason being that designers often find the perfect shot, with the perfect colors and content – only it’s a vertical and they needed a horizontal. So double your sales potential by flipping that camera 90 degrees!