A Few Good Things

I was writing this blog post for my birthday, but then I went a produced a blog-worthy event.
So here is a summary of good things that have happened to me recently:

It took me three years, but I officially became an exclusive contributor to iStockphoto!  A contributor has to have 250 downloads and an acceptance percentage of 50% on submitted files.  I have worked hard in the last eight months to bring my acceptance percentage from around 20% up to 60%, where it currently stands, while my content from iStockalypse Tokyo (Nov, 2010) provided the downloads.  My royalties will go up by 10% which is quite nice.  Some of the other perks include higher rankings in the search results, inclusion into the two high-end collections which offer huge royalties (but they are only for the best photos, so I'll be lucky if I get even a few in there), and free business cards with my images on them!

Here is the file that took me to 250:

I wrote about this before, but in June I photographed a Zamami woman for a magazine article.  The magazine came out this month, featuring some of my pictures.  I think it is unfortunate it's in black-and-white, but any publicity is good publicity, right?

[The name of the magazine is "Island".  That's not my picture on the cover.]

[all pictures but the lower right are mine]

Also, I will include my favorite picture from the Miyajima fireworks show.  Hopefully this will make the high-end collection at iStock: