THE REVIEWERS.  That great, mysterious, populace of beings who make those life and death decisions about your photos.  Your babies.  Your works of art and the result of the love and passion you find awakening in your soul.  Why, they are even a part of your very being.  A source of joy and of heartache.  You have been living and breathing nothing but your photos for seemingly a lifetime.  Now, you have sent them in for review and you truly learn the meaning of “a lifetime”.

But it is SO hard to wait.  After all, these photos (or at least one of them) just may be….no, MUST be the next greatest thing to hit visual media since motion pictures!  And no one, NO ONE will know until they are published!

It may sound like I’m being flippant.  But in actuality, that’s not too far from what I went through with my first batches of photos.  The anticipation was absolute torture.  I was filled with excitement and doubt.  It was so new for me.  I knew that I had a decent enough eye and a healthy interest, but would I really measure up?   Would I be able to compete with the likes of Andres Rodriguez, Sean Nel or Jaimie Duplass?  

It seemed like ages.  It didn’t matter that the terms of agreement stated very clearly that I would wait a certain amount of time to go by before I could expect to find out my results.  It didn’t matter that I was a busy person with a full life and plenty of other things to keep my mind occupied.  No, the only thing that mattered was that I STILL had not received a response!  Besides, every hour that went by was money out of my pocket.  I became a monster, pacing and sighing.  I would check my email every 10 minutes.  I was possessed.  I needed air.  

I needed to relax!

Eventually, the approvals came in.  I was delighted.  I was thrilled.  I was singing glory, glory, glory, to the heavens in celebration.  I had daydreams of the checks rolling in.  I imagined the riches of the world heaped at my feet, as I became the Great, the Wonderful, and the End-all-be-all Photographic Genius of the Century.

Then, surreptitiously, the knowledge that I could do even better with even more photos in my galleries crept into the corners of my mind.  I began to realize that more was better, so out I went and I shot and I shot and I shot again.  I edited again.  I uploaded again.  And then I waited and waited and waited again.  I was furious!  After all, I had been “approved”.  I was IN.  My galleries should be able to grow as quickly as I could shoot, should they not?

Well, after I got my head out of the clouds and my feet more firmly planted on the ground, it occurred to me that I had a choice.  I could continue to live my microstock life on the edge of a knife, leaning way too precariously close to utter madness.   Or, I could gather up what few shreds of sanity I had left and learn this:

Reviews take as long as they will.  Sometimes they are amazingly quick.  Sometimes they are not so very quick.  It does no good to sweat and worry about the status of one or four or ten photos you have submitted.   In the long haul, they will all get reviewed and your gallery will steadily grow.  There is nothing more to it than that.  You will not win any friends by pressing the admins for explanations of delays.  And you won’t feel any better, either.

So, relax.  Be patient.  And instead of pacing in front of your computer, checking the status of your latest uploads every 5 minutes, why don’t you grab that camera and a nice glass of wine, and see if you can think of a different way to pose a stack of paperclips for your next “office objects” study!

Happy shooting!

Perry Correll [contact] [bio ]