After one year of planning, sketching, designing, analysing and coding, Our Stock Works is now live, and you can head over to the site to start browsing and purchasing images. We’re thrilled to offer so many new features for designers. It has been a great experience to interact with photographers across the world in building up our image library so far, and we hope that we will continue to grow over the coming weeks, months and years.

So what do we have to offer? Well we’ve got all the great features you’ve come to expect - a super fast search facility, download tracking, photo requests and more. Plus we’re also offering some cutting edge features. We provide RSS feeds of popular images, your lightboxes and your searches which means you are notified when any new images appear matching your brief. You can also ‘isolate’ an image - instantly viewing it in a clutter free context - and lightboxes are so intuitive you’ll find yourself using them more and more! Check out our blog for more information.

How much?
We’re pricing our images at £30.00 for a full resolution shot, and £20.00 for medium resolution. You can check sizes before downloading and purchasing to ensure the image is perfect for your requirements.

Allowed uses?
In short you can use these images as far as your imagination takes you. Many of our customers use our images for a variety of applications such as web design, page layout, magazines, advertising illustrative material, presentations and general publicity. You can view specifics on our legal pages.

What commission?
We’re offering a great, industry leading, 50% commission on all sales of your images, allowing you to earn between £10.00 and £15.00 per download. That’s a real way to make money from your stock photography. Get contributing!

We’re really looking forward to hearing your feedback about what we have to offer and also welcome feature requests and comments.

It’s a month since my last post, and I’ve been very busy. Most of my time has been spent working on a new project, Our Stock Works. Remember about a month ago I asked for any photographers reading the blog to contact me…?

Now is the time to unveil what it was all about. Our Stock Works is a stock photography website, offering a huge catalog of images at really good prices. It’s due to launch in a few months time, so we are now scouting for any photographers who may be interested in contributing. We are offering a 50% commission rate, which means it’s a real method to earn money from your photography - images you may just have sitting on your hard drive.

If you’re interested, simply visit the site and enter your email address into the ‘Photographers’ box. We will be in touch with more information about how to get started. Feel free to pass the word on and post about it on your blog. We may be inviting a select few people to help test the site before it launches - probably people who have shown an interest already (Mint referrer feeds are great for that!).

It uses AJAX and RSS extensively, and has been a fantastic project to work on so far. It’s great to be able to apply the latest technologies to a website. To get your taste buds tingling, here are a few exclusive shots of the site and contributor area in action:

Check back for updates - I’ll be keeping track of progress here.

I’m pleased to say that I passed my driving test, which means I can now drive legally in the UK on my own. Should be a whole new feedom as far as I’m concerned, and I’m really looking forward to not having to rely on other people. I’ll be driving a small blue Clio most of the time, a fantastic car. Taking a driving test is a fairly terrifying experience, but I’m thankful I didn’t do anything to mess it up.

I passed my driving theory test today, so can look forward to taking a practical test soon.

If look forward is the right word…

Design Shack is a project I have been working on for several weeks, and it has finally been let out into the open. It is a new CSS gallery, with some great new features to set it apart from the rest of the websites out there.

Have a look, add the RSS feed to your reader and let the creative juices flow!

It’s something that the country has been expecting, more or less since September 11th. I’m amazed at how well it has been dealt with, and how calm people have remained. Something like this shocks you, but I can’t let it stop me doing what I normally would. If that happens, then we’ve lost the battle. I’m worried that this is really only a warning - it’s nothing on the scale of what happened in the USA, and I can’t help but think that there could be worse to come.

I hope that isn’t the case, and I hope with all my heart that this won’t affect the discussions at the G8 summit. That could lead to changes in millions of lives - something much, much bigger than anything that a terrorist group could ever threaten.