About Me

MR Ritratto Tondo

My name is Marco Rubino. I live in Rome and I work in marketing and advertising, but I am also a professional photographer with a great passion for photography and for all forms of art and digital communication.

Basically curious, I love traveling and taking pictures since I was a kid (and the camera rolls were never enough!) but it’s with the digital era that I learned to refine the technique, studying and improving my skills day by day, using every free moment to improve my workflow and my editing techniques.

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French Polynesia © 2012

I hope one day to be able to live with photography, but until some international journal will commission me a photographic reportage in Botswana, in the meantime I will continue with my activity as a microstocker with a lot of passion and enthusiasm. Furthermore, in 2017 I founded my portfolio website marcorubino.com as my professional showcase and main distribution platform for my works.

Microstock

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Colosseum, Rome © 2012

What about me and Microstock? Working in marketing and advertising for a lot of years, I got to know stock photography as a customer even before as an author. The Microstock for me has been and continues to be primarily a stimulus to the improvement: to quickly get rich through Microstock by selling photos of your cat is pure utopia, but it is hard even if you have great pictures and little time to make them commercially valuable (and you really need much time to do that). After the first picture sold is easy to get carried away by the imagination and to see yourself like a new upcoming Yuri Arcurs, but the reality is quite different and it can be very very frustrating, at least at the start. So many disappointments, so much effort apparently fruitless. But the effort is never really wasted, especially in photography, and when you finally see your own image used commercially on the website of a multinational company, then the satisfaction fully repay you for all the efforts and stimulates you to reach the next level. Just as it happened to me.

What’s Marcor$tock?

Old State House, Boston © 2013

Old State House, Boston © 2013

Marcor$tock is a blog about the world of Microstock and Digital Photography. The idea of ​​creating this website came to me at the end of 2013, when my microstock activities have completed the first year and the results began to arrive with some regularity. At that point I felt that my personal experience as a photographer and part time microstocker could be interesting for those who are in my same situation, intrigued by the possibilities that this market has to offer, but probably confused in front of the many agencies or intimidated by the competition of images and professionals who are already well established in this market. This blog is about my personal experience as a contributor to all the major international Microstock agencies, with the aim of sharing opinions, recommendations and tips about the world of microstock and digital photography, assuming that there’s no winning recipe for success in this field, but there is a wealth of information, techniques and shared experiences that can be the basis from which to build your own way.

Where to start your navigation?

If this is the first time you visit my blog or if you are looking for information on the microstock market you should start your visit from this page, where you can easily find your way among the various sections of the site.

If you are looking for basic informations about Microstock, I suggest you read my post “What is Microstock” from which you can explore all you need to know to get oriented between sales strategies, legal issues , licenses, fees and payments, promotion of your images, referral systems and much more.

To learn more about the major microstock agencies on the market, you can start from the page “Top Agencies”, and then read the detailed reviews of the single agencies. If you are interested in a comparison of the best agencies based on all the aspects that characterize the experience of the contributors, you can start the consultation from my article on the evaluation criteria, and then analyze in detail the comparative tables.

Do you already have a little experience and want to know my personal workflow for the sale of pictures online? Then you can consult my complete tutorial.

Are you looking for bibliography on digital photography, online resources for microstock and all you need to know about the state of the art of the softwares and apps for the contributors? You’re in the right place! Check the large section about Sources about Digital Photography and Microstock.

If you want to know more about me and about my personal microstock activity, I suggest the following pages: