I would like to see a photo...

Photos which are "shared" are the ones seeing the light of day. There was a big news story here in Dutch Harbor, Alaska last summer and I got good photos. I got 25 calls about the pictures and made two sales....The Huffington Post called three times wanting "to share." They went with the guy who gave away his seriously inferior photo for free. Who bought mine? Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. No media was willing to pay. Last month Dan Rather's show bought six images. So that's the first sale to real media. It's not necessarily about quality as much as it's about being free.

But I do have a story about quality. The linked photo was taken during the war in the former Yugoslavia. The pilot they're carrying was being exchanged for another prisoner. The Italian Magazine Panorama, if I remember correctly, would have used this as a cover shot but the quality of the processing was substandard. It did run a full page inside, but they wanted really top-quality for the cover. But that was in 1992 and the market for photos has changed dramatically since then.

http://www.pbase.com/zidar/image/58093967