Photography: AtomicShed

Once you’ve made contact with a buyer, shown him that you produce images that he needs, demonstrated that your pricing is competitive, and proven that you can be relied upon to deliver great shots, you’ll have put in a lot of work. You’ll want that work to keep paying you by keeping that client on board. It’s always much harder to find a new client and start the marketing process all over again than to keep in touch with an old one who already knows, trusts and likes you. But buyers rarely have a strong sense of loyalty. Their heads will always be turned by the next photographer with lower prices, pretty pictures and the professionalism to deliver them smoothly. So what can you do to lock your clients and buyers in, and prevent them wandering off once you’ve made your first deal?

Stock companies have what appears to be the best strategy. It’s a little like an airline’s loyalty program but one in which the customer is forced to buy the air miles in advance.

The stereotype price level of a buck a microstock image is actually almost impossible to find, if only because prices are rarely quoted on an image-by-image basis. Instead buyers pay for credits which they can exchange for images. A new buyer looking for a single image on iStockPhoto, for example, has to pay a minimum of $18.25 for twelve credits at a rate of $1.52 per credit. That’s unlikely to translate to twelve separate purchases at one credit each. The only photographs that are available for single credits are sized at “XSmall.” “Small” images cost three credits, while “Medium” swallow up six. If the buyer is looking for “Large” or “XLarge” sizes he’ll need ten or fifteen credits respectively.

Stock Companies Force Buyers to Leave Money Behind

But the credits come in blocks of 12, 26, 50 and so on, so whichever size of image or images a buyer chooses, there’s a good chance that he’ll have credits left over. Now he has a good reason to come back to iStockPhoto next time he needs photos. He might not have wanted to buy a subscription, the most reliable way to keep buyers on board, but having left money on the site, he’s effectively getting a discount the next time he comes to buy.

That’s not an easy model to copy, and it works best when competitors are doing the same thing. A site that simply allowed  buyers to purchase single images at a set price would look more inviting than a model which forces customers to put money towards their next purchase each time they buy. With images of a similar quality it might even be able to eat some market share. But the attractiveness of locking customers in is so strong that most microstock sites use the same model, selling credits and expecting customers to come back to use their leftovers.

For a photography seller who produces on a regular basis, selling packets of credits might work too. But a more occasional seller, with a more limited inventory, will have to look to other strategies.

Rewards for Loyalty and Referrals

The easiest is to offer a discount to returning clients, a policy followed by wedding photographer, Kelli Lynn. She gives returning clients a 25 percent discount on their portrait sessions. But she also goes a little further and provides $50 gift cards to clients who refer their friends. The cards have no time limit, are transferable and can be combined, so the more new customers the old client refers, the greater the incentive they have to go back to the photographer and use those discounts.

That might not be the best strategy for a referral program. When clients recommend a photographer to a friend their prime motivation is to help their friend, not to gain a benefit for themselves. If you’re going to pass out a discount for referrals, the prize would be more effective if it went to the new clients, not the old ones. But that would only encourage new clients to come in, not to keep the old ones on board. Perhaps the best strategy then is to reward both sides: give a discount to a new referred client to increase the value of the recommendation; and give the old client a reason to come back by showing your gratitude with a discount card.

Of course, when the new client refers someone else, they’ll receive another discount, something to bear in mind when your set your pricing levels.

Much less complex than loyalty and referral awards are newsletters. These don’t lock clients in so much as remind them that you’re still around. A newsletter alone won’t force a client to come back to you and it certainly won’t stop them from looking at your competitors but it can remind them of your work and keep them informed about the projects you’re completing. Instead of being forgotten over time, a process that quickly breaks down any sense of loyalty a customer might have felt for you, the newsletter can bring you back to mind and strengthen the positive feelings the client felt last time he worked with you. More directly, a newsletter can also act as a channel to deliver time-limited offers that do force clients to come back to you right away.

Or at least some of them. Offers in newsletters will only be taken up by a small percentage of subscribers; the rest will ignore the offer and if the newsletter doesn’t engage or interest them, they’ll ignore that too.

Persuading clients to come back to you is difficult. On the one hand, buyers have little sense of loyalty and always want the best for their money. On the other hand though, they don’t want to have to keep looking for new suppliers any more than you want to keep searching for buyers. And that’s perhaps the best strategy of all. Be the best photographer in your field and it doesn’t matter where you customers look, they’ll always come back to you.

Photography: hellobo

Waiting to become a successful photographer can be pretty frustrating. You want to make the sales that prove you’re creating powerful images. You want the attention and respect of other photographers. You want to be a leader in the world of photography. And it’s not happening quite yet. But for those photographers who have already achieved success, life isn’t always easy either. Even Annie Leibovitz has run into more than her fair share of trouble, putting up her entire photography collection as collateral on a multi-million dollar loan. That sort of debt might not be something you ever run into, but there are a bunch of other dangers you might well find yourself coming up against as your name becomes known and your images become popular.

The biggest risk is that your photographs will be copied and used without your permission. To some extent that’s almost inevitable. Bloggers are renowned for their lax attitude towards copyright issues. But because few blogs make money, few photographers pay much attention. For those who are bothered, it’s usually enough to point out that an image is copyrighted to persuade a photographer to take it down and swap it for another image.

Printing Company Stole Thousands

A bigger problem is when companies use those images for their own commercial benefit without permission and without paying royalties. Each sale made by the firm is a sale lost to the photographer. In effect, it’s a theft of earnings, and sometimes those earnings can be meaningful. In 2007, Flickr icon Rebekka Gudsleifdottir famously discovered that several of her pictures had been used by UK printing company, Only Dreemin. Tracking customer feedback on the site, Rebekka was able to estimate that the company had managed to generate about $4,840 in sales from her images. In response to a letter from Rebekka’s lawyer, the company claimed that they had bought the images in good faith from a third party which had now disappeared. The images were removed from sale but Rebekka never saw her royalties.

There are now services available that can reduce the risk of image theft. Products like Attributor and PicScout can search the Web for your photos and inform you of copyright infringement. They may even contact the image thief and demand damages on your behalf, particularly if the usage was commercial. For big photography companies — and top photographers — it’s a cost of doing business.

It’s not just the images that can be stolen though. Other photographers have seen their entire business model plagiarized. Build a good, professional website, create effective copy and offer a working business model and you might well find that others rush in behind you and copy your work. They might not be stealing your images but in copying the way you find clients, they can weaken your brand and remove your advantage.

To some extent, copying will be inevitable. It’s part of being a leader rather than a follower. But there are limits. Grace Chon, Los Angeles’ leading pet photographer, has long battled against competitors who didn’t just try to copy her way into the marketplace but who lifted her marketing copy from her website word-for-word. Back in 2008, she was already challenging other photographers to be fresh and original, after spotting a copycat pet photographer plagiarizing her website. That wasn’t the last time though, and it wasn’t the worst time. Earlier this year, Grace complained to a copycat’s hosting company that one of their clients had broken copyright. In the following spat, her own site was temporarily taken down by her hosting company on the grounds that it was unable to assess which site was online first and which owned the rights to the site’s text.

Pointing out to a competitor that you’ve spotted them stealing your content may well be enough to force them to change, but it’s rarely a good idea to get into a full-scale fight about stealing marketing copy — however just the battle may be. A smarter position might be to assume that a competitor who needs to steal to reach the marketplace is never going to conquer it. Cheats don’t prosper because they’re cheats. They don’t prosper because they’re aren’t talented enough to do it for themselves.

Stock Pictures Look the Same for a Reason

Stealing marketing copy is surprisingly common. In response to Grace’s initial posting about the conflict on her Facebook page, a number of other businesses commented that the same thing had happened to them.

Even more common though is that when you create successful images, other photographers will copy your approach. They won’t copy the image itself, but they’ll try to figure out what made the picture successful, what buyers saw in it, how you shot it — and they’ll try to produce more of the same.

It’s particularly a problem for stock photographers. Microstock sites allow users to see which images have sold the most downloads, helping buyers to focus their searches on the photos that other users have considered the highest quality. That also alerts other photographers to the pictures that are currently the most popular among buyers, encouraging them to shoot their own versions of the same style.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Producers should move towards the market, and if you can’t learn from the success of others, who should you learn from? But it is a problem for photographers who have managed to build a name for themselves, who have created a brand for their photographs and who are trying to stand out from the crowd. It’s not easy to do when the crowd keep following you.

If all of those challenges, from thieves stealing your pictures to sell them, through copycats swiping your business model, to followers seeing you as the photographer to copy, sound daunting then it’s worth remembering that there are plenty of advantages to being successful too. Mimicry is the highest form of flattery, having followers means that you’re a leader, and being seen to be a leader marks you as the best in the market.

And the money is nice too.

Photography: Gina Signore

The more artistic your photography becomes, the harder it’s likely to be to sell. Images shot for stock can have multiple uses and can please a wide range of buyers. But artworks have only one main use, they’ll only appeal to buyers with a similar sense of aesthetic, and not only are galleries the main retail outlet, they’re also very choosy. Without a track record, a list of prizes from juried art shows or an introduction from a trusted contact, art photographers are going to face a great deal of rejection and a lot of frustration. The ability to sell online though has changed the situation for some photographic artists. Zazzle offers products from leading brands alongside its user-made items, while Etsy has over 5.2 million members, and 400,000 art and craft sellers offering 6 million items. Revenues were $180 million in 2009 and by June 2010, they’d already reached $130 million. All of that money came from — and flowed to — artists who were earning from their creativity, including many photographers. It’s not easy and it requires that a number of conditions be met but photographers with the right products and the right strategies can make money shooting exactly the kind of artistic images that provide artists with the most satisfaction.

The right images though are clearly vital. Gina Signore describes herself as an artistic photographer. She has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, majored in painting, minored in drawing, and took a number of photography classes. Her works combine photography with painting, turning her nature photographs into unique art works, decorated with acrylic paint, enhanced on Photoshop, and filled with color. They show flowers and fish, trees and birds photographed during hikes in Michigan, while strolling through her own gardens or while attending her koi ponds, but with an extra artistic touch that’s vitally important. The Internet is filled with well-taken artistic images but Gina’s handmade alterations enable her photographs to stand out in a competitive market. They’re attractive enough to be desirable but they’re also similar enough to have a signature style yet unique enough to have a rarity value. Buyers will buy her images not just because they’re beautiful but because they’re different.

A Sales Strategy for Photographic Artworks

The right product though is only the start. It’s also important to have a sales strategy that’s able to deliver those products to buyers. Gina has her own website where she introduces herself and shows off some of her work, but her sales take place primarily on Etsy and Zazzle. Etsy, a showcase for artists and crafters,  is used primarily for original art, while Zazzle functions as an outlet for reproductions where Gina can offer large numbers of relatively low-priced photographic products to customers who are either budget-conscious or looking attractive but practical objects.

The images are sold in a variety of forms that includes prints, postcards, business cards, posters and even postage stamps. Several times each year, Gina also issues limited editions of her work, numbering and signing each piece before it’s sold, in the same way that her image would be offered in a gallery. Her best sellers though are photo collages that have been cut and sewn in many layers.

“These images become one of a kind,” she says.

But if art works need to be unique in order to sell, that makes the pricing difficult. Without a competitor offering similar items, there’s little to which the artist can compare his or her products.

Gina Signore takes a practical approach when it comes to fixing a fee for her work on online stores. The price, she says, has to take into account the cost of the materials that went into creating it, as well as the amount of time the work took to produce. Size is a factor too, if only because larger works take her longer to produce when she’s adding hand-made alterations. Some of her pieces can  take as long as three months to create. Paintings are more expensive than photographs and because they’re one of a kind, tend to be priced higher too. Ultimately though, the height to which a price can rise is limited by the amount to which the market is willing to pay.

“Currently, price is important for some customers,” says Gina. “I sell many more items priced below $100 than $1,000.”

The result is that Gina’s prices vary widely, enabling her to reach a broad market. A unique, signed, 7.5 x 7.5 inch altered art photograph sells for $79 on Etsy while a 2.5 x 3.5 inch miniature costs just $14.95. Mass-produced printed products such as those sold on Zazzle do have direct competitors and are therefore easier to price. Her business cards, for example, are offered at $22.75 for a pack of 100. But one of Gina’s non-photographic acrylic collages can go for as much as $800.

The Right Sites, the Right Products, the Right Advertising

Putting the right images on the right sites will help to make them available. Both Zazzle and Etsy, Gina says, are great sources for getting your work recognized by both customers and other customers. But with so many stores on both those sites, it will take some effort to stand out even when your images are better than most. Gina also uses Facebook and Twitter to tell her market that she’s added a new image to Zazzle. She uploads new images and products weekly, and re-lists items on Etsy each day. Art.com and AllPosters.com list a few of her posters, and Gina also buys advertising on Etsy each week to bring customers to her store.

Her strategies clearly work and enable Gina to show her work around the world without knocking on gallery doors. Browse Zazzle for posters and Gina’s work turns up on the first page of the most popular designs. More importantly, she’s also making a living doing what she enjoys the most: creating artworks out of paint, photography and talent.

Photography: Nick Gregan

Photographers who find their passion a competitive field can always console themselves by remembering that at least they’re not actors. While everyone with a camera believes they could shoot a cover for Vogue, they aren’t all trying — and even those who don’t make it to the top can still make a living from their skills by focusing on markets smaller than the film industry. For actors, it’s Hollywood or bust and everyone is pushing for the same jobs.

But struggling actors are also an opportunity for photographers. To win parts, actors need headshots and to get those headshots they have to turn to photographers, creating a reliable stream of work at a price that ranges broadly around $225 for a two to three-hour shoot. It’s a realistically priced niche with plenty of opportunities.

Develop the Connection

Nick Gregan, for example, is a UK-based photographer who has been specializing in actors headshots for more than eighteen years. For fifteen of those, one client alone has been sending him more than 1,000 child actors to photograph every year. His typical rates are £225 ($352) for a two-hour shoot.

The shots themselves are relatively simple. At their most basic, headshots consist of a properly-lit, attractive head-and-shoulders shot. The challenge for the photographer is to develop the connection and understanding with the client that creates a similar connection between the image and the viewer.

“This is done by the eyes, they must have the wow factor, a depth of emotion, focused in the right place and finally a twinkle in them,” explains Nick.

That may be where the creativity in the shoot ends though. Headshots are fairly formulaic. They’re images shot for a purpose and provide little freedom to the photographer to play with poses. While US casting agents tend to be a little more flexible and are interested in seeing lifestyle shots that might include torso-length images of the actor laughing on a sofa or looking particularly stylish, the traditional shot is still just the head, the shoulders and nothing to interfere with the look. The photographer is free to choose the lighting, the location, the crop and the clothes but the biggest satisfaction is likely to be thrill of seeing the image open doors and create opportunities rather than turning an imaginative line into an original set of pictures. When you’re shooting an actor, Nick explains, it’s important to remember that the client is the star and the best way to get the most effective shot may well be to rein in your own creativity.

If that sounds a little frustrating at least the niche doesn’t have to be difficult to break into. Nick Gregan turned to photography at the age of 29 after working as a doorman at a luxury hotel. Initially, he shot disc jockeys and musicians but it was when he was asked to photograph an actor that his career really took off.

“His agent loved it and started sending me quite a lot of people,” said Nick. “I gradually found myself drifting into this field and enjoying it tremendously.”

More than three-quarters of Nick’s new now clients reach him through his website which he works hard to keep on Google’s first page of search results. But most of his clients come in through referrals and through a network of contacts that he’s created over the years that includes agents, colleges and casting directors. Actors also need to return for fresh photographs as the years pass, if they change their hairstyle or if they put on or lose weight. Child actors, in particular, may need new sessions as often as twice a year, giving a photographer a chance to build a relationship that lasts a lifetime.

“It’s important to many actors to feel comfortable with their photographer,” says Nick. “Once a relationship is established it’s much easier to keep in contact and check how their career is going and if my headshots are making a difference.”

From the Head Up

While launch may be slow then, a good headshot photographer should find that knowledge of his or her work spreads, bringing in new leads and new central referral points such as agencies and colleges which can send a regular and large supply of new actors to photograph.

And what then? If headshots are a little like interesting school portraits, creative photographers may want a little more from their profession. It’s a small jump from headshots to portraiture and family shots, a leap that many photographers are willing to make. Art can provide another higher risk outlet that allows the photographer to play with his or her camera while the actors pay the bills. (Nick Gregan has just completed his first exhibition of fine art nudes). But at least one other photographer has seen headshots as an opportunity that can allow him to build a reasonably large business.

Peter Hurley is a former Olympic sailor who came to photography while working as a model. The success of his own photography business led other photographers to ask about his process and marketing, and in 2007, he launched PH2 Headshot Photography. A network of associate photographers in eleven cities, including London and Rotterdam, as well as San Francisco and Washington DC, the project allows Peter to spread his brand beyond his own New York and Los Angeles bases.

Not all photographers are that entrepreneurial and not all are interested in building a business larger than their own studios. Nor are all photographers excited at the thought of spending a couple of hours creating a headshot in which the only goal is to make sure that the eyes connect through the lens. But it’s rare to find a field in which the clients are as competitive as the people they hire, the jobs are regular and the connections can pour a stream of new jobs into your studio.

“Whilst other markets are shrinking and budgets are being cut there will always be a market for actors headshots as there will always be actors entering the market,” says Nick Gregan.

Photography: Caro’s Lines

Making money from an image involves two steps. The first is to shoot a picture that someone will pay to use. That’s the fun bit. It’s the step that absorbs most of your effort and it’s the activity that turns enthusiasts into photographers. Get it right, place the pictures where people can see them — on your own website or on a photo-sharing site — and you might just receive an enquiry from a designer, an editor or a publisher asking if they can license your image. Your reply is the next stage. When you’re looking to close the deal, it’s no less important than the first but it’s also one in which photographers invest far less work, putting at risk the rewards their photography has earned.

The goal for a buyer is always to move as efficiently and as quickly as possible from interest to use. Get your reply wrong and you’ll make the deal harder than it needs to be, increasing the chances that the buyer will move on to someone easier and faster to work with. So what should you say when you receive an email from a buyer asking if they can license an image — apart from “yes”?

How Big is That Picture?

Buyers want different kinds of information about a photo they’re considering using. Most important is technical data. Place an image on Flickr and they’ll be able to see a choice of the sizes available but it’s worth confirming the range that they can license and the dimensions of the image they’ve requested. Different sizes will command different prices so the wider the range of size options you can offer, the greater your ability to meet the buyer’s needs. Your answer then should include the size of the image the buyer wants, expressed in pixels or inches with DPI, and a list of other sizes available. (Make sure that those are original sizes though; images that have been stretched or enlarged are of little use to buyers.)

Next to those sizes should be prices, and this is much harder to estimate. It’s unlikely that a buyer will have time to negotiate and with stock sites offering millions of images at fixed prices, there’s little reason to do so. It will be far quicker to continue searching than email a counteroffer and wait for a reply — if there is one.

The easiest solution is to compare your images with microstock, the biggest competition. Even this isn’t as easy as it might look though. Stock sites tend to price their image in terms of credits rather than dollars and those credits are sold at different prices depending on how the buyer uses the site; the more credits they buy, the less they pay for each. You’ll only be selling one image so you won’t be able to offer bulk discounts so calculating the exact amount the buyer would pay if he simply headed to iStockPhoto instead will give a rough figure rather than an exact one.

And it would probably be the wrong one too. One of the advantages of buying a stock image is that the buying process is so simple. Having found the right photo, the buyer has to do little more than click to purchase. And because regular buyers will already have subscriptions, it won’t even cost them any extra. If a buyer is searching away from a stock site then it’s probably because they’re looking for something different, a characteristic that can allow you to charge more than rock-bottom prices for your original imagery. How much more you can charge will depend on the size of the publication — the bigger the company and the larger the audience, the more generous the budget is likely to be — but budgets can vary so widely that you’ll always be shooting if not entirely in the dark then at least in very low light. One option is to look at iStockPhoto’s Vetta collection, an inventory of premium images whose prices begin at 20 credits rather than the usual two. There’s a good chance that that’s where your competition is likely to lie.

Would You Also Be Interested in These?

So your reply should include the size details of the image the buyer was interested in, a list of other sizes available, and their prices. You should also state how you plan to deliver the image: by email or FTP, or do you have a way for the buyer to download directly? And of course, you’ll need to state the terms and the payment details. If a buyer is approaching you, it’s usually because they have one specific use in mind for that particular image so you should be able to charge on a rights-managed basis allowing the buyer to use the photo once.

That information should be enough to make the purchase smooth but if you want to go a little further, you can also point the buyer to other photos you might have showing similar images and provide a detailed description of the photo’s subject. Your reply to an enquiry then might look a little like this:

Thanks for your message and your interest in licensing “Hangzhou Lake.” The picture was shot in 2009 on the northern shore of Hangzhou’s famous West Lake (Xi Hu) and shows the Leifeng Pagoda in the background.

That particular image is 565 x 850 pixels but it’s also available for single use in the following sizes and at the following rates:

283 x 424                        $20

565 x 850                        $30

1129  x 1701                        $45

1807 x 2720                        $65

Payment should be made by Paypal to this email address stating the size of the image you wish to purchase. The image will be delivered by email within 24 hours.

A larger collection of my images from China is also available from my website. If you wish to license any of those images, do let me know!

With all of that information stated clearly in your reply there’s only one more thing that you can do to ensure that your sale goes through: send it fast!

Photography: The U.S. Army

If you have a Flickr stream you’re now in the best company. Even if you never get invited to a garden party, never feel the tap of a sword on your shoulder, never have to make small talk with the Prince of Wales, you can at least console yourself by remembering that you are at least sharing a patch of cyberspace with the British monarchy. The Windsors have launched their own Flickr stream.

They’re not the only official body to share their images with the hoi polloi though. Here’s a list of some of the biggest governments, departments and international organizations who have chosen to put their pictures on Flickr, what you can find on their streams — and what their decision means for photographers and image users.

The British Monarchy

A quick glance at the images on the opening page of the British royal family’s Flickr stream is likely to have you clicking away quickly. Most of the shots appear to be dull wire photos of various Royal engagements, from a visit to the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine to a shot of the Duchess of Cornwall sounding the noon whistle on the Queen Victoria. Take a look at the sets though and you can browse a number of far more interesting vintage pictures, including one collection of fascinating pictures by Marcus Adams. Sometimes, dull pictures can become a lot more interesting when they’re old.

The UK Prime Minister’s Office

Judging by the lack of any contacts on their profile, the British Royals do seem to be a fairly unpopular bunch. The Prime Minister however has lots of friends — at least official ones. While his images tend to be the usual PR-style official snaps, helpfully released under creative commons licenses (the Royals are holding on to their pictures), his contacts include a number of UK government departments, including the Cabinet Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It’s nice to see that the new PM has friends — and that his staff understand the social aspect of social media.

Barack Obama

That the candidate who did the most to change the way politicians think about social media should have such an impressive Flickr stream is hardly surprising. President Obama’s Flickr stream started during the presidential election, now has 2,690 sets, and includes some amazing shots taken of the family as they waited for the results on election night. It represents the difference between an official body that knows social media exists and a body that knows what users of social media want.

The White House

The White House’s Flickr stream takes up where the more political Barack Obama stream leaves off. It might be official and it might be governmental but it contains some fascinating pictures. The series showing the first 100 days in office is as historical as the Queen’s old shots — but displays history in the making. (They’re also available for people to make of them whatever they want).

The US Army

The US Army’s Flickr stream contains a real mixture of images, from battlefield visits from leading politicians to the battles themselves. The “year in photos” sets make for the easiest browsing but don’t miss the guidelines on the profile page. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to bellowed at by a drill sergeant, here’s your chance.

You can also take a look at the contacts page. The US Army is apparently friends with lots of people, including soldiers, their families, admirers around the world, and individual divisions.

The United Nations

Whatever the US Army can do, the United Nations can do just as well — at least when it comes to photography. The UN’s stream contains a number of moving pictures showing the work of the community around the world. Forget the PR shots of the conferences and meetings, and take a look at the Haiti Earthquake set or the images of children. Then browse UNICEF’s own stream as well as the work of the UNHCR.

Save the Children

And if looking at pictures of people helping children can make you a little happier then Save the Children’s stream is worth a visit too. The sets show images from different places but expect to have your heartstrings tugged (and your wallet pressed) by shots of kids enjoying soccer balls, healthy snacks and bednets — and the amount that you can pay to make your own contribution. This is Flickr for fundraising, and it’s hard to fault.

AusAid

AusAid is the Australian governments overseas aid program and what makes its Flickr stream so special isn’t just the quality of its images — or their subjects — but the way the pictures are described. Each caption tells a story so that viewers can see how a piece of Indonesian batik is created, for example. It’s a great showcase for the importance of informative image descriptions.

The International Monetary Fund

Not only does the IMF not bother to give its photos titles but you have to wonder why anyone would bother to look at them. The fund missed an opportunity to show what its work actually does, choosing instead to show pictures of meetings and handshakes. It’s dull stuff but if you get really bored, you can always look through the set of archives… where you can see people shaking hands half a century ago.

The World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum’s images are hardly better. The account even has a set called “Historic Handshakes, Hugs & Kisses.” This really isn’t Hollywood though. Unless you’re into seeing people you’ve never heard of making nice to other people you’ve never heard of, give it a skip and take a look at what was happening outside. It’s much more interesting.

There are plenty more official accounts on Flickr, including the European Parliament, the Irish government, and, if you’re really into peace and love, Yoko Ono. You can use the contacts list to see who’s being friendly and who those officials consider friends, but some accounts are certainly more interesting than others — and some have better pictures than others too.

Flickr’s deal with GettyImages is good news for buyers. Designers and other image users can now easily pick up the kind of creative, original photos that are more likely to be found on photo-sharing sites than in traditional stock inventories. It’s also good news for photographers. If buyers know that they can deal with a professional agency instead of negotiating with amateur photographers, and that the images they buy will have model releases and not breach copyright rules, then more of them will have the confidence to come to the site and browse. But making your images available through Getty is an expensive choice. The company might set the sales price but it then takes an industry standard commission of 70 percent. If you’re supplying the buyer as well as the photo then that’s a high price to pay for a middle-man to pass over the pictures. Handle the deal yourself and you can still land sales, even as an enthusiast, but you’ll be keeping all of the revenue. That means understanding what professional buyers need when they want to buy one of your images and where other amateur sellers are going wrong.

Most of the problems come down to communication — or rather, the lack of it.

“I have never had such a horrible time trying to acquire rights than when a client wants something off Flickr, DeviantArt or Twitpics, or similar,” one designer told us. “I’ve had several instances where people on those sites were hiding behind aliases and either don’t check their comments, PMs or email, or they just don’t believe we are offering them money to use their photos or they may think we are scamming them somehow.”

Those delays and doubts are problems that are always possible when a supplier who regards their work primarily as something they do for fun meets a buyer with a budget and a deadline. Designers will often have a certain amount of time to find a number of suitable photographs, and if they don’t believe that they can close a deal quickly with a photographer they’ll quickly move on to a different source.

Shoot Amateur, Behave Professional

The solution though is relatively simple: act like a professional, at least as far as communication is concerned. Make yourself easy to find and respond promptly. Check your FlickrMail at least once a day, and if you do receive an image request, answer immediately so that the buyer isn’t left wondering whether he stands a chance of landing the image.

It’s also a good idea to provide an alternative contact method. Use the profile on the photo-sharing site not just to describe who you are and the kind of photography you want to shoot, but also to link to your portfolio site and supply an email address. Just showing that you’re easily available can increase buyers’ confidence in your ability to handle a sale, as well as providing them with a way to see more of your images.

The same is true though of images posted on websites. Flickr might be particularly well-known for the flakiness (as well as the creativity) of its members, but website owners can deliver some strange responses too. The same buyer who described the difficulty of buying images on photosharing sites reported that photographers who post images on their own sites tend to respond in one of three ways:

“a) They reply immediately; b) They don’t reply at all or not in a timely fashion: or c) the image and sometimes the entire site will vanish off the web. That last is especially frustrating, and sad, and a little bit funny all at the same time.”

Even if the seller does respond promptly though, buyers are often faced with another problem: an amateur photographer might not have the answers to the questions they need to ask, especially when it comes to pricing. If the buyer deals with Getty, he knows exactly how much Getty is going to charge, and he understands that the company will be setting the market rate. Buyers might not need to see rates posted on your website or listed under each entry on Flickr, but they do expect the seller to have a realistic idea of the amount they need to charge.

Know the Market Rates

That isn’t easy. Rates for image usage very considerably, but the simplest solution is to look for images on similar topics on GettyImages’s Flickr Collection, or on other stock sites, and see how much they’d charge for a similar use. That is, after all, what the buyer will do if you charge an excessive amount.

A professional response to an image enquiry then won’t just be fast, it will also contain questions about how the image is going to be used, whether the buyer needs exclusivity (and if so, for how long), and the size of the image they’ll want to use. In short, you’ll need to ask the same questions that GettyImages asks before a buyer reaches the checkout.

And to keep the communication shorter, it’s also a good idea to supply information about the images you’re offering for sale. Buyers will want to know whether the image is digital or was originally shot on film (and if so, the film format) as well as the image sizes that are available. Enlarging small images to make them more attractive to buyers is a big no-no.

“I’ve seen attempts to make images larger by adding noise, blurs, motion effects and other crap that does not hide the fact that the image started small,” we were told. “And I’ve returned them for refund when I’ve gotten them in hand if they don’t work.

So good selling — the kind that attracts buyers to stock companies rather than independent individuals — is largely about fast communication and an awareness of market requirements. But it’s still mostly about great pictures, the kinds that are dynamic, focused, clear and usable. Combine those professional-quality images with a professional attitude to talking to buyers and there’s no reason that you have to hand over 70 percent of your sales revenues to a professional stock agency.

Photography: epSos.de

There are lots of ways to promote your wedding photography services, but for many photographers, sales tend to come down to a couple of proven methods: building a website; and hoping for enough personal recommendations to keep new clients rolling in.  But there’s a lot more that wedding photographers can do to find clients, close bookings and increase their income, and when we were putting together The Successful Wedding Photographer, we came across several that were delivering solid results.

All of these methods were being used by real, successful wedding photographers, but there’s no reason the same principle couldn’t be applied to just about any other form of photography. Here are five of the best:

Video Ads That Show How You Shoot, Not What You Shoot

Photographers rely on their portfolios to show leads that they have the skills to produce the images they want. But when clients are inviting a photographer to spend hours with them — and especially when those hours are going to make up the most important day of their lives and contain the most important people in their lives — they also want to feel confident that the photographer is personable, professional and a pleasure to work with. That’s not going to come across in the quality of the photography.

Lan and Vu Bui are photographers who fell in love with videography, and they’re bringing those two interests together to offer promotional video ads for photographers. Those ads though don’t show any images. They don’t show the photographer’s work. Instead, they focus on the photographer at work. It’s an approach, Lan says, that has shown real results in his own wedding photography business.

“[T]hat is where we get hired: not from great work, not from a killer sales team, but by connecting with our viewer.”

You can shoot those promotions yourself or hire a videographer to do them for you, but showing how you behave at the scene can have a real effect on your ability to convert leads.

Facebook for Ads and Fans

A lot has been said about the ability of social media to sell anything that isn’t nailed down — and many things that are. The experience of many people with services or products to promote though is that the returns just don’t live up to the hype.

But the results depend on how you use social media. Some photographers reported that Twitter was a good place to find other photographers as well as wedding service professionals with whom they later formed joint ventures and made cross-promotions. But the biggest success came with a smart use of Facebook.

Chris Meyer, for example, has already been quoted by Facebook as a case study for its advertising networking after the ads he placed on the site brought in over $40,000-worth of work. That figure has since risen to more than $100,000 from a total spend of less than $1,000.

It’s not just the ads that are working for Chris though. His Facebook page now has more followers than the Digital Wedding Forum, and creates the kind of connection with clients that brings easy and steady referrals.

Newsletters that Offer Filtered Choices

While some of the wedding photographers featured in The Successful Wedding Photographer only shoot nuptials, other offer a wider range of services, including engagement, maternity and family shots. For those photographers, staying in touch is essential if they want to turn young couples into lifelong customers.

Although the photographers are doing that in a number of ways, one of the most effective (but also one of the most challenging) is to issue a newsletter. The regular appearances in a mailbox remind past clients that the photographer is still around, and keep their name fresh when friends ask for referrals. And discounts and bargains, even on extras such as frames and extra prints, can generate some useful extra income. But the difficulty is to balance the desire to maintain contact with the fear of irritating readers so much that they unsubscribe.

Allowing readers to choose the kinds of photography they want to read about has proved to be a useful way of solving that problem. Offer check-boxes at sign up and you’re able to filter newsletters only to those readers who have chosen to read content related to that topic.

Networking for Support and Referrals

While photographers might admire each other’s work, when it comes to looking for clients, the tendency is to regard other photographers as competitors. That’s not always a good idea. When UK-based Canadian photographer Julie Kim started looking to network with other wedding photographers, she didn’t just find the support she wanted. She also found that those connections brought in new clients. Photographers who couldn’t accept jobs that clashed with pre-booked dates passed those leads on. Eventually Julie found that most of her bookings were coming from her professional referral network.

And she still gets to meet her new friends for coffee and talk photography.

Workshops to Give Back and Get More

Other photographers have taken that collaboration even further. Rather than marketing their skills to potential clients they’re teaming up to offer their knowledge to other rising photographers. Denis Reggie, one of the founders of wedding photojournalism, has joined with Joe Buissink to offer a three-day workshop for almost $500 a day, but they’re not alone. Paul D. Van Hoy and Brady Dillsworth, two New York wedding photographers have also come together to teach wedding photography by putting on their own workshops. It might not be the kind of work that people think of as they’re learning photography but it can be a powerful way to build your brand, create an additional revenue source — and give back to the photographic community.

Wedding photographers, like all photographers, need to know the most effective ways to market themselves. Those methods though are changing all the time. They’re changing as technology creates new opportunities, and they’re changing as photographers figure out the best way to make use of even the oldest of channels such as print advertising and word-of-mouth. They’re strategies that any photographer — whether they shoot weddings, portraits, news or anything else — needs to know. You can learn more about them all in our new book The Successful Wedding Photographer.

Photography: Shockadelic

For as long as John Griffin has been running CutCaster, the image marketplace he founded in 2008, he’s been hearing the same request from buyers. They want to see more “everyday” people in stock inventories, they tell him, and in particular, they want to see more “ethnicity” represented. It’s a request that crops up frequently whenever you ask designers and image buyers about the sorts of images they’d like to see photographers creating.

“I need more diversity in the subjects,” one buyer of medical-themed photography told us recently in response to a post on a design forum asking what they’d like from photographers. “The stock that’s out there is overwhelmingly Caucasian.”

Joe Frazee, who works in the pre-press department of a small town print shop, described the difficulty that his company has been having tracking down suitable images for one client, an education group in Ohio. Over the last few years, Joe said, the association has requested that more photos of Black, Asian and Hispanic teachers be included in its quarterly publication to ensure that the magazine accurately reflects the growing diversity in the state and the school district. Despite having a subscription to ThinkStock, a fee that provides access to select images from Getty Images, iStockphoto and Jupiterimages, his company has been forced to extend its search to other sites to meet the demand. While ThinkStock has some images of diversity, he says, it falls short.

Photographers might retort that the images available reflect the population of the US and Europe, the biggest consumers of imagery. Both markets have sizable and important minority populations but they are still predominantly Caucasian, so shooting white models is more likely to please more potential buyers than creating images that only appeal to a subset of buyers. But a quick glance at sales figures suggests there’s real benefit in meeting the demand for images that represent those minorities. Conduct a search for “couple” at iStockPhoto and the first image returned is Kevin Russ’s photo of an African-American family. The picture has sold more than 6,800 downloads. Ethnic models appear in four of the 30 most popular photos returned for that keyword term, including one multi-ethnic composition entitled (not very subtly) “Beautiful Diverse Family.” While there may be less demand overall for images that are specifically ethnic, the relatively small number of suitable images available means that images with ethnic models face less competition for each request and stand a good chance of making sales.

“We Need an Asian in Here!”

How that diversity should be represented though isn’t quite so clear. The same designer that complained about the predominance of Caucasian models noted that he was looking specifically for diversity within each shot, so that lots of different ethnic groups are represented in the same photograph. When he does come across people of color, the designer complained, (something another buyer described as a process that can take “hours”) they’re usually in the form of a family shot, rather than in an image that depicts a group of people as diverse as the design’s audience.

That might suggest that photographers should be advertising for models representative of different ethnic groups and shooting them together. But the risk of that approach is that the images may no longer look natural. Worse, they can look like they’ve been shot according to a checklist of different ethnic types each of which has to be represented at least once.

“When trying to find a group shot, I’m always running into a scene where you can just imagine the photographer screaming ‘ASIAN! WE NEED AN ASIAN IN HERE!’ because they want the perfect ‘diversity mix’ of one Caucasian, one Black, one Asian, one Hispanic, etc.,” said one source who works in the large format print industry. “I’m totally okay with two White guys and an Asian guy in a shot. The mix shouldn’t look pre-planned, which most of them seem to be nowadays.”

Are Your Models Old Enough to Drink?

And it’s not just ethnic diversity that’s both underrepresented and difficult to create. Age is also important, and photographers can have particular ideas about the sorts of activities in which different age groups might take part. One designer who has done a lot of work for bars, pubs and casinos complained that it was almost impossible to find pictures of people in their thirties and forties at a bar or a party. Those sorts of models are more likely to be shot at exclusive restaurants and in the daytime, he noted. And yet, when it comes to shots of people drinking, clients need to be sure that they can’t be accused of advertising to minors, which means using models who are clearly older than 19 or 21.

Ideally, of course, these things shouldn’t matter and perhaps the heart of the problem is that to most people they don’t. When photographers look for models, their first concern is usually the models’ ability to pose and how good they look in front of the camera, rather than the ethnic groups to which those models might also belong. While some end-clients, such as public service education associations, want the images that appear in their publications to reflect all of their readers, others aren’t concerned at all. Another designer, the art director of a Canadian tourist magazine, noted that in her country, color isn’t an issue when it comes to using images.

“There is never a discussion at my office about how we need to get someone Asian, Caucasian or whatever,” she explained. “It’s about what is the best shot… that is all that matters…. That is why for us the racial diversity is not a big issue. It’s more about how stunning the photo is.”

It’s a sentiment with which many photographers would agree, even if it did mean losing the chance to fill a potentially profitable gap in the market.

Photography: Zarko Drincic

When it comes to spreading the word about a photography business, large or small, nothing is more effective than a write-up in a newspaper or an appearance in the news. Not only do you suddenly get all of the recognition and awareness that usually costs a fortune in advertising dollars, you’re also seen by viewers as an expert and an authority. If the media are writing up your accomplishments or turning to you for a quote, it must mean that you’re the most knowledgeable person in your field. It’s an opportunity that provides a massive advantage over competitors. But winning publicity isn’t easy. Reporters don’t cover photography issues every day and they’re not interested in handing over page space to every business that asks for it. Coverage in top national publications tend to go to photographers who are already national figures. Local publicity for your photography business is available, but you still have to show that you’re willing to pay for it by delivering a story the media outlet wants to run.

One way to do that is to tell the press about changes to your business.

Two Trend Stories for the Price of One

Stait Photography, a small photography business in the UK, won a write-up in nebusiness.co.uk, a news site run by a local newspaper group. The story was simple. It described how a traditional photography business has introduced a number of new photo kiosks, a group of only three in the country, that allow people to “produce and manipulate digital pictures using environmentally-friendly technology.”

That doesn’t sound like much of a story. Few readers would be interested in hearing that a business has decided to invest in new equipment. Businesses are supposed to invest in new equipment, and they do it all the time without the media noticing. This story though won distribution for two reasons.

First, it placed the photographer in the middle of a trend. Or rather, it placed the photographer at the center of two trends. The headline

Traditional photographer embraces digital age

demonstrated the extent to which technology is changing traditional work. This isn’t a story then about Tait Photography buying some new machines. It’s a story about how every workplace is changing, a trend that is likely to affect the reader too. The content of the story also emphasized that the new machines are environmentally friendly. So it’s not just the digital world that’s changing the workplace; the green movement is too.

Together those two trends gave a story about a photographer buying new equipment a different spin.

But it helps that the story appeared on a relatively small website which accepts public submissions. The site might not run every story idea it receives, but as long as the submissions look professional enough there’s a good chance of winning some publicity.

The larger the audience though, the harder you have to work and the better the story has to be. Changes to your own business — unless you can demonstrate that they’re changes that affect the reader — are unlikely to be powerful enough to do the trick. What can work however is your own accomplishments as a photographer.

Local People Want to Read About Local People

The Marin Independent Journal, for example, recently covered the story of an exhibition of adolescents by photographer Jona Frank. The story was detailed, showed some of her images and even include a picture of the photographer herself. She was quoted throughout the piece and the reporter, Paul Liberatore, even talked to the assistant director of the museum hosting the exhibition.

There are a number of features that make a story like this interesting for the local press. First, it’s a story about an exhibition, an event taking place within the local area. Readers would no doubt see the exhibition’s publicity material and wonder what was going on. It’s the job of the local press to tell them.

But the real pull of the story is that it’s primarily about local people. Jona Frank photographed local boys playing with their skateboards. Readers would look at the story, see the pictures and wonder how similar those boys are to their kids or to the children they see skateboarding around the city center.

Both of those features are available to any photographer who wants to use them. Any photographer can choose a group of local people to photograph, whether they’re children, hairdressers, owners of mom-and-pop stores, checkout workers or the homeless. Whatever the topic, just picking one local demographic may well be enough to win interest from the local media.

And anyone can put on an exhibition too. That’s certainly going to be harder than shooting the images in the first place but if galleries aren’t interested, you can approach libraries and community centers. If they don’t have space either, you can always organize your own exhibition, putting it on in a café, a restaurant or even a private home. Strong marketing before you send out the press release to the local arts reporters will ensure that they’re already familiar with the exhibition and curious about it, while the subject should help to make them feel that they’re not just writing about art but about the town too.

It’s even possible though to win publicity by trumpeting your own accomplishments. Michigan-based The Daily Reporter, for example, gave space to news that local photographer Kenn Klein of Skywater Photography had been chosen to shoot stills for a movie that recently finished filming in Grand Rapids.

It’s not usual for the local press to cover the success of a small business, especially when it doesn’t lead to the creation of a stack of new jobs, but it helped that this job involved Hollywood, stardom and a touch of celebrity glitter. It’s not a strategy that’s always going to work for every accomplishment but even without being hired to photograph images for movies it’s still possible to turn yourself into a media star.

Photography: PNNL – Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Today’s photography market has brought opportunity to every photographer with a store of talent and a stock of camera equipment but it’s also brought plenty of competition. If prices for stock images have fallen to microstock levels it’s because good photos are now common enough for buyers to shop for bargain prices. That presents a challenge for photographers hoping to stand out in the market. More worryingly, as duplication becomes the most common reason for stock companies to reject submissions, it may even represent a closing of the opportunities that photographers have been enjoying. But while stock sites might be filled with images of flowers, businessmen and offices, they struggle to provide specific images for buyers with particularly special needs.

“Standard images (sunsets, puppies, a guy in a suit holding a briefcase) are plentiful on iStock and contributors face stiff competition,” iStockPhoto has told us. “There still is a tremendous need for specialty shots. For example, shots that convey specific scientific concepts with appropriate props and models.”

Those kinds of photos though aren’t always easy to create. Contributors to PhotoResearchers.com, a specialist scientific stock site, are often professional scientists first and photographers second, experts with access to the kind of expensive equipment necessary to shoot cells or capture microscopic images. But not all scientific photos need the kind of gear usually found in laboratories or the kind of knowledge picked up while taking science degrees. Sometimes the same type of image created by any kind of photography enthusiast can be made scientific with just a little extra thought.

It’s All in the Description

This shot of Yellow Daisies, for example, is exactly the kind of photo that many enthusiasts would be happy to shoot without leaving their back yard. This shot is of the same subject (and has sold more downloads) but look at the difference in the descriptions. While the second photo, offered as a design element, makes do with the description “Sunflower isolated, white background,” repeated in German, the first photograph offers a ton of vital information about the subject:

“Rudbeckia hirta – Black-Eyed Susan.

Rudbeckia is flowering plant commonly known as coneflowers. Close flowering relatives are Echinacea, Dracopis and Ratibida. They are herbaceous, mostly perennial plants. The flowers are produced in daisy-like inflorescences, with yellow or orange florets arranged in a prominent, cone-shaped head. They are popular garden flowers, distinguished for their long flowering times. There are many cultivars of these species. The name was given in honor of Uppsala University botanists professors Olof Rudbeck (father and son). The plant is also a popular garden ornamental..”

That kind of detail (swiped apparently from Wikipedia) changes the nature of the image entirely. The photograph is no longer just a pretty picture of flowers. It’s a picture of Rudbeckia hirta, a popular garden ornamental.

Simply adding scientific detail to the description then can be one way to move a standard image closer to a scientific photo. Another can be to include scientific tags in the keyword description. The Latin names of plants can help to do that but it’s also possible to mention the parts of the photo’s subject. iStockPhoto offers over 410,000 photos to someone searching for “flowers.” It offers fewer than 15,000 results however to buyers looking for “stamen” even though many of those other shots will show the plant’s reproductive bits too.

Scientific Images Don’t Have to Be Flat, But It Can Help

More usually though, photographers hoping to capture some of the scientific market will need to shoot very different kinds of compositions. Just as photographers hoping to sell standard stock photos should look at adverts and magazines to see the types of compositions that designers like to use so photographers hoping to sell scientific photos need to spend time looking through textbooks, nature guides and science magazines to see the shots those buyers find the most attractive. They’re rarely as artistic or as creative as the images used in popular science publications like National Geographic. The pictures in the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Birds, for example, are well-taken and interesting but to an artistic photographer, they can look a little flat. They weren’t shot to be admired though. They were chosen for their ability to help an ornithologist identify the bird in front of him. That means the colors have to be clear and the details should be apparent but they don’t have to deliver the bird’s personality or create an emotional impact. It’s a different way of shooting — and one that can be combined with a regular, artistic shoot.

It’s not just the style that differs though. Demand within scientific imagery can vary too. In general, the harder the image is to obtain the less competition the contributor will face and the greater the chances that a stock company will accept it. For most photographers though the most difficult images to shoot are also impossible to shoot. But even scientific publications have a weakness for the most photogenic subjects. Shots of interesting-looking creatures such as mantises and pitcher plants, hairy spiders and giant trees tend to enjoy greater sales than images of pigeons and grass lawns.

Events can make for interesting scientific pictures too. Some photographers have managed to build an entire career out of the moment a water droplet explodes but shots of butterflies emerging from cocoons, carnivores catching prey, and flowers in mid-bud all contain elements of action that make for pictures that are both interesting to the eye and informative to the scientific reader.

And, of course, if you’re really looking to develop scientific shots as a specialist niche there are few challenges as interesting as macrophotography with its basket of dedicated equipment, library of special techniques and yard-full of subjects, from parts of large plants to the fangs of tiny bugs. They’re all a challenge to shoot, they’re accessible, and many of them are commercial too.

What does it take to become a successful wedding photographer? How have the opportunities available to today’s wedding photographers changed, and what are the most successful wedding photographers doing to make the most of them? Those were the questions that we were considering as we started putting together The Successful Wedding Photographer. To answer them, we got in touch with some of the world’s leading wedding photographers. We asked them how they had created their brands and their businesses, what they were doing to bring in clients and generate word-of-mouth marketing, and how they had coped with some of the biggest practical challenges of today’s wedding photography such as building websites that worked and calculating rates that were competitive but which also reflected their talent. We wanted to know where they advertised, how they used new, digital marketing channels, and which opportunities they were exploiting that other photographers tend to overlook.

The answers came in from across the country and around the world, a characteristic in itself of modern wedding photography. We ended up with a book that did more than offer tips and advice to rising wedding photographers. It explored the nature of modern wedding photography, from Facebook marketing to video advertising and from print-on-demand wedding books to photojournalism and Trash the Dress. Many of the results surprised us.

The Value of Networking

For a profession that’s usually solitary, networking, for example, turned out to be surprisingly valuable. Julie Kim, a Canadian photographer now based in the UK, started looking up her competitors when she found that she was receiving more enquiries than she could accept. She wanted a place to send her overflow “to be helpful,” she said.

She contacted photographers who shared her style and soon found that many of them were already in touch, swapping ideas and sharing experiences. The standard of photography, she told us, was high and she was soon chatting with photographers whose names she recognized and who were well-established in the industry. They stay in touch through email and the Internet, and also meet occasionally in person for talks and for coffee.

Most importantly, the photographers that Julie now networks with regularly refer clients to each other.

“Now a bulk of my bookings come from referral networks,” she says. “It’s one of the best things I’ve done for my business.”

Julie Kim wasn’t the only wedding photographer who had discovered that cooperation can bring more rewards than competition. Brady Dillsworth and Paul D. Van Hoy had been circling each other ever since Paul moved to Rochester, NY in 2005. Leads would tell Brady that they needed to speak to one other photographer before making a decision, and inevitably that other photographer would be Paul. They’d meet at photography events, became friends and finding that they shared a similar view of photography began putting on workshops together for other photographers. They still shoot weddings of their own but their joint workshops have the potential to bring each of their businesses a new revenue stream while giving back to the world of wedding photography.

But it wasn’t just the way that wedding photographers were coming together that was surprising. Some of the particular strategies that they were following to improve their income were creative too.

Stock, for example, might look like a completely separate branch of photography but as long as buyers need photos of brides and grooms, cakes and rings, wedding photographers will be in a position to earn extra income from their shoots. We found that many photographers who chose to submit their images even to microstock sites were doing well. This picture, for example, has generated more than 3,600 downloads in the eighteen months it’s been available.

Shots like that though require model releases and the photographers we contacted while preparing the book reported a variety of different methods to acquire them. Some went as far as to offer discounted fees or additional images in return for the ability to sell some of the photos afterwards. Others, such as Todd Kuhns, a South Carolina-based photographer who shoots stock and about fifteen weddings a year, decided simply to ask his clients. It worked:

“I have only had very positive reactions which has been wonderful because I was not really sure what to expect when I started approaching couples with the idea,” he told us.

One solid tip that the photographers offered though was to be sure to obtain the release before the wedding and to bring a stock shoot list to the event. The first goal of a wedding shoot will always be to satisfy the client so knowing which additional images you want will help to keep your mind on the main job.

Building a Wedding Photography Business

But perhaps the most remarkable characteristic that we found while researching the book was the way in which each individual photographer had been able to build a photography business that suited their own personality, their own preferences and their own desires. In fact, that choice to shoot the way they want and to work the way they want was a key element in achieving a success they could call their own. So Christian Keenan, an award-winning photojournalist who had left Hong Kong to create a wedding photography business on his native island of Jersey, was happy to limit the number of weddings he shoots each year and to work only with a single employee. Kathleen Ferry, on the other hand, a former advertising executive, employs ten freelance photographers and runs her photography studio like a small business, taking orders and passing them on to her team of photographers while still accepting jobs herself.

We started with the idea of identifying the characteristics that make up a successful wedding photographer — the best strategies for bringing in clients, the methods of generating referrals, the marketing tools that delivered the best returns — but what we discovered was that just as there is more than one kind of wedding photographer so there is more than one kind of success. The most successful wedding photographers don’t just create success, they also define it for themselves.

It might look like a small detail compared to the challenge of framing the image and adjusting the lighting but for photographers looking to cash in on their images, the lack of a model release is a major limitation when it comes to making sales. It’s one of the most common reasons — together with duplication and trademark infringements — that stock companies reject images, and it’s also one of the hardest elements for photographers to deal with. If you know you’re going to be shooting with the idea of selling for stock you can hire models or ask your subjects to sign on the dotted line but when you’re hoping to sell pictures shot a long time ago and whose subject is long gone, usage will always be restricted to illustrating editorial pieces, and the value of the image will be lower. One solution is to shoot — and offer — the kinds of pictures that don’t require model releases.

When Elizabeth Popadopoulos joined Flickr in March 2008 she had only a Canon Powershot, iPhoto and, she says, time on her hands. She began uploading images, found the feedback from other members addictive and, realizing that digital photography allows her to shoot as much as she wants without wasting film and with no extra expense, continued taking pictures. She’s since upgraded her equipment (at least a little), completed a number of photography classes, but more importantly, she’s shot 40,000 photos. Despite her lack of experience, Getty approached her a year ago and invited her to add a number of her images to its Flickr collection. She sold eleven licenses in the first month and has gone on to make a total of 143 sales.

No Model Releases Keeps Things Simple

Part of Elizabeth’s success is down to the quality of her photography but much has to do with her creativity and a fortunate detail about the subject of her images. Elizabeth shoots mostly artistic abstracts, rich in line, color and detail. They could be close-ups of feathers, shots of hot air balloons, or even patterns made from colored post-it notes. But what they all have in common is that the images are sellable and none of them requires model releases.

“Model releases are not an issue for my photos,” says Elizabeth. That’s great for me because it’s another way of keeping things simple (and less work).”

Photos like these also carry another benefit: they’re artistic enough to serve as fine prints, an area that Elizabeth is promoting as well. That’s unusual. The kinds of pictures that buyers usually want to use tend to be more deliberately commercial. If they don’t include shots of business people in suits, they’re likely to show happy families walking in a park or receptionists talking on the telephone — all images that would require model releases.

Following Elizabeth’s approach to shooting sellable (and artistic) image doesn’t have to mean lining up pieces of colored paper or getting close to a peacock’s feather. It’s also possible to separate the elements from her work and focus on color or form alone. Paul Marotta’s photo of buttons, for example, goes for form; Martin Pickard’s picture of traditional sweets goes for both. Each of those kinds of images is artistic enough to be rewarding for the photographer to shoot and commercial enough to be offered for sale. And they don’t need model releases.

All of those pictures involve getting close to the subject. It’s also possible though to step back. While certain buildings can require property releases — you can sell photos of the Eiffel Tower shot in daylight but the lighting company owns the copyright to the way the tower appears at night — you should usually be on safe ground if you’re hoping to offer photos of landscapes and cityscapes. Just packing the camera as you stroll the city then may be enough to land you a spot on Getty although you might have more fun creating shots that demand a little more artistry.

That’s fine if you’re the kind of photographer that’s happy to shoot the environment or make pictures out of buttons. But what if you’re a people photographer at heart? Are there still easy ways to enjoy yourself shooting photos of faces and offer them for sale without having to chase down the subject of the image first for a model release?

Self-Portraits Deliver Easy Model Releases

There’s you, of course. Self-portraits are a particular kind of photograph but they’ve allowed Icelandic Flickr member Rebekka Gudsleifdottir, among others, to build a career, and stock sites offer them too. Ignore the cheesy stuff in which photographers shoot the topic rather than the style and look to the genuine article for examples of what you can create when you’re willing to put yourself in front of the lens — and supply your own model release. Sometimes it’s even possible to create a self-portrait that lets the photographer maintain a secret identity and which requires no release at all. Shooting someone from a distance or in a way that makes them unidentifiable can do that too.

And if all that fails, there are always the old favorites. Think ahead and make sure the people you photograph are prepared to let you use their image either because they want to or because you’ve bribed them with a CD-load of free images for their own use. Or stick to offering images of friends and relations who are easy to find and unlikely to refuse. But whichever approach you take to beat the model release challenge, it also pays to be flexible. As Elizabeth Popadopoulos put it:

“Remember, nothing is forever in the market. Needs and tastes change. No one can tell me if my images will be selling in a year or two, or at what price points. So keep your eyes open and always consider your options.”

And if all else fails, get the model release first.

Photography: Duncan

What you shoot will always define your reputation as a photographer. When it comes to generating respect and interest in your work though, what you say to other photographers about the images they shoot is no less important. Picking up an audience for your work on Flickr, for example, has always involved taking the time to view other people’s images and leave notes of admiration in the expectation that the photographer would reciprocate. As those photographers become contacts, awareness of your photography starts to grow as does the audience — and eventually buyers become aware of your work too. It’s a benefit that’s not been lost on Flickr members and the result is that images posted by any reasonably popular photographer quickly pick up fake awards, invitations to group submissions, and congratulations expressed in the form of “good capture” comments.

Those are exactly the sort of comments though that contributors are most likely to ignore. Words of admiration can be encouraging, and certainly plenty of budding photographers have been moved enough by the reactions their images have generated to put more time and effort into their photography. But what’s most likely to attract the attention of a popular photographer is not telling them that the photograph is good but actually talking about it. Contributors want to know what precisely the viewer liked about the picture and they want an opportunity to discuss it. There are a few ways that you can do that.

The easiest is to ask how they shot it. Although some pictures will be relatively straightforward, many will require a particular knowledge of lighting and technique without which the image can’t be created. Sharing the picture is a way for the photographer demonstrate their skill as well as their creativity and the comments are an opportunity for them to explain exactly what they did. An intelligent question about a photographer’s working method then is more likely to generate a response from the photographer than a quick compliment.

Make Comparisons

When Strobist blogger David Hobby, for example, posted this picture of his daughter reading in bed, the light apparently coming from the pages of the book, the photo generated over 10,000 views, 49 comments and 95 favorites. Most of those comments said little more than “excellent shot,” “great lighting” or “awesome.” It was only when “Squilky” noticed an error in the image’s technical description, questioning the choice of F2 at 1/60ths of a second and asking if the flash was diffused, that David Hobby himself entered the comments to make a correction. It was a question that went straight to the topic of the picture and demonstrated that the questioner was knowledgeable, astute and appreciative. It’s the kind of question that would make the photographer want to learn more about the questioner.

A question can make an effective comment because it invites the contributor to share knowledge. An even more effective comment is to share information that you know and which the photographer lacks. This David Hobby photograph of six photographers shooting a celebrity, for example, generated more than 33,000 views and 41 comments. With six photographers’ flashes synced and included in the photograph, it’s not surprising that many of those comments asked him how he had done it. One comment that attracted David Hobby’s attention offered an accurate suggestion but more importantly, it also told him that a couple of publications had recently run similar images. David Hobby then asked a question himself, enquiring where he could see those pictures.

For David Hobby, posting the picture hasn’t just allowed him to demonstrate his skills, and answering questions hasn’t only enabled him to share some information.  It’s also given him some helpful new knowledge — and introduced him to a photographer with an understanding of photography and a photographic education that can benefit him too.

It’s certainly a lot more effective than offering another pat on the back.

What Do You Think of This?

Comments though don’t have to be only questions and answers about the way a particular image was made. Some of the most interesting comments are those that develop from a note about the photograph to a fully-fledged debate about photography in general.  Rebekka Gudsleifdottir’s photo of her niece tucking into an oversized slice of cake and a giant glass of milk picked up a remarkable 258 comments. As usual, many of those were acclamations and group invitations. Plenty of other comments though were questions about whether Rebekka had used Photoshop to resize the props, enough to make her add a note in her description that she had used “real, oversized props.”

It was when “werdan” wondered

when we’ll cross the line that it is no longer worth doing oddities like this ‘in camera’ because everyone will just think that it’s ‘shopped’ anyway which was the simpler alternative to begin with. Or perhaps we have already crossed that line.

that Rebekka chimed in with her own comment, one of many contributions to the discussion her picture generated:

@Werdan: I think the line has apparently been crossed, where the majority if people now assume everything is PS’d, even things that are relatively simple to create for real…

Regardless of others oppinions on the matter, i myself will stubbornly stick with creating things and shooting them as is, rather than painstakingly create them with aid of computer. It just doesn’t float my boat..

When a comment goes beyond praise for the execution to touch on the subjects that inspired the photographer, then the commenter always has a chance of attracting attention and engaging in conversation with a photographer he or she admires.

There are no solid rules about posting comments that lead to return views, reactions and new contacts — except for one: be respectful and polite. Browsing photographer comments both on Flickr and on websites tends to be a pretty happy affair but that’s not true of all websites or all occasions. A bad picture won’t kill a photographer’s reputation — their skill can always improve — but a bad comment certainly will.

Photography: Larry Shaefer

Larry Shaefer’s last professional project was in July of last year for the television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. He’d donated his time to build a staircase for a needy family. The work done, he put away his tools, took his family on a vacation to Oregon, and on the day he returned was informed that the carpentry workshop that had employed him for the last thirteen years was shutting its doors. There were no new projects lined up, his employer couldn’t pay him and he — and the firm’s three other employees — was being laid off.

Over the last couple of years, as the recession has continued to bite and unemployment has stuck at just below 10 percent, it’s a story that’s been repeated more than 8.4 million times. Days that used to be filled with work and career-building are now consumed by job-searching, interviews and daytime television.

Photography enthusiasts at least have somewhere to turn. They now have weekday hours to practice their photography, learn new skills and even earn a little extra money from something they’d previously only considered a weekend hobby. Microstock firm Shutterstock reports that its site really took off towards the end of 2008, about the time that the downturn began. A number of publications had suggested photography as a way of supplementing income, and submissions grew from a public concerned about the stability of their salaries.

Magazine Covers and Getty Portfolios

It’s something that Larry Shaefer has begun to benefit from too. A keen photographer, Larry had long been putting his life on film, shooting nature, pictures of his son or still life images, and uploading the results to his Flickr account. One picture entered in a local fair — the first he’d entered in a contest — picked up a blue ribbon and was featured on the cover of Ozark Mountaineering Magazine, a request that earned him twenty bucks.

“I thought that was cheap, but I didn’t care,” he recalled. “I thought it was great that they even asked me.”

Subsequent offers have been more serious. Getty approached him after seeing his pictures on the site, and although he has yet to make a sale, the stock company does represent several of Larry’s photographs.

After the initial shock of thirteen years of work without missing a day, Larry says he’s now relieved. He’s back at college, retraining as a middle school teacher and hoping to find work in some of Missouri’s underprivileged schools, and he has discovered that he has the time to improve his image editing, something he’d overlooked in the past. He’s learning Photoshop and while he says he may take the same number of pictures that he used to, he now puts more time into producing quality photos rather than shooting large numbers of them.

From English Teacher to Editorial Photographer

A focus on post-production is something August Kelm has been concentrating on too. A former student with plans to teach English in Japan, August was forced to drop out of college when the bank supplying her student loan failed. She took a job to save enough money to re-enroll, but was laid off in January this year. Her days are now spent improving her photography. She’s also teaching herself Photoshop and is learning about the Zone System as a way of adding some extra flare to her black and white photos. She’s now hoping to become an editorial photographer and plans on enrolling in some photography classes at her local state college. In the meantime, she’s been sending her resumé to magazines and publications that she believes publishes the kinds of images she likes to create.

August’s unemployment then may end up opening a whole new career path, one that she might not have considered if she hadn’t been hit by the recession, and an activity that she would not have had as much time to practice. But the real benefit, at least in the short term, is photography’s ability to take some of the pain out of being unemployed.

“It’s made those days in between rejection letters and firing resumes out a bit more bearable,” says August. “I can just grab one (or all) of my cameras and just take a walk down the road and I usually end up with a couple of good shots.”

Larry Shaefer too has found that the prospect of making sales through Getty or figuring out how to improve his layering skills are little compared to the way in which photography is helping him through a difficult transition. He describes the creativity involved in taking pictures as a kind of therapy and enjoys the fact that he can still get to wield a tool that’s more demanding than a mouse or a board marker.

“The camera has filled that void, and I appreciate it more now actually that my hands have grown a bit softer,” he says. “I think over the months photography has helped me move on and grow into a better person.”

Recessions though do end. People who have lost their jobs go on to find new ones, sometimes better ones, and sometimes even in entirely new fields. Losing a job might be painful but photography can make it seem a little easier, perhaps by bringing in a little income, always by helping to fill days that can otherwise feel interminable. Both Larry and August say they’ll continue shooting pictures even after the economy has improved and their job prospects have brightened.

“I don’t think I’d stop just because of a job,” says Larry. “I may have less time to edit, matt and frame, but with today’s technology I’ll throw them on a hard drive for my son’s kids and their kids to look at.

“There is nothing more inspiring, than losing your job,” he continues. “If you keep your sense of humor about it, and take advantage of the extra time, a person can easily transform a loss into an added bonus.”

Photography: Nebojsa Mladjenovic

Vanessa Dualib’s photography career took off when illness restricted her to her house. Forced to make her own amusement, she played with food and cameras, uploaded the results to Flickr and ended up with an offer from Getty. Emin Kuliyev too spent a year in bed after a car accident broke his leg in five places. He used the time to play with his new digital camera. In 2008, he was named Photographer of the Year by the Artistic Guild of the Wedding Photojournalist Association. While there’s always plenty to shoot if you’re willing to get in the car and drive to picturesque locations, there are also plenty of opportunities not just to practice your photography without leaving the house but to shoot the kinds of pictures that can raise dollars too.

Stock is the most obvious place to put those images, and inventories offer all sorts of photos that contributors could have shot in a garage studio or just with a camera on a tripod. Food photography, for example, often requires some special skills to prepare the items so that they look good under the lights but when even a fairly straightforward shot of an apple in front of a white background can generate over 6,000 downloads, home-based photographers don’t need to look further than the fruit bowl to come up with ideas for highly valuable compositions. And there’s no reason to stop at fruit. There’s a market for vegetables, cookies, bread and all of the items filling up your kitchen shelves. (If you’re also going to use packaged goods though, remember to take off the brand names in post-production. Logos and brands are one of the most common reasons stock companies reject images.)

Shoot the Family

Of course, you don’t have to restrict yourself to shooting edibles. If you’re a better photographer than a cook, then furniture can make for sellable images, as can toys and books. And that’s before you’ve stepped outside to shoot the garden or take architectural images of the house itself.

If the rest of the family is bored, you can also gather them together to lend a hand. You’ll need to supply model releases but once you start to think in terms of playing, working, resting or any other form of action, a solitary afternoon with the camera can become a valuable activity in which everyone takes part.

Stock images are always the most obvious to shoot because they’re the most versatile but they do require a particular kind of image, one capable of being used in a number of different ways, that has a clear message and which leaves room for copy. More fun to shoot are the kinds of pictures that can be put in a book. One of the reasons that Vanessa Dualib refused to contribute more than a handful of her images to Getty was that the company’s exclusivity restrictions would have prevented her from doing almost anything else with them for two years. She’s used her freedom to create a Blurb book, the response to which, she says, has been “an amazing surprise.”

Create your own book and the only limit to what you can shoot around the house is your ability to produce the kinds of images that other people would want to see and buy. You can create a book based on your collection of netsuke or old cameras, the flowers in your garden or the clothes in your closet. Or you can think of a feeling you want the book to portray, such as calmness, vibrancy or quiet, look for aspects of the house that reflect that feeling and create images that reproduce it. As long as you can find enough material to create a varied book, Blurb’s “Home and Garden” category will provide a suitable home for it.

You Can Sell from Home Too

The real challenge though will be selling it. Fortunately, even this can be done without leaving the house as well. Vanessa Dualib was smart enough to do what many print-on-demand bookmakers don’t bother to do and launched a website to promote her book. She says she didn’t do any hard marketing but her following on Flickr has helped to drive traffic to the site where people are able to see more of her work and invited to place their order. It’s not a huge effort, and it’s one that can be done from the home office in a matter of minutes and as a normal part of online photo-sharing. But it is an easy way to turn the images you shoot for fun around the house — including amusingly arranged vegetables — into sellable works of art.

The most important factor in selling books of the photos you shoot at home though, will be the quality and the nature of your photographs. No one outside your family is going to be interested in buying pictures of your children playing soccer in the garden unless the pictures have some other quality that makes them worth looking at. That quality can be a sense of loyalty created by a long-running series of images. David Morgan-Mar’s photographic Web comics are shot in half a day every Saturday using Lego characters, a bright desk lamp and a bit of computer-based post-production. David even does the writing and development on the train on the way to work in the morning. The comics, which are shot at home, have generated a large following. If they haven’t generated any cash though, that comes largely down to David’s initial decision to use a low print resolution and his unwillingness to take on Lego’s legal department. Emily Horne of A Softer World has managed to turn the images that she shoots, and for which Joey Comeau provides the text, into a full-time job.

It is possible then to pick up a camera and shoot pictures that can sell through stock inventories, as books, and even as comics, without leaving the house. That’s something to think about the next time a rainy weekend ruins your shooting plans.

Photography: Photos8.com

You’d think that microstock companies have nothing to worry about. This time last year, iStockPhoto was predicting revenues of about $200 million — and that after Getty had bought the company just three years earlier for $50 million. Six months ago, Fotolia announced that it had 8 million images available, and as companies battle for plug-in space on the ribbons in Microsoft Office 2010, these hardly look like difficult times for the low-cost image industry. And yet something does some to be bothering the stock world as a whole. It’s a threat so large that Getty, Shutterstock, PACA (Picture Archive Council of America) and BAPLA (British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies) have all teamed up to fight it together.

They’ve launched StockPhotoRights.com, a website intended to educate image buyers about the rights issues associated with photography. According to Shutterstock:

“Stockphotorights.com is an educational resource which unravels the complexities and exposes the potential legal pitfalls of image use. It is intended to provide image users with information and advice so they can purchase and use images with confidence.”

In fact, the site has the exact opposite aim: it’s intended to undermine the confidence that images users feel when they help themselves to photographs that they haven’t paid for or which are licensed directly from the photographer. And there may be good reason to do so.

Four Kinds of Rights Owners

A survey by Redshift Research of 1,200 new and established image users in the US and the UK involved in sourcing stock imagery, and released with the launch of StockPhotoRights’ website, revealed that almost 45 percent of respondents were unaware that they could face a legal claim relating to an image they’d used. That’s true even if they’d paid for a license.

The threat, if the image has been paid for, doesn’t come from the photographer – the more usual source of trouble when images are taken without permission. But it might come from the owners of three other rights in the picture, those related to models, trademarks, and designs. Buy an image that contains a recognizable individual, for example, and if that person complains, the image user would be liable even if they’ve bought the picture from a photographer. The same is true of a business whose logo appears in a photo, and even of a product that’s easily identifiable and the main subject of the picture. Shutterstock, for example, not only refuses images of people without model releases, it would also not approve an image for commercial use that shows an isolated, identifiable car in case the auto-maker complained about the final usage. It may however accept “generic-looking” objects, including those that have been digitally altered to remove logos.

Those multiple rights issues are a concern for image users licensing some photos directly from photographers. They’re also a problem for photographers selling certain types of pictures through their websites or on Flickr. They need to make sure that they have model releases for the people in their images and that they’ve removed any commercial logos.

Forty-Four Percent of Image Users Source from Google

But direct sales like these are rare in comparison to the large numbers of licenses sold each day by stock companies. A much larger threat to the growth of the stock industry comes not from individual photographers but from images stolen from search engines and photos licensed as Creative Commons. According to Redshift Research’s survey, an incredible 44 percent of small business decision makers admitted sourcing their images from Google Images. The survey didn’t make clear whether those images were used as specs for internal purposes or actually placed in commercial publications (although it did indicate that the 22 percent of image users who license images from photo-sharing sites use them commercially) but it does suggest a real problem among image users who fail to understand that a photographer owns the rights to an image that appears in Google — and that others may own the rights to elements within the photo.

And, of course, it’s an important sales point for stock companies whose prices include indemnification against legal complaints, and which employ selectors to filter out potentially problematic compositions. According to Shutterstock, one of the main reasons the site has been successful is that it can stand behind its images and provides signed model releases when necessary.

If the aim is to persuade image users to pay for that indemnification though, it’s hard to say how much a site like StockPhotoRights will help. The site’s case studies focus in part on illustrating the kinds of issues that could face bloggers and website owners, but it’s those small users who are also the ones who feel the most immune. The chances that someone would spot their picture on a blog or that BMW would sue a small blogger for using a picture of one of their cars are pretty small. Even when photographers themselves complain about illegitimate image use, the response is more likely to be an apology and a quick change of image than a willingness to cough up money for a stock photo.

In fact, one of the few instances of a law suit described in StockPhotoRights’ news section links to a case brought by a Greek man against a Swedish company that used a picture of him to sell Turkish-style yoghurt. He’s claiming a frightening $6.9m in damages. Unfortunately for StockPhotoRights, the dairy company’s defense is that they bought the image from a photo agency.

Small photo users, the ones most likely to use legally questionable images, may be put off stealing images or licensing photos that don’t come with all of the necessary permissions, but only if they see other users like them facing lawsuits. Until then, the stock world, photographers and other rights holders will struggle with breached rights in the same way that the music industry has struggled. A better target for education then may be not users but photographers. Even if the publisher is liable for the way an image is used, and not the photographer, few sellers want to face complaints from their customers. If you’re selling your images yourself or making them available with Creative Commons licenses, you need to make sure you’re not offering pictures for commercial use with rights issues.

Photography: GlacierTim

Start thinking about ways to turn images into cash, and at the top of the minds of most photography enthusiasts will be microstock. With dozens of companies begging for new submissions to keep their inventory fresh and attract buyers, it takes little effort to be in a position to make sales. Just shoot, upload and wait. The cost of that easy market access though is low prices and stiff competition. Stock sites offer millions of pictures, only a small percentage of which actually sell and only a small percentage of those sell a significant number of licenses. While some photographers are making meaningful incomes from microstock, they’ve usually chosen to work at it full-time and make a point of shooting the kinds of pictures the market demands rather than the sorts of images they most love to create. There are however a number of other fields which, although not as easy to enter as microstock, do offer real opportunities even for non-professional photographers.

Dance Classes

School photography is big business. According to Chris Wunder, a professional photographer who offers workshops on school photography, the field is one of the few that offers the opportunity to generate $1,000 a day in revenues (although the profits are significantly smaller). It’s also one, he says, that’s becoming increasingly open to smaller studios.

“The tables are turning away from the large, inflexible companies,” he told us. “Plus, other markets photographers have traditionally depended upon (weddings, seniors, children’s photography, etc) have become more competitive, so they are wanting to reach out to new opportunities to fill that void.”

In practice though, photographers looking to break into the school market will struggle to persuade the schools to give up their current suppliers for an untried photographer, especially one with little experience in handling large groups of children. School photography might be a lucrative opportunity, but it’s not an easy one to exploit.

But learning doesn’t stop when the school bell rings. After-school classes provide a different kind of opportunity for photographers. The number of images will be smaller — you’ll be shooting dozens of children, rather than hundreds — but that just makes the logistics easier and there’s a good chance that you’ll be shooting them more often. School shoots take place once a year; dance classes put on performances every few months, and parents are more likely to want to order prints of their little ones jumping and pirouetting than sitting on a stool in the kind of characterless pose that they can create themselves.

The relatively small size of the market means that dance classes aren’t going to be a replacement for professional school photographers. But occasional photographers — especially those with children who take dance classes — can find that offering to shoot and sell pictures of dance performances can bring in some useful extra income without having to compete against large professional companies.

Pro Bono Photography

You’re not going to make any money shooting for free but offering your skills to a good cause can produce something else of value: it can give you contacts — and those contacts can give you income. Top pet photographer Grace Chon, for example, started her photography career while working in an ad firm. In her spare time, she shot free portraits of homeless dogs for a charity. The shoots gave her the opportunity to practice photographing animals and put her in touch with pet owners. Grace now charges as much as $1,150 for a session.

Clearly, not all photographers are going to follow that route. Much depends on the organizations to which you want to donate your images, your ability to network and the willingness of the organizations to use your photos in their material, spreading your name and building your portfolio.

But the way in is simple enough. Choose a cause you want to support and start volunteering. Let people know that you’re a talent behind the lens and start shooting for free. Then let that internship guide you towards a specialization — even a part-time one — in a field of photography that’s important to you.

Textbooks

Blurb has made it easy for photographers to create photography books, but it hasn’t given people a good reason to buy them. Although the company’s online store is filled with books on topics from weddings to the Wade Family’s Visit with President George W. Bush, few of those books ever sell more than a handful of copies. Creating photography books is now simple. Creating books that people want to buy — and marketing them so that those people know about them — is still a struggle.

One kind of book that does have both a steady demand from buyers and a constant need for images is textbooks. Publishers of college books, whether they’re intended to teach budding physicists or produce young sociologists, tend to have stricter image demands than other image buyers do. It’s not enough to know that the picture in the stock inventory is a flower. The publisher of a biology textbook will want to know what kind of flower it is and where it was photographed. They’re more likely to find those sorts of details on specialist science image banks like PhotoResearchers and PhotoTake.

Not all of these images are easy to create. Shots of cells and medical procedures require a level of access that most members of the public lack — which is why stock companies like these often depend on doctors to do the shooting (and why there’s always a demand for them) — but if you have connections that can get your foot in a hospital door or into a university laboratory, you’ll be in a position to create (and keyword) some very sellable images.

When it comes to making money from photography, there are no easy opportunities. There are however, openings that are easier to make the most of than others, or that offer less competition than others, or that are more enjoyable to exploit than others even if they take longer to fulfill. Some paths to selling images might be well-known but there’s no shortage of narrower routes that are no less fruitful.

Image: Twitpic

When a picture sells, it’s traditionally the result of plenty of planning, lots of practice and years of professional training. The low cost of professional quality digital cameras, the ability to show the results on the Internet, and the rise of microstock have now made it more common for buyers to license pictures from talented enthusiasts. But sometimes, those sales are more than an occasional purchase by a Web designer with a small budget. Occasionally, an amateur will break through and create the kind of pictures that land a big client, a ton of attention, a pile of cash — or all three.

Kevin Bauman’s Houses

Kevin Bauman used to be a professional photographer. For five years, he had been shooting architectural images, product photography and lifestyle jobs for businesses in the Michigan area. As the economy sank though, work began to dry up and Kevin turned to Web development as an alternative line of business.

But he didn’t give up photography entirely. As he traveled around Detroit, he would take pictures of the empty homes abandoned by former residents trying their luck elsewhere. The houses were shot front-on without adornment or any attempt to make them look better than they appeared to someone driving by.

Kevin built a collection of the photos then placed them online, offering the prints for $35 with a portion of the fee going to charity.

The pictures were noticed by The New York Times who ran a story about them, delivering around 8,000 visitors to Kevin’s website in a single day. He sold almost 70 pictures that week alone.

“It has generated quite a bit of interest, and because of it I’ll be donating a lot more money to a few Detroit charities than I ever would have without the project, but I don’t think it’s actually done much of anything to change people,” Kevin told us. “Maybe it could serve as a warning. Maybe that warning would be, ‘prepare for the future.’ Detroit didn’t.”

Vanessa Dualib’s Fruit and Veg

When illness forced Vanessa Dualib to remain indoors, the outgoing Brazilian Fine Arts graduate chose to bring together three things that interested her the most: food, photography and humor. She pulled fruit and vegetables out of her fridge, photographed them in the form of animals and placed the images on Flickr.

That’s where the story should have ended: with a collection of amusing pictures enjoyed by other members of the photo-sharing site. But Getty was looking for creative new pictures to add to its growing Flickr collection, and invited Vanessa to contribute some 60 percent of her “Playing with Food” photography. Worried about the two year exclusivity, she agreed to provide just four of them which, she says, “sold a few times already” in the first four months they were on the site.

Unlike much stock photography, these are images that weren’t shot by a professional and weren’t created with any particular use in mind. They were created solely to entertain a bored photographer — and yet they were picked up by one of the world’s biggest stock companies, proving that you don’t need to be a pro to succeed, just creative and good.

Citizenside’s $100,000 Headless Movie

When it comes to news images, the line between photography and videography isn’t as neat as used to be. While the press will prefer the clarity of a still shot, when the story is hot enough and when there’s no competition, they’ll also pay through the nose for the right images. At that point, the kind of device you’re holding doesn’t matter any more than the professional status of the photographer — or whether the images are still or moving. If you’re in the right place at the right time with a tool capable of capturing light you can still produce successful images.

“Jerker08,” for example, a contributor to citizen news site Citizenside, got lucky in January 2008 when he found himself in an office opposite the Brigade Financière building where Jerôme Kerviel was being questioned about the trades that cost French bank Société Générale around 4.9 billion Euros.

With the lights on in the building and the blinds up, he had a grandstand view of the interrogation. He pulled out a camera, shot three minutes of footage and sent it off to Citizenside. The video was sold for around $100,000.

And yet it’s a terrible clip. In some of the video, Kerviel’s head is blocked by part of the window; in the remainder of the clip, it’s entirely hidden behind a light. But it was topical enough to land a six-figure sum, demonstrating that you don’t need to be a professional to get lucky with location.

Astro Soichi’s Space Shots

Soichi Noguchi’s profession certainly has made him lucky with location. Since December 20, 2009, the Japanese astronaut has been a crew member on the International Space Station. It’s a position that gives him a grandstand view of the Earth, of space and of other astronauts flying around in spacesuits.

As Astro_Soichi, Noguchi has also been providing updates on Twitter. Shooting through the space station’s windows, he links his tweets to his collection of photos on Twitpic. The images have been stunning and have included shots of the space shuttle Atlantis hovering in space, a storm over the Atlantic, and plenty of satellite-style photos and close-ups of the world below.

There’s no question of Noguchi making money out of his amateur photography, but his tweets, and his images in particular, have given him a following that’s almost a quarter of a million strong – an impressive audience for a professional engineer with a minimum of photography equipment.

It’s always going to be easier for a professional photographer to make sales than it will be for an enthusiast. They have the time and the resources to go out and create the photos that sell. But if you have the right idea, the right technique, a decent amount of talent –  and sometimes a reasonable amount of luck – you too can produce images that other people will want to see.

Image courtesy: Veer

Veer Marketplace, a microstock element within stock site Veer, is currently paying photographers for every contribution that they approve. The rates vary according to the number of images accepted, whether the photographer is a new member or an existing contributor, and the size of their current portfolio, but can be 35 cents, 70 cents or as much $1.40 per photo for photographers who manage to place 400 or more new images.

Veer is part of Corbis’s stable of stock offerings and is targeted primarily at graphic designers working in advertising, marketing and Web design. The service launched in 2002 but began offering microstock images from Veer Marketplace in addition to its rights managed products in early 2009. Currently, searchers on Veer are offered photos at price points that range from a dollar (or as the site calls them, “way cheap”) to $655 (“worth it”). Three checkbox filters let buyers choose to search by RF, RM or microstock — an RF category that appears to need its own filter. By default, all filters are checked and the microstock images are offered in a separate single column on the right of the page, with the more expensive images dominating the viewing area. Checkouts for microstock and traditional imagery are also separate.

Veer Will Place Microstock “Front and Center”

Designers, it seems, weren’t fooled by the design. In the summer of this year, Veer will be revamped making it easier for buyers to load up on the “way cheap” offerings. Writing on the Veer Marketplace forum, Veer Community Team member Brian O’Shea has explained that the new site will be “simpler to use and more affordable to customers.” Veer will be more like Veer Marketplace whose microstock content will be placed front and center in search results together with the traditional imagery. The aim of “Dash for Cash,” the promotion paying contributors for approved images, is to refresh and enlarge Veer Marketplace’s inventory, already more than a million pictures strong, before the big launch.

“Veer is a few months away from launching a refreshed website, and we’d like to offer an even wider selection of quality content to our customers when we do,” explains Aaron Booth, Senior Director, Creative Content.“We hope to generate a significant amount of new imagery for our refreshed website.”

Veer’s approval rate tends to be about 60 percent so the odds for photographers hoping to make a few easy cents aren’t bad. The most common reasons for rejections include the usual legal issues: visible trademarks which the site doesn’t have the right to sell, and other copyrighted material included in the images. Veer’s editors also screen and reject photos from the same shoot that appear too similar. The site’s guidelines describe what it sees as the difference between “similar” photos and a “series” of photos. While the first show the same image with only “slight variations,” the second “depicts an idea in a variety of different ways.” In practice, the line between the two is likely to be a lot more subjective and leave many photographers scratching their heads over rejected images.

The number of rejections can also be reduced by shooting the kinds of photos that Veer knows buyers want. These include particular kinds of models and a number of niche subjects.

“We are especially in need of imagery focusing on diverse ethnicities and age ranges across important verticals like lifestyle, medical and travel,” says Aaron Booth.

In a neat use of Twitter, Veer Marketplace’s @veermarketplace timeline also includes specific
“wishlist” tweets based on requests from buyers, alongside its “staff picks” and networking news.  One recent request, for example, was for more images of adult education classes. (Residents of Canada and the US can also join a bonus $500 Twitter sweepstake by following Veer Marketplace’s timeline and tweeting a message promoting the Dash for Cash.)

From Microstock to Corbis

All of this is good news for photographers hoping to earn at least a little income from their images. For a few weeks at least, they no longer have to impress buyers or get lucky in search results in order to pick up a few dollars. It’s enough to produce pictures that have the potential to sell to receive their first commissions. (Veer Marketplace’s royalty rates start at 20 cents for a subscription download and 35 cents for a single download, making the Dash for Cash payments comparable to an initial sale.)

It’s also possible that the connection between Veer, Veer Marketplace, and Corbis may allow microstock photographers to move up the stock hierarchy. Veer operates as a separate entity from the rest of Corbis “and focuses on a different type of customer and photographer,” but there are channels linking the different elements.

“While submitting content to Corbis is a separate process, Veer editors do take note of high-quality imagery and contributors that might be a good fit with Corbis’ more premium position,” explains Aaron Booth. “When possible, we also try to steer very high quality content that has potential legal issues which make it problematic for RF towards licensing models that may be a better fit.”

In theory then, a particularly good photographer may find that they submit a number of particularly good images in the hope of receiving the maximum royalty of seven dollars for a single download of an XXLarge image, but find that they’re asked to become a Corbis contributor with the option of making hundreds of dollars per sale.

The question that Veer’s promotion raises though is whether they’d want to. Veer’s original design emphasized its most expensive RM images. Its redesign will focus on microstock presumably because those are the photos it has found that its buyers want most. Those buyers though aren’t small-scale bloggers and occasional buyers. They’re creative designers, professionals who use large numbers of images and buy the 9,000 typefaces that Veer also offers. That Corbis is willing to pay for microstock images even before they’ve sold but is offering nothing attract quality RM imagery isn’t just a reflection of the difference between traditional stock and the microstock markets. It’s also an indication of the way the stock industry is continuing to develop.

Photography: unifiedphoto

There are no “easy” ways to generate regular photo sales. Selling photography always requires a knowledge of craft, the talent to use it creatively and the willingness to push those images ahead of competitors’ works and into the hands of buyers. There are however a few methods that are easier than others, not necessarily because they deliver more sales or because they generate higher prices but because offering the images is more fun – and feels less like work – than other channels.

Art fairs, for example, are held at regular intervals and provide an opportunity for photographers (as well as other artists) to show their work and make sales. The value of those sales will vary from fair to fair, and will also depend on the prices you put on your images. One of the most important strategies for success at art fairs is to offer a broad range of rates and image sizes that allow buyers with different budgets to make purchases. It’s not unusual for a photographer to end up with profits of between $1,000 and $2,000 at the end of an art fair.

Those profits cost money to generate though and they aren’t available to everyone who wants them. Selling at an art fair means investing in display materials, a tent, and prints and frames that you’ll be hoping to sell. Like any professional venture, it’s an investment that always carries an element of risk.

Art Fairs Let You Sell the Photos You Love

And that’s if you’re accepted. Most applicants to art fairs aren’t. At the Evergreen Arts Festival, for example, one of the top 300 fairs in the US, only one photographer in nine who applies to sell their work makes it to the fair. All the applicants produce good images but space is always limited and there are no preferences to photographers who were accepted the previous year, forcing everyone to compete from scratch.

The need to invest and the requirement to compete then make selling at art fairs difficult.  But what makes them an easy way to make sales is that you’ll be selling art. You won’t be shooting for clients who want their products shot in a particular way or for brides who challenge you to make them look their best even as their tears smudge their mascara and their families refuse to stand in a straight line for the formals. You’ll be shooting the images that make you proud and happy, and you’ll be enjoying the thrill that comes from having your own satisfaction endorsed by admirers willing to pay for your images.

You’ll also be spending time with other photographers, a benefit that’s underrated but hugely valuable. They’ll tell you about other fairs that have proved successful for them, give tips about sales strategies and generally provide the kind of camaraderie that’s not always easy for photographers used to shooting alone to find.

Art fairs then take effort to break into. You’ll need to be willing to risk some cash and accept plenty of rejection. But once you’re on the circuit, you should find that it’s one of the most enjoyable ways to sell the photos you had the most fun creating.

Like art fairs, Flickr too provides an element of camaraderie. One of the biggest benefits of the site is its ability to bring photographers together, initially in an online environment and, for dedicated members, in local meet-ups and photography tours. There is a difference between the kind of relationships that grow in online groups and those enjoyed by photographers who spend several hours standing next to each other art fairs every few months, but the shared advice and compliments on Flickr can do much to boost a photographer’s skill levels and confidence.

Flickr Sells Creative Images

And like art fairs too, the kinds of images that sell on Flickr also tend to be the more creative types that buyers can’t find on stock sites, that photographers most enjoy shooting — and which they usually struggle the most to sell. Vanessa Dualib’s pictures of vegetable animals, for example, weren’t just picked up Getty, which now scours the site looking for sellable photos; they also picked up real sales on Getty’s Flickr collection.

For most Flickr photographers though, sales won’t happen through Getty. The stock company might be actively searching for images on Flickr but it’s still selective about the photos and photographers it accepts. Instead, those sales will happen occasionally after a buyer has stumbled upon one of their images and decided it’s something that they want to buy. Usually, that’s a chance event, a combination of good keywording and even better shooting. Turning those sales into regular occurrences tends to mean tracking the stats available to Pro members, ensuring that all images are keyworded properly, only displaying the best photos and organizing them into easily browsable collections, and indicating in the description that photos are available for licensing and sales. It also means networking constantly so that your name spreads across the site — as well as across the blogosphere. None of that is easy. But it is all enjoyable.

And it’s also possible to make sales regularly on microstock sites, a channel which can bring the benefits of regular revenue but which also provides the challenge of shooting commercial rather than creative images, and of building a large enough portfolio to keep those sales coming in. That’s always going to feel more like work than a hobby, and the small payments for each sale mean that it can feel like low-paid work too.

The advantage though is that the selling itself consists of doing nothing more than uploading the images and leaving the site to do its own marketing. While art fairs and Flickr will both demand some form of marketing, microstock requires only that the photographer shoots the right kind of images and in the right quantities. If you can enjoy doing that, you’ll have found another easy to make regular sales.

There are other ways of generating regular, enjoyable photography sales too, of course. Pet photography can be fun and is often practiced — at least initially — by part-time photographers happy to indulge in two weekend hobbies: photography and pets. Designing photography products can be fun but marketing them requires a giant push. And selling through your own website will let you shoot anything you want and keep all of the proceeds but you’ll be spending a large amount of time on SEO and offline marketing, activities which are rarely enjoyable at all.

Whichever method you use though, find a channel that you enjoy using and which lets you sell images that you like creating, and you’ll find that your sales, however occasional and however they’re priced, are always easy.

Choosing your rates is one of the hardest challenges for any photographer, professional or enthusiast. But wrong prices can be corrected. The challenge isn’t just to choose the right amount though; it’s to pick the right moment to make the change.

The worst time to demand more money is also the most tempting. As photographers build up experience they also build their confidence. The danger comes when that confidence spills over into a form of arrogance. They become aware that their pictures are beautiful, impressive, moving and technically correct but they’re not aware just how many other photographers are equally capable of creating images that beautiful, impressive, moving and technically correct. Believing that they’re in the top one percent of photographic talent, some photographers believe that their prices should be in the top one percent too.

“I find some photographers start to get an attitude about themselves and quote very high-end prices,” says Teri Bloom, a professional photographer in New York. “Very often, their pricing is more about their ego than about the quality of their work.”

While having the confidence to charge for work is essential, the moment when you start to feel that you’re better than almost every other photographer isn’t a good time to raise your prices. It’s a good time to buy a photography book and remember what other talented photographers can produce.

Let Your Competitors Take the Risk

Similarly the sight of a competitor adding some figures to his rate page isn’t a reason to adjust your prices upwards either — at least not immediately. Other photographers have no greater feel for what the market will bear than you do. They’re also no less prone to wishful thinking. If they’re right about market rates, then they’ll stay in business and will have earned a little more money than you for the few months it takes to test the new pricing. If they’re wrong though, they’ll lose jobs and see their income fall until they decide to adjust their prices down again.

When you see competitors changing rates then, rather than jump right in behind them, watch to see what happens. Let the competitor take the risk and only follow suit if you see that they’re keeping the prices at the new higher level. That’s a sign that the market has shifted. The price it will have cost you to discover that new level is the difference between your old prices and your new fees during the time you waited.

So if you shouldn’t raise your prices immediately after you find that you’re shooting consistently beautiful images or even the moment your competitors increase their fees, when is the best time to ask for more cash?

There are at least a couple of clear signs that your prices are too low. The first — and the most serious — is when you’re not meeting your expenses. It’s not unusual for part-time photographers to accept an offer from a buyer for a picture that they shot for fun, only later to calculate the true cost of the production and realize the buyer didn’t actually pay anything for the talent and creativity. The fee barely covered the costs of printing, framing and shipping, let alone travel to the location, time in post-production or buying the equipment used to create the picture.

When you realize that you’re shooting for nothing, that’s always a good time to put up your prices.

Losing Photography Clients? Charge More.

Oddly though, losing customers can also be a sign that you’re not charging enough. While charging too much will price you out of the market, charging too little suggests a lack of experience and knowledge. You might want to charge less than competitors in order to buy your first clients, but buyers who are willing to pay the market rate will believe a low price will deliver a budget service. Photographers who have pitched low prices in the hope of making their first moves into professional photography as quick as possible have found that their rates slowed their progress by scaring off buyers.

Another good time to consider raising your prices then is when you see that a client who rejected you has hired a competitor with higher fees. Compare your images to see if those clients are receiving more creative images for those bigger checks, but if you find that your photography is comparable and that the only difference is experience, then try matching their rates and see what happens.

That’s not easy to do though. Comparing images requires a subjectivity that’s hard for a photographer to bring to his or her own images, and it will always be tempting to buy market share with lower rates than to hide inexperience with mid-range prices. But there is another fail-safe time when it always pays to put up your rates.

When your schedule is full and you’re having to reject bookings, that’s a sure sign that you could be earning more money. Just as it doesn’t pay to turn down low-cost work when you’ve got empty hours, so it does pay to swap your budget clients for buyers with deeper pockets. You might want to keep returning customers who supply a regular source of income, but new customers will have to win the remaining slots in your book by outbidding each other. Put up your prices as you see your schedule closing up and you should find that while you’re holding fewer consultations, you’re still completing the same number of shoots, turning away fewer leads, and earning more income.

In general, a recession might not be the best time to think about raising your prices, but if you’ve been charging too little for your photography then even a crunch can be a good moment to ask for more money from new clients. Just make sure that that your schedule is full enough to handle lower demand from budget buyers, that you’re not stepping too far ahead of your competitors — and that your new prices match the quality of your images, and not what you’d like to think about your images.

Photography: Nic McPhee

In 2004, Steve Levine was about to show his photographs in public for the first time. Three New York galleries had invited him to exhibit his work in a series of back-to-back shows that would last a total of four weeks. As he prepared for the exhibitions, meeting the gallery owners and arranging the printing, he and his partner Iris consoled themselves with the thought that when the shows were over, they’d pack a truck and hit the road. They ended up spending sixteen months touring the United States, selling a few images along the way, paying for accommodation at small hotels with free commercial shoots, and pitching travel articles and images to magazines from the road. It wasn’t the most organized way of using photography to finance a trip, and there were times when the couple found themselves almost down to their last penny, but by the time they were back in New York, they’d amassed a collection of commercial images that allowed them to revamp their website and build a commercial photography business — and they’d built up a solid collection of memories too. Other photographers looking to use photography to finance their trips though might want to plan a little more carefully. It isn’t easy, but there are niches in which the plane tickets and hotel fares come included.

The most obvious place to look is the magazine industry, a field that always has a strong demand for pictures from far-off places. But it’s also likely to be the most unreliable. There are few publications around that treat photographers as well as National Geographic does, sending its freelancers off to interesting locations, giving them the time to research their stories and paying all the expenses. More usual is the approach taken by Travel+Leisure where editors like Whitney Lawson field pitches from photographers who have returned from a trip that they’ve already made on their own dime. When Whitney does look to commission photographers, she tends to search in the locations where the shoots will take place, an easy way to find a professional who knows the area and won’t need an expensive plane ticket.

For photographers then, travel magazines won’t usually be a way to land a free air fare, let alone a  per diem, but they might help to lay off the cost of a trip that’s already been completed. That will depend though on pitching images that tell a story rather than photographs that show the sites.

“I am not wowed by random images of exotic places so much as I am by a well-told story that has a strong sense of place,” Whitney said. “My job is to bring rich, beautiful, enticing photography to our readers and transport them to another place, to take them there.”

Shooting Buildings Can Put You on the Road

If the print industry looks like lean pickings for traveling photographers then, another option may be architectural photography. As always, clients will generally prefer to cut the costs by finding someone local but photographers with large reputations and small niches can win commissions, especially when the clients are big enough to foot a large bill. Barbara White, for example, specializes in interiors, shooting for designers, architects and developers. Most of her work takes place in California but one of her most memorable shoots took place at a casino in Las Vegas where she had to work from 12 pm to 6 am four nights in a row. Barbara built her architectural photography business through  a combination of cold calling and direct mail, with some online marketing thrown in too. These days, most of her work comes in through referrals, a benefit of being established.

Shoots like these aren’t something you can depend on but some photographers have been lucky enough to find themselves doing them with some regularity. Jeremy Mason McGraw has managed to specialize in shooting hotels, a job that’s sent him to Australia, Hawaii, Italy, Croatia and Malta among other exotic spots. It’s a career that started in 2002 when a friend, who would later become his business partner, helped him to win a contract to photograph the Kohala Coast Resort Association, a series of twelve luxury hotels in Hawaii. The contacts he made during that shoot — combined with other connections built during an earlier job with a production company on a cruise ship — have allowed him to continue shooting hotels around the world, and to stay in them too.

More Brides Are Choosing Destination Wedding Photography

It sounds like a dream job, and it does allow Jeremy the time to wander off and take his own travel images, but like any work, it has its downsides. Much of the photography includes producing virtual tours, 360 degree images of hotel rooms and reception areas that are more technical than creative.

“As a photographer, I dislike the format,” Jeremy said. “They require a lot of post work and because they  show you every view from a given location you are limited artistically on how you can present the space. You simply pick a place to stand.”

But architectural photography does allow the photographer to build even more contacts and to get used to the difficulties of traveling with professional equipment, obtaining insurance, working in high humidity, and dealing with the visas and paperwork necessary to work abroad. Heather Parker, a wedding photographer, started booking destination shoots shortly after taking architectural assignments in resort photography. She shoots 35 weddings a year and about a third are destination shoots in locations that range from Jamaica to Barcelona and Montreal. Clients cover the cost of the airfare, hotel, meals and other fees, in addition to the shooting cost, a significant addition to the price charged by a resort for their own photographer.

“The amount of images and time a destination wedding photographer can offer far exceeds what all-inclusive resort photographers do,” explains Heather. “The markup that a resort adds to their packaged photographer often goes directly to the hotel rather than paying for a high quality of photography so more brides than ever are choosing to hire a destination wedding photographer.”

Most of Heather’s work comes in through word of mouth and she has been shooting professionally since 1998. Getting paid to shoot and travel requires a bit of planning, a lot of patience and, of course, some great photography.

Photography: The U.S. Army/Sgt. Travis Zielinski

It’s now possible for any talented photographer armed with some basic technical knowledge, a consumer DSLR and a reasonable amount of talent, to sell their pictures. But not everyone is doing it. Not all photographers are making their pictures available to buyers and not all of them are making sales. If you’re struggling to find buyers for your pictures, it’s likely that you’re putting one of these common obstacles between the buyer and the sale.

You’re Shooting the Wrong Kind of Image

The biggest obstacle to making a photography sale is the kind of image you’re offering. The type of pictures that photographers like to shoot aren’t always the same as  the photos that buyers want to purchase. The best pictures, for example, tend to tell a story. The scenes they capture should portray more than  singular moments in time; they should also suggest the days and weeks that came before the photographer pulled out his camera, and they predict the way that life will continue afterwards. The art of photography is the skill of turning a captured scene into a complete story —and it’s those kinds of pictures that are the most satisfying to shoot.

Stock buyers though want to tell their own story. That might be a story about the product they’ve been hired to promote or it could be the story described in the article they’re illustrating. The picture they use to tell that story though has to be flexible enough to include different narratives and be laid out with enough room for a designer to add text and additional graphic elements. Creating photos that sell as stock is very different to shooting for the pleasure of creating a beautiful image. Professional stock photographers might get satisfaction from producing a good commercial image but the feeling — and the pictures — are very different to the works they place in their personal portfolios.

Print sales do allow for greater creativity. Buyers of photographic art want the same kinds of aesthetically pleasing works that make the photographers proud and happy. But they’re difficult to sell. BuyaPhoto offers one way of passing prints to buyers but the best method is usually to hit the art fairs. That may deliver a reasonable number of sales, and juried fairs can deliver the kind of kudos that can open gallery doors, but it requires an investment. Selling at fairs often means paying a fee and will certainly mean paying for a tent, for display material and for printing and framing. It’s not as simple as shooting a picture and asking friends if anyone wants to buy it.

No One Knows You’re Selling

Even BuyaPhoto though relies on the photographer to do the marketing. Most of their sales take place on the photographers’ own websites. While vendors at fairs can depend on the event’s organizers to promote the fair widely enough to bring in traffic —the main reason that they’re willing to pay for attendance — photographers usually have to depend on their own marketing skills in order to let people know that their images are available. Those are skills you’re not going to find in any camera manual.

There are a few things you can do to let the world know that the images you’re showing are available for sale and not all of them require giant marketing budgets or a weekend on a photography business workshop. It’s hard to find a photography enthusiast who doesn’t have a Flickr account for example, but it’s no less hard to find a Flickr member who has bothered to mention in their image descriptions that their photos can be bought. Sales are being made on the site, but you stand a much better chance of making one if you let buyers know you’re selling. Doubt is an obstacle too.

And Pro members on Flickr also have stats that reveal a wealth of information about the sources of their traffic and the kinds of images that people are looking for in their stream. Even if you don’t want to shoot subjects that match the keywords, those statistics might suggest which images you want to upload and which sets and collections you should create.

You’re Not Shooting Enough

A Flickr portfolio though should always be carefully chosen. While it might be tempting to simply toss onto the site every spare image on your hard drive and leave it to viewers to choose the ones they like, a Flickr portfolio, like a website portfolio, is a storefront that should only show your most impressive work.

But you still need to be shooting a lot.

Professional wedding photographers will shoot hundreds of images during an event. Stock photographers may produce thousands each month. Even portrait photographers, who shoot fewer images in each session, will still be shooting every day and for several hours each day. And that’s only the photographs they shoot professionally. Every time they pull out their camera and shoot for fun — enthusiast-style — they’re still putting more experience under their belt and improving their technical skills.

The same is true of enthusiasts hoping to make a little extra cash. The more you shoot, the more you’ll learn, the better your pictures will become, and the greater the choice of images you’ll have available for buyers.

You’re Not Spreading Your Photos Wide Enough

And it also helps to push your images through multiple sales channels. Flickr is one easy option. A website is another, and a microstock portfolio is a third. None of those takes a great effort to set  up, although the first will take time and effort to market. But there are also product sites, photo books, home-made exhibitions and a whole host of other ways to deliver your images to buyers. If shooting the wrong images is one giant obstacle then finding as many ways as possible to bring them to market is another.

Professional photographers have the advantage of being able to shoot all the time. They have an incentive to look for ways to market their images. And they have the time to build their portfolios and strengthen their marketing channels. Enthusiasts have passion and many have talent. When they remove the obstacles between their images and their potential buyers, they can also have some sales.

Photography: WisDoc

The usual order for shooting travel photos is to go somewhere far away then take some beautiful pictures. A competition currently under way at Shutterstock is trying to reverse the order: submit your best travel image and they’ll send the winner (plus one) to South Africa. They’ll enjoy three nights on safari and another three nights exploring Cape Town. The prize doesn’t include plane tickets but it does include $2,000 to pay for them, good enough for someone based in the United States to which the competition is limited. It’s a nice reward for shooting a great vacation photo, and with entries so far numbering in the hundreds rather than the thousands, the odds for photographers with an eye for an exotic landscape aren’t terrible. (Although Felicia Morton, a Shutterstock spokesperson, says that she expects many more entries closer to the May 12 deadline.) Photographers can only enter one image but they retain copyright over it and it won’t become part of Shutterstock, although it may be used to promote the competition.

The judges, photographers Zack Arias, David duChemin and Chase Jarvis, are looking for pictures that are creative, striking and artistic. They’ll review 100 of the best photos chosen by popular vote — a chance for popular photographers to improve their odds, and for the competition to benefit from a little viral marketing as entrants send their pals to the voting page.

“We aren’t looking for specific kinds of travel images for this contest, just ones that are inspiring and creative,” says Felicia. “Every photograph that makes it to the final round will be judged on its unique attributes, its technical quality, its artistic value, and how well it represents the theme of travel.”

Who Wants a Picture of a Japanese Keep?

That makes them at least a little different to the kinds of travel images that sell best on stock sites. Shutterstock has over half a million photos tagged with the keyword “travel” and they include sites that range from the Eiffel Tower to Matsumoto Castle. But however innovative and beautifully shot, those kinds of photos aren’t necessarily the type that buyers want in large amounts. There will only be so much demand, after all, for a photograph of a sixteenth century Japanese keep. Arrange the travel images on Shutterstock by popularity and the first image offered is a shot of an old suitcase covered in travel stickers that looks like it was created in a studio rather captured in the field. The next most popular image is a montage of a plane and a road for which the photographer needn’t have traveled further than the airport departure lounge before rushing back to his image editing suite. And the third most popular travel image is… well, the same idea.

In fact, you have to look past about fifteen generic images of beaches, bags, planes and backpackers before you reach the first photograph of a specific place, a boat in Maya Bay, Thailand. And even that is more about the beauty and serenity of a tropical sea than the place where the movie “The Beach” was shot.

When it comes to selling travel stock then, location doesn’t seem to matter so much as the story the image conveys and the number of ways it can be used by a designer.

“In contrast to personal travel photos, stock library shots tend to be conceptual, useful for many purposes, and shot with great technical skill, often in a controlled environment with models and lights,” says Felicia Morton. “Conceptual images generally sell better than images of specific places. For example, more customers are likely to search for a rock climber than for the name of a specific mountain.”

And stock travel photos also tend to come with model releases that allow them to be used commercially even when they contain pictures of tourists, who are more likely to be posing than genuinely lost.

Conceptual Photography is Commercial Photography

Photographers whose hobbies also include traveling to beautiful places, the type of places they’re most likely to want to bring their camera, are faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, they want to shoot the kinds of beautiful, creative, artistic photos that reproduce the unique appeal of a location and sum it up in one shot. These are the kinds of photos that make photography so enjoyable and which Shutterstock’s judges want to see. On the other hand though, if they also want to generate a little income from the photos they shoot on their trips, they’re forced either to push their images as editorial photos to magazines — a difficult thing to do at the best of times, although not impossible — or create the kind of vague, conceptual images that multiple buyers with different messages to communicate want to use.

To create those images, Felicia Morton recommends that photographers pay attention to the photos used in travel advertising, “think about the images that businesses would want to use,” and look at Shutterstock’s most popular photos and the most common keywords on the site.

“Think about images that are difficult to get and that might be of value to image buyers,” she advises.

Of course, it’s not impossible to take more than one kind of photograph on a trip to a beautiful location. It’s possible to take stock shots of the beach or even the airport that strip away the location but leave a sense of travel and movement, and upload them to a stock site, suitably keyworded. And it’s possible too to take other pictures that capture the story of a trip or a place and pitch them to magazines or even offer them as prints when you get back.

Although Shutterstock offers images that cover a wide range of different topics, the company chose travel as the theme for its competition partly as a joint promotion with photography suppliers B&H and travel firm Zozi, but also because photographers are so enthusiastic about the subject. It would be nice if buyers were also enthusiastic about buying the kinds of travel photographs that photographers most want to shoot, but creating commercial conceptual images at the same time isn’t a bad alternative. And your most artistic images can always win you a competition — and another trip.

Photography: xposurecreative.co.uk

If clients had better memories, a lot of photographers would be out of business. Couples wouldn’t need wedding albums to remind them of the most important day of their lives and families wouldn’t need portraits to show them what their children looked like aged three, seven or thirteen. They could shut their eyes and recall for themselves the most beautiful scenes they’d experienced. Fortunately, they can’t do that so instead they hire photographers to freeze those moments for them. It’s no surprise then that one of the biggest challenges for photographers looking to keep clients is reminding them that they still exist, that they’re still shooting — and that they’re still happy to photograph for them and for anyone they know. One way to do that is through a regular newsletter.

Delivered once a month, a photographer’s newsletter can maintain relationships, deliver repeat jobs and generate referrals. It waves a greeting to former clients you might have photographed years ago, and prompts them to remember what they loved about working with you.

“A newsletter simply encourages them to keep loving you and to keep sending you referrals,” explains George Dean, a former gymnastic coach who set up a professional photography business after starting a family. “Treating clients right and staying in touch works.”

A Photography Newsletter in Half an Hour

It’s a system that Dean says certainly works for him and he now makes his own newsletter template available to other photographers. For $47 a month, subscribers can receive a fully customizable, two-page 300 DPI Photoshop newsletter file to which they can add their own pictures, testimonials, special events and public thanks for referrals. A short testimonial from a recent client can help build trust, a gallery of recent images will show off your work (and give readers whose images are featured a reason to hold onto the newsletter and show it to others), and some trivia can help to make it more readable. The whole process takes about half an hour, he claims, a large saving on the production times required to produce a unique print version. For an additional fee, it’s also possible to buy an exclusive license, locking competitors out of using the same newsletter in a 15-mile radius, and naming five additional competitors who will be blocked from using the template.

The value of a regular newsletter and its ability to maintain relationships should be familiar to photography businesses, many of which send email newsletters, but according to Dean print newsletters have a unique value. Only about 3 percent of electronic newsletters are actually read, he claims, either because they’re not delivered or because they’re automatically deleted. Email, he argues, has zero perceived value to most people, although an emailed newsletter can be a useful supplement to a print version.

And emails, he notes, can’t be attached to the fridge or left lying around for friends to pick up and read.

It’s Not About Your Studio

But just as email newsletters can be treated as spam, so print newsletters from a photography business, even one the recipient has done business with, can be seen as junk and treated the same way as brochures from Home Depot and offers from loan companies. The key to ensuring that the newsletter doesn’t just stand out but is picked up and read with interest is ensuring that the content is genuinely interesting. Articles should have “fun and entertaining stories” says Dean.

“It’s not about your studio. It’s mainly an entertainment piece that people look forward to every month,” he explains. “It’s not a blatant sales piece…. It’s a powerful sales piece in disguise.”

Content then will be one factor that will influence a newsletter’s ability to generate new work. Another is the nature and number of the people who read it. Newsletters should be sent to everyone you’ve photographed in the past but also the people you want to photograph, as well as vendors who will show it to their own clients and use it to send more work your way. It’s those referrals, as much as the reminders, that are the goal of the newsletter, and Dean does take action to encourage referrals by rewarding people who recommend him to friends and family. He doesn’t use studio credit, which might appear to be too commercial, but instead gives every referee a small gift such as  a gourmet brownie or a generous Starbucks gift card. It’s a mark of appreciation given to a valued friend rather than a commission paid to an affiliate or a semi-employed sales representative.

“Clients love getting them,” he says.

But however good the content in the newsletter, whoever you send it to and however you choose to reward the people who act on it, a newsletter’s result will always depend on the quality of the photos and the feelings that clients hold towards the photographer after their shoot. A newsletter can maintain a connection, but it takes the images and the personality of the photographer to create a connection that the client wants to keep in the first place. Good photography then will always be the most important factor in a newsletter’s success.

And the newsletters do take some time and some effort to produce. Dean stresses that his newsletters aren’t for everyone, and in particular, they’re not for people who aren’t prepared to work on them and invest in them. The $47 fee doesn’t include the cost of postage or the time spent choosing and preparing the images you plan to show in the newsletter, for example. It’s an investment that should pay its way with a steady stream of referrals but like any form of marketing, a newsletter does make its own demands.

One way to deal with those demands is to fit the newsletter into your studio’s regular marketing schedule, alongside renewing print ads or checking AdWords campaigns. Once creating and sending the newsletter becomes part of the routine, it’s less likely that you’ll forget to send an issue too.

That’s important because it’s not just clients who have been known to have problems with their memories.

Stewart Brand famously declared that information wants to be free. Newspapers have been cursing him ever since. But what about images? If words are crying for freedom, are pictures also aching to be used for no fee and without royalties? Should photographers ever give away their work, and how can they be sure that their generosity will eventually make them money and not cost them valuable time and effort?

For professional photographers, the question of whether photographs are eyeing a free escape route looks moot. Of the billions of pictures posted on Flickr, about 137 million of them have been added with some sort of Creative Commons license. By way of comparison, even iStockPhoto’s royalty-free but commercial inventory “only” contains 6.7 million photos. Many of Flickr’s Creative Commons images will appear on blogs and websites (including this one) without costing the publisher a dime.

And to buyers, the costs of microstock itself have long been considered “close enough to round down to zero,” as Chris Anderson puts it in Free, his hymn to the cashless economy. It may appear then that images aren’t aching to be free; they’ve already made their break for it and are being picked up in the wild by publishers ready to take advantage of some innocent photography hobbyists.

Microstock Has Become More Expensive

Look a little closer though and that spurning of money may be a little more complex. Flickr might have a giant pile of images that are free to use, but most of those are also unusable pictures of mad cats and vacation snaps. When Flickr’s photos are used, it’s often on blogs whose low income and frequent posts don’t give them a budget for regular image purchases.  Even the trajectory of microstock shows a move away from images for nothing (the original price on iStockPhoto) through a buck an image (the price often quoted in regard to microstock) towards $10 for a photo in a size usable in any format other than the Web.

It might be better to say then that having lots of images available means that buyers can demand that they’re cheap — or at least cheaper than they used to be — but to get good images in a usable format for a publication that can afford to pay for them, editors have reach into their pockets. Free isn’t as cheap as it used to be.

But it is still useful to photographers. Most of the Creative Commons images on Flickr might be unusable, and those that are usable tend to appear on pages with no budgets but that’s not always the case. The Economist’s blogs, for example, combine Flickr-sourced Creative Commons images with stock photos, microstock photos and images from wire agencies. Graham Douglas, The Economist’s Head of Graphics, explained that Flickr “has been a useful fallback when we need images not typically served by the photo services we subscribe to” but admits that cost has been a factor too in the choice of free photos.

If some big users with budgets are searching Flickr for usable images then, photographers who want to make sales on the site need to make sure that their photos are seen. On Flickr, that means offering lower-grade versions with Creative Commons licenses that show up in search results, but using the image description to indicate that a better version is available for a higher fee. The free images then become bait to bring in buyers in the same way that supermarkets offer staple food items like bread and Corn Flakes below cost then pitch higher-priced luxury goods with larger profit margins to make money.

Posting images that you’ve already shot with Creative Commons licenses won’t cost a great deal. The photos will only take a few minutes to upload and if you’re using versions that are unlikely to sell, then you won’t be giving away anything with a high value. Many photographers though begin their careers by being asked to give away something that is valuable: their time.

New wedding photographers in particular, may be asked to shoot a friend’s wedding as a favor, giving them an opportunity to help someone with a small budget while building their own portfolio and gaining experience.

Free Shoots Don’t Benefit Anyone

Jobs like these though aren’t entirely free either. The shoot is often considered the photographer’s wedding present, saving the cost of writing a check or buying a gift. While that won’t come close to the amount the couple would have paid for images, it does mean that the photographer is receiving a measurable saving in return for the shoot. Nonetheless, it’s still something that photographers taking their first step in professional photography rarely do more than once.

Some photographers however do continue giving away their photos even after they’re established. Will Smith, a professional photographer working in New York and Texas, runs a referral program that delivers free image editing and shoots in return for recommendations. The idea of motivating former clients to pass on his name is understandable and it’s easy to see how a free shoot in return for a fifth new client should pay its way. But it misses the point. Clients rarely pass on their photographer’s name because they want to benefit themselves. They do it because they want to benefit their friends. Other photographers give a discount to the new client and reward the old client with a thank you call or a small gift. The gift might be free but the photos aren’t, and the benefit makes the recommendation even more valuable.

Photographers have been seeing their prices put under a huge amount of pressure over the last few years. Many of the images used on the Web, and even some used in advertising and traditional publishing, have been picked up for nothing. But most images that are used commercially are still paid for and even professional photographers who start with a freebie rarely provide them twice. Newspaper owners may feel that they have a reason for cursing Stewart Brand but he was wrong and so was their decision to make their publications available for nothing. Photographers don’t have to make the same mistake.

Image Courtesy: BuyaPhoto.net

Prints don’t sell on the Web. You can sell digital downloads through microstock sites. You can turn your photos into books and offer them on online stores. You can even put your pictures on products and offer them as t-shirts, mousepads and even skateboard decorations. But create a gallery and suggest that people who like your pictures should order up a print to place in their living room, their study or on their desk, and you can’t expect to make a dime. There’s too little demand, too little available wallspace and too much competition from other photographers with beautiful pictures of similar subjects. It’s just possible though that that old assumption about what sells on the Web might not be true. At least one site has been happily offering pictures submitted by photographers for more than six years – and making regular sales.

BuyaPhoto.net was originally created by Dean and Kathy Outlaw, owners of a photo lab in New South Wales, Australia, as a way for a local newspaper to upload photographs from its editions. Their lab would print the pictures on the newspaper’s behalf and send them to its customers. The couple approached other newspapers and the service began to grow. By 2004, the idea had become so popular that they decided to sell their lab, subcontract the printing work and rewrite BuyaPhoto.net as an online gallery service with enhanced print-on-demand features.

More Than 20,000 Print Sales Every Year

Today, the company has 80 active and contributing photographers, and offers images submitted by three newspaper groups covering more than 90 newspapers. Altogether it’s sold more than 135,000 prints, a rate of more than 20,000 every year.

The price for those prints ranges broadly. Contributors are free to set their own rates and different photographers operating in different fields can charge very different amounts. According to Dean Outlaw, some photographers are demanding AU$15 for a 6×8 inch print while others are asking for as much as AU$35. For larger photos, prices can reach as high as around AU$240 for 24×36 inch canvas.

“It depends what market they are in and also what sort of marketing money they are spending on selling their prints,” he says.

The most popular subjects that individual photographers sell on BuyaPhoto are scenery, flowers and events, the kind of decorative images that buyers might want to place around the home. Newspapers that contribute to the site tend to sell pictures of people featured in the publication, such as a child with his soccer team on the weekend, an item from the social pages or perhaps a shot from a current story. Most of those orders will come from the subject’s family.

The photos are sold through the site through three different channels. The gallery is the main part of BuyaPhoto and acts as a warehouse that stores all the images submitted by all the contributors.

“It enables photographers who are just starting out to be able to sell their images as prints or downloads,” says Dean.

RSS galleries provide a showcase and shopping cart for photographers who already have their own website but want to add ecommerce functions. A file uploaded to their website uses the photographer’s images on BuyaPhoto to create a gallery which is updated automatically whenever new images are made available for sale. The shopping cart and gallery are branded with the photographer’s logo but the logistics and page creation are handled by BuyaPhoto.

Finally, photographers who already have a gallery online, can add a piece of code that generates a buy button, allowing them to make sales without even uploading their images to BuyaPhoto.

Most Images Are Sold on Photographers’ Own Websites

Together those three tools make the sales opportunity simple to create, but actually bringing in the revenue is a lot harder. That more than half of BuyaPhoto’s contributors are professional publications with established audiences is likely to help its sales a great deal, but according to Dean Outlaw, there are a few things that an individual photographer can do to increase the chances of selling prints.

Most important is the quality of the images rather than size of the portfolio. Photographers should take a long, hard look at the images they’re planning to upload, Dean says.

“If their wife, husband or whoever wouldn’t want it hanging in their lounge then they should think seriously before uploading it for sale. Quality is always better than quantity.”

Keywording is vital too, a necessary aspect of online sales that’s familiar to stock photographers but still not very enjoyable. A small gallery on a photographer’s website can be easily browsed but images added to a large gallery such as the one on BuyaPhoto have to be found through a search engine. That means doing more than just shooting and uploading. BuyaPhoto has put some effort into strengthening the site’s keywording options.

And it’s vital, too, to get off the site and onto your own where “the photographer is not competing with another 80 photographers to sell their images and they get the full value of any marketing money they spend,” says Dean.

In fact, about 90 percent of BuyaPhoto’s printing work comes from photographers using either the RSS gallery or its PrintMe button to pitch their products to their own customers. It’s a figure that suggests that successfully selling prints on the Web may not be about putting them on a site like BuyaPhoto’s, which only brings 10 percent of the buyers. Rather, the sales depend on the relationship between the photographer and his or her community of customers. Uploading carefully chosen, comprehensively keyworded images to BuyaPhoto’s galleries may help but to continue making regular sales, a photographer will need to build a relationship with buyers, keep them coming into his or her website, and create the kind of decorative images that they want to own.

Selling prints on the Web then may not be impossible. But while you can outsource the printing, the billing and the payment systems, you’ll still have to find and satisfy the market — and that’s still difficult.

Decide that you want to make some money from photography and whether you’re setting up as a professional or just hoping to earn a little extra cash at the weekends, you’re going to be spoiled for choice. You could become a wedding photographer, a specialization with plenty of demand, high prices… and lots of competition. You could aim at portrait photography, a field with a fair amount of creativity, some enjoyable personal interaction… and also, lots of competition. Or you could decide that you want to be a landscape photographer, an area that’s going to bring satisfaction with every image, an occasional sale… and lots of competition.

Or you could aim for something more esoteric and position yourself as a car photographer, an equine photographer or an expert on photographing orchids. While you’ll still have to do the marketing, you wouldn’t just be selling the quality of your pictures, you’ll also be pitching your knowledge of a narrow topic, an asset that few other photographers possess.

And you can even choose to specialize in a particular style, letting the uniqueness of the look of your photos help you to stand out from the crowd and build a brand.

Shoot your Hobby

There are two ways to choose a specialization. The first, and probably the most common, is to shoot what you love. Grace Chon, a pet photographer in Los Angeles, began taking pictures of animals while working as an advertising art director. Her roommate had two dogs and Grace would constantly take pictures of them.

“I even had their photos at work, which coworkers were always asking questions about — like ‘How did you take those?’ or ‘What camera did you use?’” she recalled. “I was just using a little Canon Elph point and shoot at the time, but it was really cool to get such positive feedback.”

Eventually, Grace upgraded to a DSLR, began taking head shots of homeless dogs for a rescue center, and encouraged by the compliments she received from people who saw her pictures, turned her hobby into a side business. Today, Grace is an award-winning pet photographer whose images are used on the cover of magazines. She’s invited to judge photography competitions — and she charges up to $1,150 for a shoot.

Grace isn’t the only pet photographer in Los Angeles but she is now the first photographer that many people in the city turn to when they want photographs of their animals.

For Grace, a love of photographing pets has given her a career and a reputation in one particular field of photography. Jerry Lodriguss also moved into photography as a result of an interest in a particular field. For Jerry, a love of astronomy led him to buy a camera to put on the end of his telescope back in 1971. He still makes money from his astrophotography, writing books and selling stock images, but he’s best known as a sports photographer, a job he’s been doing for more than 25 years.

Both Grace and Jerry began with a clear interest in their subject and only later moved into a photography, but other photographers have been known to move in the opposite direction. Matt Adcock and Sol Tomargo both had successful wedding photography businesses before they met through mutual clients. Having teamed up, their joint photography business is now best known not for  its wedding photography in general but specifically for its Trash the Dress photography, a style in which the bride is shot in her wedding dress in unusual locations. She might be photographed floating in the sea or, Del Sol’s particular specialty, standing in cenotes, water-filled caves in Mexico. It’s a style rather than a subject, but one which has won Del Sol a shelf full of awards and media attention around the world.

Although the effect is the same — Del Sol is now branded as a Trash the Dress photography studio and known for its specialization in the same way that Grace Chon is known as a pet photographer  — the method of choosing the specialty is very different.

How Big is Your Niche Market?

But either approach can work. It’s possible to choose a niche based on a hobby and build a photography business around that expertise, and it’s possible too to push an established business in a narrow direction.

Established businesses though will always have an advantage. They’ll know the market and the size of the competition.

That’s always going to be vital. Start shooting something you love and you’ll soon amass a pile of attractive images on a topic you find interesting. You’ll pick up expertise in a particular field so that you’ll know your way around the star system, for example, and which part of the sky to point your camera. And you’ll know how to photograph those subjects, understanding the importance of polishing a car’s paintwork so that it looks good in the image, for example. But you’ll still have to figure out how to put those images in front of buyers.

For new photographers, even that marketing knowledge should come naturally. As you attend events related to your field and share your pictures, your name will spread. For car photographer Andreas Reinhold, a side-career shooting for magazines around his day job as an engineer developed after meeting an editor at an auto show. That might have been a chance encounter but it happened because Andreas was so interested in cars that he was prepared to spend his spare time attending related events.

And that’s the most important factor in choosing a new niche. The ability to create the pictures is going to be important. The size of the market is going to be a factor in your success too, as will your ability to reach buyers. But to really master a niche, you will need to have the dedication required to fully understand it and want to keep learning about it.

That’s as true of pet photography and astrophotography as it is of car photography and particular styles of wedding photography.

Image courtesy: Light Blue Software

Become a successful photographer and it won’t be long before other photographers are asking how you did it. They’ll want to know how you take your pictures, what sort of equipment they should use and what tips you can offer about shooting in low light, bright light, no light. If you’re on photography forums, you can expect to be fielding questions and receiving giant amounts of gratitude for your professional answers. And people will even pay for that advice. For many successful photographers, the stage after building a full schedule and a glowing reputation isn’t hiring more photographers or even publishing a photography book. It’s putting on a photography workshop.

Workshops though usually explain the techniques of photography. Sometimes, they’ll also explain the business of photography, teaching marketing and business-building. But they always sell information that the students have to take away and use. A few photographers are going a little further. They’re not just selling their knowledge, they’re offering the physical tools that they’ve created to build their photography business.

Tom Catchesides, for example, began his photographic career while studying economics at Cambridge University. He hoped to become a writer for the university’s student newspaper, but between assignments volunteered to photograph the bands the newspaper was reviewing. After leaving college in 2003, that interest in picture-taking grew into a photography business that combines wedding photography with corporate photography and occasional PR work.  In 2008,  he was voted one of the ten best wedding photographers in the UK.

Invited to Put on Workshops

Tom’s move into workshops wasn’t planned. Two years ago, he was approached by Calumet, a chain of photography equipment stores, who invited him to put on some seminars for other photographers.  His last workshops have been about post-production and workflow, teaching professional photographers how to stay on top of the work that comes after the shoot.

“So that they can spend more time taking pictures and building their businesses,” Tom explains.

Tom will do another set of workshops for Calumet this year, but his main focus, he told us, is divided between his wedding photography and a software company that he launched last year to sell business programs to photographers.

Light Blue Software’s main product is Light Blue: Photo. A workflow and studio management program, Light Blue: Photo lets photographers manage enquiries, send personalized messages to clients, place bookings in calendars, issue invoices, track expenses, and even review the effectiveness of a photography business’s marketing strategies. It can also create Web galleries with a built-in shopping cart and, as a bonus, publish commitments to either iCal or Google Calendar, allowing photographers to view them on their iPhones and Blackberries.

“We’re well aware that it’s possible to manage a photography business with bits of paper, various spreadsheets, a diary, etc.,” says Tom, “but Light Blue: Photo brings everything together into one streamlined package. That saves you from having to remember where everything is and, more importantly, it save a lot of duplication.”

Whether it will save enough time to cover the program’s £295 price tag is another question. According to Tom, the program’s profitability depends on the amount of time a photographer’s current system takes to use, but he predicts that it can save busy photographers “hours every week.” Depending on how much the photographer earns per hour, those saved hours should quickly add up to more than the price of the license.

Create a New Revenue Stream

What is clear though is that the program provides another dimension to Tom Catchesides’ photography business. In addition to earning from wedding clients, corporate shoots and workshops, he’s been able to add another revenue stream based on a program that he’s been using in one form or another since he created his business.

Like his workshops, the idea to offer the program came as a result of demand from others. Photographers, said Tom, had been hassling him for years to let them use his workflow system ever since he had created it for his own business in 2003. He formed the software company in 2008 then spent six months working closely with a variety of photographers to test the program before release. Today, the development and company management does take up much of his time — perhaps not the best result for a process that was first developed to allow him to spend more time shooting — but he is able to leave the work to his team while he’s out taking pictures.

Tom though, isn’t the only photographer to have seen his workflow system as a product that can be sold as well as an asset to his own business. Fran Howlett is a portrait and wedding photographer in Perth, Australia. Her husband, Peter is an electronic engineer, and the couple together run TimeExposure, a professional photography software company. Their main product, ProSelect, was designed for photographers who choose and lay out the images in front of their clients. The company claims to have sold “thousands” of copies and “many” businesses using the software “have reported at least a 50% increase in sales.”

Clearly, programs that share a successful photographer’s workflow tool have to be effective. Learning a new system takes time and expense, even if that investment is paid back in the long run. Creating the system and marketing it also demand a whole new set of skills that go beyond the challenges of building a wedding photography business. Having a professional engineer close at hand, as Fran Howlett does, will always be helpful. But more important is the kind of drive that’s strong enough to move a photographer outside the relatively comfortable world of photography into an area as different as software production and marketing. It means hiring coders, designing functions, testing the program and setting up a way to field the inevitable support questions that technical products always generate. It requires the kind of willingness to take risks that’s essential for every high-flying photographer. As Tom Catchesides puts it:

“Any successful professional photographer needs a combination of photographic talent and an entrepreneurial streak.”

It takes effort to land a photography client. You have to make sure that your website is seen and persuasive, that your images are attractive and inviting, and that your prices are pitched at the right level. You have to talk the lead into hiring you, and you have to build up the experience that generates the referrals and recommendations. It takes time, and every time you succeed, you have to start again. Only staff photographers have the luxury of a regular salary. For freelancers and studio owners, keeping the money coming in means keeping the leads coming in — and keeping those leads converting.

If you’ve already persuaded someone to hire you for a shoot though, whether that’s a wedding, a catalog or a portrait, then they should be willing to come back to you next time they need photographs. But that means letting them know that you’re still around, giving them a nudge about the need for new images, and reminding them that when they do need new pictures you’re still available. And it has to be done through all of the months and even years when they don’t need a photographer without bothering them.

It’s a particularly big challenge for wedding photographers looking to convert their clients into maternity and children’s photography clients. That process should be natural and could lead right through to the children’s weddings, so that an engagement job becomes the first in a series of bookings with a lifelong client. But each job is separated by years when the clients don’t even think about photography. Commercial photographers too have to struggle with the need to balance staying on the client’s radar with the disruptions that cause the client to break the connection.

Put Your Studio in Your Clients’ Pockets

Tim Gertz offers one way to solve the problem with his photographer’s iPhone app. For $299, studios can put their pictures and updates in their clients’ pockets, pushing pictures to them every day and targeting discounts to client categories and individuals. At least one studio, he says, was able to make back the cost of the app within days by encouraging his mailing list to download it, then offering them a discount on a new portrait shoot.

But an app can only be used by those clients who happen to have iPhones and it demands that they open it to see the updates. The client has to remain interested enough in photography to keep checking and they have to come to the photographer — or at least to his or her app. They might check it the first time they download and use a discount offered the first time they open it, but for how long will they continue to open the app?

In general, photographers looking to maintain a relationship with a former client will need to be a little pushier and put their messages where their clients are likely to see them. Wayne Wallace, a commercial and portrait photographer in Vegas, is just one photographer who provides a newsletter that delivers “news, announcements and special discount offers” directly to subscriber inboxes. Readers don’t have to act on every offer or order a shoot every month. As long as they stay subscribed, they’ll see it. And as long as they see it, they’re being reminded that they have a photographer when they need one.

Email newsletters though, can be treated like spam. By law, publishers have to supply an unsubscribe link that makes it easy for readers to stop receiving them. And they’re not interactive. The relationship between the reader of a photography newsletter and the photographer who sent it consists of a monthly look that last no more than a few seconds. Social media though, is interactive, and allows photographers to maintain a friendly relationship with clients. That’s easier to do on Facebook than on Twitter, where it’s not always easy to find clients. Facebook’s larger audience — and members’ use of real names — means that studios can set up fan pages, invite clients to follow them and push out messages on a regular basis. Those messages can then receive comments and replies, turning a quick note into a brief conversation — an interaction that’s more likely to keep the relationship close. Breaking the connection too, feels a little rude. Unfriending someone on Facebook is a serious business.

Talk About The Client, Not About You

How a photographer stays in touch with clients is only part of the story. What you say is important too. On Facebook, photographers frequently feed in their blog posts, which leads to lots of images and little text, content that’s more likely to please other photographers than clients. Wayne Wallace’s decision to include “special discount offers” in his newsletter together with his own news is a better idea. Readers aren’t very interested in whether a photographer they used a year ago has bought a new camera or just completed a shoot in a beautiful location. They want to know whether can get some more prints cheaply, where they can find a nice frame or whether the photographer has some recommendations for fancy albums.

Newsletter writers have long understood that if they want to keep readers, they have to make their content about the reader and not about the sender. It’s a valuable lesson that’s worth keeping in mind as you’re trying to maintain a long-term relationship with a client.

If all of that though sounds like a challenge too tough though, it is worth remembering that there is one more easy way to stay in touch with clients over the years. A large portion of the clients that many photographers pick up come by way of referrals. Those referrals are a connection to previous buyers. Wedding photographers in particular will find themselves running into past clients when they come to shoot their friends’ weddings, and children’s photographers will find themselves shooting the classmates of previous subjects. Sometimes all you have to do to stay in your clients’ minds is ask how they’re doing — and ask the client to pass on your regards.

And, of course, when you shoot pictures that your referred clients will want to show, you won’t just be reminding your old clients who you are, you’ll also be reminding them what you can do.

Courtesy: Emily Horne and Joey Comeau

Photographers, especially photojournalists, are often told that their pictures should tell a story. A number of photographers though, are using their pictures to create entire storylines, as well as jokes and books, adding text and speech bubbles to turn their images into comic strips. Posted online, these webcomics are attracting large fan bases, and for some photographers even the kind of living that creative types dream about.

Photography-based comics, known as fumetti, aren’t new but it was largely with the rise of webcomics — strips posted online — that they began to take off in the United States. Dedicated webcomic hosting services have now made publishing almost as simple as photo-sharing, allowing creators to put the strips together, place words over their characters’ mouths, and build an audience. Most importantly, it’s also enabled people who want to create cartoons but can’t draw to still be able to turn their ideas into working publications.

“I’d long wanted to make comics of my own,” explained David Morgan-Mar, a physicist and creator of Irregular Webcomic. “I know my drawing isn’t brilliant, so that held me back. Until I got a webcam, and could take cheap digital photos. Suddenly I had everything I needed to make comics for the Web.”

David now produces a new strip every day, using Lego figures and role-playing game miniatures to create the scenes for his multiple storylines. The writing is done on the train during his half-hour commute to work, and the week’s scenes are photographed in one batch at the weekend.

“This is the most labor-intensive part of the process, as it involves setting up sets and character figures,” he says.

A Labor of Love

The sets are lit with a bright desk lamp, diffused to eliminate harsh shadows, and shot with the lens about five to ten centimeters from the figures. David will then add the backgrounds in Photoshop, using his photos of cities or landscapes, or mining public domain and creative commons images online if he doesn’t have a suitable picture of his own. The process takes about half an hour for each strip.

Courtesy: David Morgan-Mar

For David, Irregular Webcomic is a labor of love. All his strips are published under creative commons licenses, he asks that fans who want to donate contribute to charity instead, and he doesn’t provide any way for people to buy his strips. In part, that’s due to concerns about licensing issues — Lego is known for its willingness to sue — but it’s also because the comics are only created at screen resolution and would be “pixellated and ugly” if they were printed in book form, he says. Publishing his strips offline would mean re-creating more than 2,000 scenes. It’s a choice about which David insists he has only “minor” regrets.

“I never had expectations of getting fame or money out of it, and that’s the way I still treat it.”

It’s not a problem however faced by Emily Horne, co-creator with Joey Comeau of A Softer World. For more than five years following the creation of the strip in an all-night photocopy shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2003, Emily created the images for the comic in her spare time while working in the heritage field and in museums. For the last year and a half though, she’s been one of a small group of webcomic publishers able to earn a living from what used to be a hobby.

There’s No Link Between the Photo and the Text

While David Morgan-Mar poses toys to create his strips, Emily’s images often contain real people and none are posed. The viewer feels that they’ve caught the subject in the middle of something, she explains, a feeling enhanced by the strip’s grainy look — created by shooting largely on film — which has also become one of its hallmarks.

Emily and Joey’s working methods have changed over the years as the pair have moved around. When they were living in different cities, collaboration took place over online chat, a practice they continued even when they were both in Halifax again. For most of the strips, Emily would shoot a series of images, divide them into three frames and crop or enlarge them to create drama. Joey would then add the text. Recently, they’ve switched places: Joey will send Emily the text and she’ll find suitable pictures that suggest action or thought, before the two of them fine-tune the writing and the photo choice.

“Often though, there is no literal link between the photo and the text,” Emily says. “Instead Joey and I try to match them up by mood.”

It’s a system that works. A Softer World’s Facebook page, which is used in part to promote new merchandise now has more than 9,000 fans. The strip was picked up for a while by The Guardian, a UK national daily newspaper, and Emily and Joey are able to sell t-shirts, prints and books based on the strip’s popularity. Some of those sales are made through TopatoCo, a company that specializes in artistic merchandise, but comics conventions are also great places to release new merchandise, Emily says.

Creating comic strips has become a lot easier over the last few years. Strips such as David Morgan-Mar’s have shown that it’s possible to produce them without models, without costumes and without any cartooning skills. Emily Horne and Joey Comeau have proved that it’s even possible to make a living combining images with text.

But to be that successful they have to be good. Emily puts the success of A Softer World down to the uniqueness of  its dark sensibility, something they’ve tried to maintain while avoiding stagnation — perhaps the biggest danger of creating a photocomic that’s capable of building a fan base and even generating revenue. The writing is difficult and it’s even harder to keep it going.

“I want to keep the strip fresh, with new and unexpected storylines and jokes, but honestly that just seems to get harder as time goes by,” says David Morgan-Mar. “It makes you realize that turning out a daily gag is really hard work, and the people who do it well for a long time deserve credit for it.”

Photography: ShironekoEuro
The difference between a professional who makes a living out of photography and an enthusiast looking for his or her first sale isn’t always talent. There’s no shortage of mediocre photographers using their cameras to pay the rent, and there’s no shortage too of photography lovers with a great eye and a portfolio filled with valuable but unsold images. Much of the difference between a reliable revenue stream from photography and just the thrill of a great picture comes down to a few key pieces of knowledge.

The first piece of knowledge is the hardest to pick up. Professionals know how to price their pictures. They understand the market rates for the kinds of images they produce, the type of photography they do and the amount that the market is willing to pay for them. It’s something that every professional struggles with as they launch their business and it’s a calculation that’s even harder for an enthusiast to make.

For professionals, the cost of their equipment and the need to pay expenses and bills provide a foundation on which to base their prices: if the profits they’re making on the sales aren’t enough to cover the rent, they’re know they’re going to be looking for another career. Non-professionals however, who see any sale as bonus revenue, are often clueless about market rates and are willing to push down prices to land a sale. Buyers, of course, are only too willing to encourage them.

Your First Mistake

The result might well be an enthusiast’s first sale, but it will also be the enthusiast’s first mistake. When Brandy, a photographer in Spokane, Washington, sold her first framed print, she had no idea what to charge, so she asked for fifty bucks, a price that looked about right. By the time she’d taken out the shipping, framing, printing and matting costs however, she found that she’d earned exactly what the picture had cost her to produce.

There are few easy solutions to the challenge of getting the pricing right — and even professionals frequently get it wrong, usually when middling photographers charge prices that reflect a generous self-assessment of their talent — but the good news is that you can learn and make corrections. Begin with market research, looking at the amounts that other photographers in your area are charging for similar types of pictures, then negotiate keeping in mind the buyer and his ability to pay. Remember that one pricing issue that professionals often neglect is that the sort of buyers who turn to enthusiasts are often the type who don’t have a budget to pay professional prices. They’re willing to put up with the difficulties of dealing with an amateur in return for the low fee. Charging top rates then because that’s what others charge, could cost the deal.

Finding prices to make comparisons is relatively easy. Knowing where to find the buyers though — and how to catch their eye — is much harder. This isn’t something you’re going to pick up just by looking at other photographers’ work. It’s specialized knowledge that needs to be learned and pulled out of more experienced photographers. Browsing Flickr, for example, will reveal the value of including website links in image descriptions and indicating that the photos are available for sale to buyers browsing the site for unusual shots. But you have to know that buyers are on Flickr in the first place. You also have to know how to use the site’s stats to assess traffic flows, what it takes to hit the Explore page, and the value of networking to build an audience.

Similarly, while anyone can upload images to microstock sites, it’s the experienced and successful microstock photographers who know what kind of images sell the best, how to create them, and how many images to shoot and upload each week to maintain a steady revenue flow.

Most importantly, those photographers are aware of what buyers want.

Know What Buyers Want

That’s the most critical piece of knowledge that photography sellers need — and enthusiasts tend to lack. It goes beyond the value of a well-taken image — there are millions of beautiful photos easily available on the Web that never receive offers — to a recognition that buyers aren’t looking to pick up a picture simply because they like the aesthetic. They want to use the image, perhaps to illustrate a blog post, maybe on an ad design, or perhaps on a book cover. Even if they’re buying a picture to hang in a spot on a wall it has to be a photo that matches the design in the room and the taste of the buyer. Beauty alone won’t cut it.

It’s that understanding that has made successful microstock photographers out of contributors like Andres Rodriguez and iStockPhoto’s Lise Gagné. Both began their careers not as photographers but as graphic designers — the type of people who most frequently buy images and understand what other buyers need.

There is a difference between shooting for yourself and shooting for money, and it’s the photographers who know those differences who make sales and continue to make sales.

And they know two other things as well, both of which are difficult lessons for even the most enthusiastic of photographers to absorb.

They know that creating the kinds of pictures and putting them in front of buyers willing to pay for them takes time. You can create a portfolio on a microstock site today, but it takes longer to create the kind of pictures that sell and put together a large enough portfolio to bring in lots of sales. It takes patience build a Flickr following that will attract the attention of buyers (and perhaps even Getty), and as for search engine optimization, that requires both the patience of Job and his willingness to absorb punishment.

But making sales also requires action. Knowledge about selling pictures is only useful when it’s applied. It’s not enough to know that business images sell best on microstock sites, for example, or that it’s a good idea to leave space for text on images offered to designers. You have to shoot, edit and upload those kinds of images too.

The most important piece of knowledge that professional photographers possess then, is knowing that sales don’t come in — you have to go out and get them.

It’s not easy to make money out of photography. Learning how to shoot great pictures is hard enough but you also have to be able to put them in front of buyers, persuade those buyers that they want them and beat off the competition. Traditional stock companies are choosy, galleries are selective, and microstock sites are bursting and cheap. But there are ways to make money out of your knowledge of photography without selling a picture — and even without standing in a regular classroom and following a curriculum.

Many of the world’s biggest photographers supplement their income by offering workshops that pass on their knowledge to other photographers. Scott Rouse of the The Lightroom Lab, for example, is one of the instructors teaching a five-day workshop in the Glacier National Park this summer. Wilderness photographer Carl Heilman is doing something similar in the Acadia National Park this June.

You don’t have to head out into the wilds to teach photography though. Denis Reggie, said to be the creator of wedding photojournalism, offers a three-day wedding photography workshop with partner Joe Buissink. With twelve participants each paying $1,495 (not including travel and accommodation) those workshops allow Denis and Joe to earn almost $18,000 from three days’ work. And they do it more than once a year. The February workshop was sold out; the May workshop appears to still have places.

Selling Your Name

Denis Reggie though can charge those sorts of fees because he has a name and a reputation. An investment of over $2,000 (by the time you’ve added accommodation and travel) looks like a safe bet if you gives you the kind of skill and knowledge that has allowed Denis to shoot the weddings of Kennedys and celebrities. But even relatively new photographers can put on workshops if they’re bold and confident enough. Corey McNabb, for example, says on his bio that he only started shooting weddings “a few years ago,” although he comes from a long line of photographers and his commercial clients have included Pepsi and Gucci among others. That relative lack of experience in wedding photography however hasn’t stopped him supplementing his income with his “McWorkshops,” designed to pass on his photography knowledge to other rising photographers.

Corey’s workshops are sold entirely on the teacher’s photography skills. When Scott Rouse and Carl Heilman teach though, the students aren’t just getting a lesson in how to take pictures in nature. They’re also getting a vacation of a lifetime, a trek though some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes. That’s what Geraldine Westrupp and Martin Sammtleben offer through their company Wild Photography Holidays. Based in Iceland, Geraldine is a climber and mountain guide, who has traveled and led groups in South America, the Himalayas and the Alps among other locations. She has always taken pictures on those trips, and says that she has been an “adventure photographer” since before the term was popular. Wild Photography Holidays, which launched in September 2009, aims to produce special trips to suit photography enthusiasts like herself and her partner, a German designer and keen photographer who came to Iceland for a vacation fourteen years ago, and stayed.

The idea to offer unique trips aimed at photographers, she said, came while leading a tour in Bhutan. While some of her party, which included a couple of triathletes and a marathon runner, wanted to push on and cover as much ground as possible, the photographer in the group wanted time to stop and shoot the scenery.

“[He] was getting really frustrated and I really had great empathy with him as the landscape in Bhutan both culturally and geologically is quite remarkable,” recalled Geraldine. “Often he was not getting the time to get the shots that he really wanted.”

Photographers who take Geraldine and Martin’s tours, which currently take in the landscapes of Iceland and northern Spain’s Picos de Europa, are receiving workshops in shooting in those specific locations — Geraldine and Martin have photographed in both of them — but they’re also getting a well researched tour and someone to take care of the safety, logistics and planning, as well as knowledge of the best places to take pictures. It’s a tour that’s sold as much on the knowledge of the sites as on the ability to capture them on disc.

Go Where You Know

And that’s something that any photographer with knowledge of their local landscape can offer on a smaller scale. Without Geraldine and Martin’s tour-leading experience you might not want to start organizing hotels, flights and certainly not mountain hikes, but if you know of great shooting locations that few others know about — or know how to shoot — in your area, you can still take a leaf out of their book and take enthusiasts to the area and show them how to photograph the scenes. Even a simple day trip to a local lake to photograph birds or a walk through your neighborhood to point out exciting street photography scenes could bring in some useful extra income. While Wild Photography Holidays are planning an adventurous tour to a mountain hut close to an erupting volcano, they’re also organizing a more sedate eleven-day tour for flower photographers.

Teaching isn’t for everyone. Photographers who have turned to college classrooms as a way of generating a stable income and encouraging new photographers often find that they miss shooting too much. Preparing classes and checking assignments also takes time and however much they might enjoy teaching, photographers tend to get into photography because they love taking pictures not teaching others.

Workshops though provide one way that experienced photographers can supplement their income without committing themselves to months away from their business. The lessons can even take just a few days (plus organization and marketing). Guiding photography tours though can be even more enjoyable. If you’re going to be heading out into the wilds anyway, why not take some other photographers with you and earn as you shoot?

Photography: Mark Humpage

For most photographers, the weather represents a challenge. It’s one element that they can never control and it affects how they shoot, what they shoot, and how the pictures eventually turn out. For one group of photographers though, the weather is more than a factor that affects the light levels. It’s the subject of their photography – and even the foundation of their careers.

Mark Humpage, a UK-based photographer, has been shooting storms professionally since the mid-nineties, when he followed his first, mild storm in Britain. It was a far cry from the systems he would track and shoot later, but it did allow him to practice logistics, forecasting and planning without having tackle something truly dangerous on his first run. Since then, his pictures of tornadoes, hurricanes, giant storms and tidal bores have been featured in just about every photography magazine available, by television companies looking for images to accompany severe weather programs, and by most of the UK’s national newspapers. His photos have made him an ambassador for Olympus and, with television producer Allister Chapman, he’s one half of the Elemental Project, a 2008 plan to capture on film within twelve months all of the world’s most extreme elemental events, including tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, extreme  heat and cold, monsoons, and aurora. They only missed the volcano.

While the pictures Mark’s stormchasing produces are certainly enviable, the methods he uses to capture them aren’t. Storm season in the American Great Plains lasts from April to June so in the months before, Mark will be poring over severe weather forecasts from the UK and using weather models to predict their development. If a storm appears to be developing in the next week, he’ll book a flight to Denver, Dallas or Oklahoma City where he’ll use GPS, satellite radar, weather radio and various communication systems to close in on an attractive storm system.  A typical day will then begin at 7 am, when he studies the day’s weather forecasts to look for a defined target area. The rest of the day might then be spent traveling – sometimes for more than twelve hours a day – looking for a place where a storm is likely to hit and, no less importantly, a safe spot to shoot it.

“This is where meteorological knowledge is so important,” says Mark. “With intense lightning, hail the size of cricket balls and tornadoes feasible, positioning is critical, especially if the entire storm system is moving fast.”

Even then, he could find himself hanging out of a car window behind a tornado, as dust, mud and debris smash into the car in what Mark describes as “the wildest weather ride on Earth.”

Photography: Mark Humpage

The Tornado Was Within Touching Distance

While weather is always unpredictable, the dangers vary depending on the kind of storm Mark is shooting. For hurricanes such as Hurricane Ike, which Mark photographed in 2008, the only way to stay safe is to pick a secure location, such as a multi-story car park, in the hurricane’s path, settle in and wait for the winds to arrive. For tornadoes, which are smaller and form faster, the dangers are different. Mark describes how he once managed to capture a storm in Kansas in 2004 as it grew into a tornado, tore up homes, ripped apart roads, and passed “within touching distance” of him before it dissipated half an hour later. It was, he says, a life-changing experience.

But he also described an incident the year before when he and a group of stormchasers were caught off-guard. The sky went green and the tornado ended up chasing them. The group had to dive for cover in the basement of a gas station in a tiny Missouri town as tornado sirens howled.

“It reduced one of our party to tears with fright,” he recalled.

Even a “supercell,” a kind of giant thunderstorm,  can pose its own dangers. Mark described photographing one storm in 2004, shooting with a tripod from the side of the road, when a lightning bolt struck the ground just yards from him.

“It was like a bomb going off,” he said. “My ears were ringing for a week”

Staying Out of the Rain

While those sorts of risk seem to come with the territory, there are ways to reduce them. Placement is particularly important. For a storm moving from southwest to northeast, the most common direction for a weather system on the Great Plains, Mark always places himself on the south/southeast flank of the storm. That ensures that he’s out of the way of the rain and can follow the storm as it moves off. Traveling with an experienced company, such as Silver Lining Tours, can also help.

While safety is always the most important factor when shooting severe weather systems, it’s also important to know what to look for. Mark listed a range of different cloud types, from “anvils” the flat top of a cumulonimbus cloud which usually appears at the front and rear flank of storms, to mammatus, sack-like protrusion that hang from the clouds, especially anvils.

Clearly, without the kind of knowledge and dedication that Mark Humpage brings to stormchasing photography, it’s always going to be difficult to earn income from these images. But it’s notable that Mark’s role as ambassador for Olympus came after the camera company spotted his photos on his website and felt that he could be a useful symbol for the robustness of their equipment. He wrote a few articles describing his experiences and the relationship grew — allowing Mark to add to them. The unique quality of his pictures too has led to commissions and sales, turning a childhood love of extreme weather into a profession.

And it’s that transformation that’s probably the most important aspect of Mark Humpage’s photography business. He might not have taken up storm photography as a way of making a living but by living his passion, understanding it and mastering it, he’s been able to devote his professional life to shooting the weather — especially when it’s bad.

Photography: Philip Stevens

A great photograph always brings two kinds of pleasures. There’s the thrill that comes from knowing you got all the technical demands right: the lighting, the composition, the focus, the moment. And there’s the excitement too that comes from looking at a subject you love presented in the most loving way possible. That’s particularly true of aviation photographers, aircraft enthusiasts who specialize in capturing images of airplanes and helicopters in flight and on the ground.

It’s not a huge field – the International Society of Aviation Photographers only has about 400 members and many of those are publishers, photography businesses and artists rather than photographers – but it is an area that requires particular skills, and a genuine love of all things flying.

Philip Stevens, for example, has been taking pictures of airplanes since his early teens. Born in Toronto, Canada to a father who had served in the Royal Air Force,  the family moved to the UK in the 1960s, and lived near Elmdon Airport, now Birmingham International Airport. By the age of ten, Philip was a keen plane-spotter. The photography followed shortly afterwards.

“I remember taking landing shots with my only lens, a standard 50mm, at RAF Valley in the early 70′s whilst sitting amongst the landing lights,” he recalls. “The jets were full frame!”

Today Philip specializes in shooting military aircraft and civilian planes made before 1960, a time, he explains with all the enthusiasm of a specialist, when civil aircraft were hand-crafted and had character. Like all aviation photography, the shots themselves can be captured in three ways: ground-static photography means taking pictures of aircraft on the ground (Philip often visits small airfields in the UK and Europe in the hope of capturing a rare, old plane); ground-to-air photography involves the photographer standing on the ground as planes fly overhead. (It’s the kind of aviation photography that’s easiest to do and it’s the type that most photographers at air shows engage in.)

Air Forces Like Favorable Publicity

But the most exciting form of aviation photography is air-to-air when the photographer is in one plane taking pictures of a second aircraft in flight. That kind of photography though is the hardest to organize, especially for shots of military aircraft, although air forces can be fairly welcoming to photographers if they feel that the images will help them to communicate a positive message.

“The biggest challenges are getting to places where only the best journalists get to,” says Philip. “If you put forward a good case for flying with any air force then often they will let you fly with them. They like positive publicity in the form of articles etc.”

That does, however, create a problem for new aviation photographers. Writing articles for magazines helps to establish credibility with military public relations departments — the people who can arrange the necessary permissions — but it’s hard to get the articles without landing the permission first. And for some air forces, only the Chief of the Air Force can authorize a visit or a flight.

“To get access to air bases, you have to build up creditability, and this takes time,” says Philip. “This is almost a chicken or egg conundrum.”

When you can get permission though, the experience — and the manner of shooting — can be unforgettable. Paul Bowen, a commercial photographer from Wichita, Kansas, has been shooting aircraft since 1972. One of Canon’s 60 “Explorers of Light,” Paul’s images have appeared on more than 950 magazine covers and he’s the author of four coffee table books about aviation photography. His favorite shooting position sees him strapped into the end of an adapted B-52 whose tail cone has been removed. From there, he can shoot a following aircraft head on, capturing the plane at the most exciting angles, against the most interesting backgrounds and playing with the way the light strikes the wings or fuselage.

Paul is unusual in that he’s able to make a living as an aviation photographer. Despite a formal education in photography, Philip Stevens is not a professional photographer. His main job involves running an engineering company but his images do earn enough to cover his equipment and some of his travel expenses. He hopes to retire early and focus on photography full time.

Income from Stock and Commissions

The revenue comes from two sources. Despite his non-professional status, Paul does win the occasional commission from clients who come across his website. He also posts his images on stock libraries, an approach followed too by Paul Bowen and other aviation photographers. Paul’s website even offers personalized stock selections and suggests that clients hire him to photographer their aircraft.

For most aviation photographers though, as for most car photographers, any income the photography generates is a bonus on top of the pleasure that comes from taking great pictures of a subject they find fascinating. Asked what makes a good aviation photograph, Philip replied that it’s a picture that you like to look at, often, and wished you had taken yourself.

“An image that reminds you of how excited you were at the moment you captured it. Images that took a lot of time to arrange for permission to take them [and] a unique opportunity all go to make an image special,” he says.

But there is income to be made. Just as Andreas Reinhold, another professional engineer and semi-professional photographer, has been able to build a second career for himself as a car photographer out of a love of automobiles, so it’s possible for any photographer with a passion for a subject and an eye for an image to turn their talent and their interest into income. It might not let you give up the day job and it might just be enough to cover the camera gear and the travel fees but there’s only one thing better than shooting a great picture of a subject you love — and that’s getting paid for it.

Photography: Mr. T in DC

On March 26 and 27, Profiles in History, a California dealership, will auction a collection of photographs and memorabilia that is said to include “every iconic image of ‘30s and ‘40s glamour photography by every major photographer.” Among the images to be sold are a negative and custom print of Jean Harlow lying on a bearskin rug, shot by George Hurrell in 1934, which is expected to reach $30,000, as well as photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray and Helmut Newton. The auction is expected to raise between $3 million and $5 million, a large portion of which will be donated to the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center and to the Trevor Project, a non-profit.

For photographers, sales like these generate two kinds of envy. On the one hand, most lovers of beautiful photography would like nothing more than to own a collection of fantastic, artistic photographs, the kind of works they can admire and enjoy for years.

On the other hand though, as artists themselves, photographers would also like to see their own images in collections like these, being auctioned for giant sums of money and fought over by keen collectors.

Neither has to be impossible.

The Value of a Photograph

According to Janet Borden, owner of Janet Borden Inc., a New York photography gallery, photographs do make good investments. Although less liquid than stocks, the value of photographic art has risen faster than the stock market, she says.

While the price of a stock is linked to the company’s profitability however, the value of a picture depends on a number of different factors. Writing in the Huffington Post, art expert Daniel Grant explains that for old images, value is largely determined by the closeness of the photographer to the image. “Original” images — those whose negatives and prints were made by the photographer — are generally the most valuable. “Vintage” prints, those printed up to five years after the creation of the negative, also fetch higher prices. Images created later, in large numbers or by people other than the photographer him- or herself can be relatively cheap. Those photos won’t rise much in value, but they can be good places to start a collection of art from great photographers without spending giant sums of cash. Even some Ansel Adams prints, for example, can be affordable because he printed so many of them.

Darkroom skills and the way the print is made then do influence the price of an old photograph.

For contemporary photographers, of course, the ability to mix chemicals in the dark is no longer important, leaving just the quality of the work itself — and who it’s associated with.

“The art is always of primary importance, but the amount is dependent on other factors,” explains Janet Borden. “The name of the photographer is very important, as is the reputation of the seller, whether it be a dealer, a gallery, an auction house, or a private person.”

To begin building a collection then, Janet advises buying photographs that don’t cost more than a year’s rent and that are being sold by a reputable seller. Artists whose works have been collected and exhibited in museums tend to have potential as good investments, Janet says.

Those images though are also the type most likely to cost more than a year’s rent but a cheaper approach for photographers is to trade photographs with friends. Even if those images aren’t worth a great deal now, if your friend is as talented as you hope he or she is, you might find that that friendship is also a good financial investment. So it pays to make friends with good photographers, and not only for the advice and inspiration they can supply.

Being knowledgeable about photography helps too, and that includes understanding the range of photographic art available.

“I think when someone sees a photograph that they fall in love with, they should buy it.  Then they should just look and look and look at photographs, in books, in museums, in galleries,” says Janet Borden. “We always tell people that buying photographs is what makes you a collector.”

Become a Collectible Photographer

Becoming a collector and creating a photographic collection that can grow in value then is simple enough — at least in theory. If you’ve got lots of money, you can buy old images printed by the photographer and wait for them to rise in  value. If you want to buy contemporary photographic art, then buy from galleries or auction houses, or pick up works that have been exhibited in places with impressive names as they’re the type most likely to prove the best investments. And if you’re cash-poor but rich in friends, then try swapping your photos among yourselves and hope that at least one of you will go on to great things, making you all a little wealthier.

Becoming that great photographer though is clearly a little harder. Asked what a photographer can do to increase the value of their own work, Janet Borden recommended working with reputable people, whether that is a dealer or a gallery, or friends or schools.  That’s sound advice, but it might mean that only marketing your images yourself could restrict their potential as investments. And galleries, such as Janet Borden’s, are notoriously choosy, looking to recruit their photographers through photography schools or by choosing people who already have impressive photographic resumés.

When Michael H. Epstein, whose collection will be autographed this month by Profile in History, began buying images as a teenager he wasn’t thinking about selling them. He just wanted to own some beautiful pictures produced by great photographers. Perhaps that’s the best way to create a valuable photographic collection then: buy the images you want to own and assume that other people will want to own them too. And if you can then use those images to inspire your own pictures — and put them in galleries — you might just find that they form parts of other people’s collections too.

Photography: ©National Geographic

When photographer Paul Nicklen climbed from his Zodiac into the Antarctic Ocean to take pictures of a massive leopard seal for National Geographic, the former marine biologist from Baffin Island, Canada, had no idea what to expect. A short distance from an enormous marine predator and in freezing waters, he swam up to the seal with a dry mouth and shaking legs. As he began taking pictures, the seal saw him and dropped the penguin it was eating. It approached, and opening jaws twice as wide as a grizzly’s, the leopard seal took Paul’s entire head — and his camera — into its mouth.

Describing the encounter on a YouTube video that has picked up almost 2 million views, Paul explains how after releasing him, the seal exhibited typical threat behavior but then swam away and returned with a gift of a live penguin. As Paul ignored the meal and the penguin shot away, the seal looked at him with disgust. But over the next four days, the seal would return, first bringing him more live penguins, then weak penguins, then dead penguins and finally, half-chewed penguins that the seal would attempt to thrust through Paul’s lens in an attempt to feed a fellow predator who, Paul believed, it saw as unable to take care of itself.

For any photographer, working for National Geographic is a dream job. It’s an opportunity to create stories about important subjects in exotic locations, to place them in front of a large audience, and to do it in a format that places a value on imagery, on photography and on photographers. It’s a chance both to shoot incredible images and to publish photographs that make a difference.

“As a biologist all of our hard work was rarely seen and seemed to have no influence on the public,” Paul told us by email on the way to a shoot in Brazil. “As a photojournalist, I can reach 40 million people with my stories through National Geographic.”

“A Year After Going Pro, I Was Broke”

For Paul, who grew up on the Arctic ice as one of only a handful of non-Inuit families in a tiny Inuit settlement, shooting for National Geographic marked the culmination of a long and difficult struggle. When he left his job as a government biologist to become a photographer, he had saved $60,000, he told us. A year later, he was broke with just a few hundred dollars’ worth of picture sales behind him. It took seven years of sending one-page proposals – and receiving even shorter rejections – of mentoring under whale photographer Flip Nicklin, and learning how to tell a story as well as take pictures, before he won his first job with National Geographic. Specializing in arctic wildlife, he has since completed ten stories for the organization with another three in the works.

For Amy Toensing, who is now on her eleventh story for National Geographic, the road was a little smoother. She applied for an internship with the organization a decade ago, while a graduate student of photography at Ohio University. Ironically, for a publication known for its glossy, color images, the portfolio that won her the position, beating off competition from 300 other applicants, was shot entirely in black and white.

“It just shows that it’s better to submit your passion and your best work than what you think someone will want,” she told us from her home in the Hudson Valley of New York on a break between shoots.

It was while interning at the organization, and with the help of an editor who took her under her wing, that Amy put together an idea for a shoot on Monhegan Island, a plantation off the coast of Maine. She was given a month and in the style of a classic photojournalist, was able to let the story develop in front of her, documenting the way of life in a tiny community with a population in double figures. That shoot became her first published story in National Geographic.

“Go and See What You Can Find”


Photography: Amy Toensing.

Today, Amy is still told to “go up there and see what you can find,” the brief she was given on her first job. She’s provided with a budget, resources and even time to spend on research that she can use to read about the subject and conduct interviews before she begins packing her camera.

While the approach is the same, the stories have become bigger. A recent shoot that Amy conducted about the drought in Australia, for example, was ostensibly about one region dealing with water scarcity but it was also about global climate change and river management, issues that affect everyone. Amy’s job is to encapsulate a topic that large in the story — and images — of an individual or a family.

“The strongest stories are intimate and offer us a common, human experience – something that we know and can connect to even if we live on the other side of the globe. It’s my job to make those connections and get people to care,” she says. “National Geographic Magazine is one of the last places that allow the photographers and writers to go out and find the story.”

For photographers, that uniqueness is a problem. Paul Nicklen compared becoming good enough to shoot for National Geographic to making the NFL, then realizing there’s only one team. If the publication decides to fire you or trade you for a better player, there’s nowhere else to go — and unlike players, who are allowed to have off days, a photographer is only as good as his or her last job. The kind of remote places that National Geographic sends its photographers tend to mean little interaction with editors once on location, so editors need to rely on their photographers to deliver the story. That creates tremendous pressure.

“My proposals are full of promises,” says Paul, “and once the story is approved, I have to live up to those promises.”

However frightening placing your head in a leopard seal’s mouth might sound then, for National Geographic photographers like Paul Nicklen and Amy Toensing, the alternative is even more terrifying: not working for National Geographic.

Update: This post was altered to include a number of corrections and clarifications.

Photography: James Higgins

Prowling used bookstores in the search for old photography books back in 2002, photographer Karl Baden began to notice something unusual. Many of the most iconic images in the history of photography, he saw, were turning up on the covers of books that appeared to have nothing to do with the subject of the image. Man Ray’s Violon D’Ingres, for example, appeared on the cover of Walter Redfern’s Puns, one of four books that Karl found with that photo on the cover — and one of 41 books that use images by Man Ray.

Fascinated by this use of a work of photographic art, Karl began collecting books that place famous photographs on the cover, eventually building a collection of around 3,000 books. About  350 photographers are represented, and their images can be viewed at CoveringPhotography.com.

It’s a fascinating overview of one use of well-known photographic images, but most of the photographs that appear on book covers are not well-known. They might be drawn from stock inventories, and even these days microstock. Occasionally, they could be sourced on Flickr, a good place for buyers to find unconventional imagery. But many are commissioned, giving photographers a way to land interesting projects that put their works in stores.

You Can Sell a Book by Its Cover

Wendi Schneider has shot around 100 book covers in a career that has lasted more than twenty years. Many of those books are romances, a genre that suits her “graceful, romantic” style of hand-painted photography, she says, but they’ve also included The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, her first cover, and Louisa May Alcott’s collection of thrillers.


Photography: Wendi Schneider
The aim of the image should always be to attract the eye and interest browsers because a good cover, says Wendi, can be enough to sell books.

“A good book cover image should convey to you a feel for the book. It doesn’t need to tell you the whole story or be entirely literal, but should tease you, tempt you and draw you in,” she says. “I for one, will definitely ‘judge a book by its cover’ and have bought many books for their stunning covers.”

The process of creating the image depends on the book. Usually, says Wendi, the art director, editor and marketing department will have already conferred and decided what the cover image should be before she’s commissioned. Sometimes, she’s given the manuscript, allowing her to read the book, research the period, if relevant, and then begin looking for props, a model, and a location.

James Higgins, who has created about 30 book covers, many of them mystery and suspense, works in a similar way. He usually asks for a synopsis of the book so that he can “get a feel for the emotional center of things.” An image then usually comes to mind that might be something he’s already shot or “bits and pieces of things that, when put together, become the cover.”

“The cover image needs to be compelling enough to make the browser stop and read the intro text,” he says. “Keep it simple and dramatic.”

Find Work with Friends, Cards and an Online Portfolio

Finding that work, of course, is never going to be easy. Wendi Schneider’s career began in the late-eighties while working at the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans. A background in painting and a love of photography led her to paint on photographs, and her images were used editorially in the newspaper and the Tulane Alumni magazine. It was while she was working for the New Orleans media that she was asked to design, photograph and art direct the Creole Cook Book. That project gave her something to show when she later moved to New York and was introduced to artist reps.

“It has all been a bit serendipitous and fueled by friends,” she says.

In addition though, Wendi also sent art directors at the major publishing houses 5×7 cards of one of her hand-painted images, together with her contact information. She created three cards during the six years she lived in New York. Today though, she assumes that many art directors are using a lot of stock images, and also search the Web for photos and photographers. A strong online portfolio is crucial today, Wendi says.

That’s what works for James Higgins. Most of his work comes either from word of mouth or from hits on his website. When he started, however, James placed advertisements in trade publications to advertise his photography.

Clearly, connections help then, and they’re always going to be easier to pick up and keep once you’ve already won your first job. But shooting the right images is vital as well. Wendi Schneider’s unique hand-painted photos match the atmosphere of romance books so closely that it’s easy to see why the art editor at a publishing house would be confident of hiring her. James Higgins, too, understands the importance of researching current trends, as well as the physical needs of an image that’s going to be used on the cover of a book.

“Doing your homework is very important: go to the library or to the books section of Amazon.com and study the cover art,” he advises. “Besides the obvious vertical format, you’ll notice that the better cover artists know where to leave dead space for the title and author typography, and know how to create drama without a lot of clutter!”

Few photographers think of targeting publishing houses in their search for clients, and even fewer rely on them entirely. Wendi Schneider also offers editorial, fine art and commercial photography, as well as design. James Higgins provides a range of photography services too, and much of what he says about creating a good book cover is also true of stock images — and they have more buyers.

In fact, according to Karl Baden, many of the famous images that he spotted on book covers weren’t just there because they were famous but because the pictures themselves had an “open” quality that allowed them to be interpreted in a range of different ways. If you want to see your photos on book covers then, it pays to focus your marketing on publishers, but make the images broad enough to be used again and again.

Photography: Joe Thorn

One of the things that makes photography special is that it’s an activity that many people pay to do and some people are paid to do. It’s a business and an industry, as well as a passion, a hobby and a pastime. Usually, those two elements don’t mix. Photographers who shoot stock might enjoy their shoots but they’re rarely taking the kinds of pictures that they’d create for fun. They’re taking pictures that sell. The same is true of event photographers, commercial photographers and even editorial photographers. Services like Microstock and especially Flickr  have narrowed the gap a little in the last few years, enabling enthusiasts to sell images that were taken for fun but there are a few other areas where business meets photography in surprising ways.

Flickr’s Business Potential

Bookstore shelves now groan under the weight of books promising to teach entrepreneurs how to market with social media, and conferences are packed with speakers who can’t wait to explain how tweeting, Facebooking or being active on LinkedIn can bring sales and boost profits. But no one ever talks about one of the most effective and long-standing of social media sites: Flickr. While photographers and buyers have been quick to pick up on the value of the kinds of creative images posted on the site, businesses have been slower to make use of a resource that allows them to share pictures of their product, their venue, their conference activity and the people behind the logo.

And Flickr even offers businesses much more than most social media sites. The site has just brought back referrer data to stats, allowing Pro members to see who’s viewing their submissions — and businesses to do some smart, targeted marketing. That’s not something you’ll find on Twitter.

For more information, read the new Flickr Marketing ebook.

Microstock Gets Moving

Although microstock sites will accept images shot for fun and which might have some business use, most photographers find that the biggest profits come when they shoot photos specifically for sale. The kind of business-oriented images that Yuri Arcurs shoots for example, are clearly professional rather than images that he created in his spare time. But while microstock photos clearly have a use for businesses, it does appear that microstock companies are now looking for other ways in which entrepreneurs can use their images.

In February 2010, for example, Fotolia launched Flixtime, a free resource that allows anyone to turn their still pictures into a short promotional video, complete with backing music. A quick look at rival site animoto, which charges $249 a year, gives a clue to the direction Fotolia is moving: towards turning still photographers into creators of images for promotional videography.

For more information, read the new microstock photography ebook.

Kodak Turns Pets’ Eyes

Kodak, perhaps one of the biggest victims of the move away from print photography, has had to change its photography-related business but it has managed to adapt. The company’s Picture Kiosks now boast social connectivity so that users of Facebook, Kodak Gallery and Picasa can access their images and  print them, even on greeting cards, DVDs and calendars. Its Video Snapshots feature does the opposite of Flixtime, allowing owners of videos to print stills. But its most surprising new offering is Pet Eye Retouch.

While features that beat human redeye have now become standard on even the simplest digital cameras, Kodak’s new offering ensures that cats, dogs and other animals can now look their best on film.

That might sound like a waste of effort but according to Kodak’s own market research, the US alone has about 71 million pet households, and pets rank in the top four of all captured images. The company has also found that 65 percent of consumers would use a feature that turned their animals’ eyes the right color, and over a quarter would go to another printer to get it.

Pets might be as much fun as photography but they certainly affect business too, even the business of photography.

For more information, read the new pet photography ebook.

Photoshop Goes Mobile

iFart Mobile might be the most (in)famous app to hit the iPhone charts but while the app store’s electronic whoopee cushion has been making all the noise, a better-known product has been quietly blowing it out of the water. According to Techcrunch, in the six months since Photoshop.com Mobile was put in the app store, the free photography app has been downloaded more than 6 million times. The app gives users access to 2 gigabytes of images stored on Photoshop.com’s servers, allowing them to do simple editing. Layering and other complexities might kill an iPhone, but the app does allow cropping, rotating, effects and borders. Photographers then can shoot pictures on their iPhones, upload them to Photoshop.com and start editing.

Although the app itself is a simple enough tool that anyone can use to improve the look of their photos, the familiarity that it brings to non-professionals who may then graduate to the full version of Photoshop is clearly invaluable to Adobe. It could also have an effect on the photography business as a whole. At the moment, photographer’s assistants can charge a little more if they bring technical skills to a studio in addition to the ability to carry heavy lighting gear, and time that a photographer might have spent in a development lab is now often spent in front of a monitor.

With 6 million people playing around with Photoshop, many for the first time, it’s just possible that those skills will become more commonplace, allowing photographers to focus on the shooting while assistants do the cropping. That’s certainly Adobe’s hope anyway.

Photography might be both a passion and a profession and those two aspects of image-making might meet in some familiar ways. But if you can spot places where the love of photography coincides with a business opportunity, you can increase your ability to generate more revenue from your pastime.

For more information, read the new photoshop ebook.

Photopreneur’s new range of ebooks are now available from Scribd. Covering Flickr for businesses, pet photography, microstock photography, and Photoshop, the ebooks contain explanations and case studies to help anyone understand the opportunities available in those photography-related fields.

Photography: Mike Stimpson

When Toyota hired Rebekka Gudsleifdottir to shoot a series of billboard ads for the Prius in 2006, it was an idea they were after. Rebecca, then an art student in Iceland, had already gathered a large following on Flickr by creating a series of self-portraits in which she appeared twice. That double-appearance, Toyota’s advertising company felt, reflected the hybrid car’s two power sources. These days, they might want to avoid photographers whose careers appear to be as unstoppable as Rebekka’s (her work this month will be exhibited in New York) but that commission – remarkable for a non-professional — does show how sometimes a good idea, combined with the right execution, can be enough to win paid work. Rebekka though isn’t the only photographer whose creativity has helped to fill her order book. Here are five others:

Kevin Bauman’s 100 Abandoned Houses

Kevin Bauman’s idea was perhaps the simplest. A resident of Michigan, he became fascinated by the abandoned houses he saw in and around Detroit as industry closed and people moved away. He began taking pictures of the properties, shooting them front-on, so that as his collection grew the individual houses became part of a crowd, describing both the beauty of the decaying architecture and the spread of that decay. When he put those pictures up on a website, the result was phenomenal. The site was Dugg and StumbledUpon, and featured on ABC. A report about  Kevin’s work appeared in The New York Times and sent him about 8,000 unique visitors.

It also delivered 70 print sales at $35 a time, $10 of which were donated to Habitat for Humanity and the Greening of Detroit.

The images themselves aren’t particularly complex, but the idea struck a nerve at a time when Detroit was in the news. Matching the political zeitgeist with charitable donations, a clear way of shooting a subject, and a way to buy the pictures, helped Kevin turn his idea into cash.

Beth Dow Takes a Platinum Idea into the Garden

For Kevin’s photos the creativity is in the concept. For Beth Dow, it’s in the execution as well. In 2008, her Blurb book In The Garden, a collection of images shot in English and Italian country gardens, won the Photography.Book.Now competition. Unlike most landscape photos the images were made from platinum prints, a hand-made “slow art” process that Beth said she found seductive.

“I drew compulsively when I was growing up, and I filled stacks of sketchbooks with pencil drawings of twisted trees and anything else that would stay still for me,” she told us then. “I still love the subtlety of graphite, and platinum is the closest photographic medium I can think of.”

The result was a set of photos that Beth describes as “meditative” and “spiritual.” It was also a set that, despite also being exhibited at the Katherine Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota, was tailor-made for a book, Beth’s format of choice.

“I’m seduced by the “thingness” of books – the smell and feel of them, and this notion of the book as artifact is echoed in a platinum print.”

It helps too that books are easier to buy than prints, allowing Beth to turn her idea into more sales.

Vanessa Dualib Plays with Her Food

While Beth Dow’s style is serious and atmospheric, Vanessa Dualib is able to earn income through play. Her decision to start posing food items came when confined to her home while recovering from an illness. It started as a joke, she said, a way to avoid boredom and to combine her three great passions: photography, food and humor.

When she put the pictures of animal eggplants and skating carrots on Flickr though, like Rebekka, she found herself developing a following. And like Rebekka, that following attracted the attention of the professional world. Getty, which was then starting to build its Flickr collection, invited her to submit her photos. Put off by their licensing requirements, she kept most back but offered four, each of which sold licenses in the first four months on the market. She’s also put all of the images in a Blurb book.

For Vanessa, sales come from a mixture of fun, creativity, Flickr’s support network and, most importantly, the concept.

“If you got an idea but you’re a bit shy of trying it out because you don’t think you have the right technical skills or equipment to do it, my advice would be to just really give it a try,” she says. “The real important thing here is just to actually have the right idea. Have fun, do your thing and enjoy!”

Mike Stimpson Builds Sales out of Lego

Playing seems to be a good way to come up with valuable, creative ideas. It worked too for video games programmer Mike Stimpson. After taking up photography, Mike became interested in the history of the subject and decided to re-create classic early images… using Lego characters. The photos were spotted again by Diggers, who in turn were spotted by the BBC. The Sun, the UK’s highest-selling tabloid wrote an article about Mike’s work, including the link to his page on RedBubble.

The newspaper’s publicity generated sales of more than 150 cards and about 30 print sales. The BBC gave those revenues another boost.

For Mike, as for Vanessa Dualib, it was the idea that was key — and the lack of fear about doing something new, fun and imaginative.

Vlad Gerasimov’s Siberian Houses

Kevin Bauman isn’t the only photographer to recognize the beauty — and the earning potential — of old homes. Vlad Gerasimov’s series of wooden Siberian houses are shot in a very different style, filled with color and texture. They’re also sold in a different way too. While Kevin Bauman relies on print sales to generate revenue, Vlad’s following on product sites like Zazzle has enabled him to create subscription models that let him sell his unique pictures as computer and mobile phone wallpaper.

Sometimes, creativity can extend beyond the picture into the sales channel too.

One of the biggest challenges for photographers is the conservatism of buyers. Customers tend to buy what they know they — and sometimes their clients — like. Being creative then can mean sticking your neck out, but it can also be fun, rewarding and remunerative too.

If a photographer were to open a store — or even a gallery — the business plan would be pretty simple: figure out the right price for a photo, put the price on a sticker, put the sticker next to the image, and wait for someone willing to pay that amount. It’s the way retail usually works and it’s straightforward enough. The seller names the price; the buyer gets to take it or leave it. Set up a photography business though and when it comes to ways of taking money for your photos, you’ll be spoiled for choice. Selling prints might be simple to plan (if hard to do), but event photographers have to create packages that combine hourly rates with physical products, making them flexible enough to appeal to different budgets but enticing enough to encourage clients to spend as much as they can. Even those sorts of packages though are fairly clear, and a quick look at what competitors are doing can usually provide a pretty good guide. It’s when a photographer want to license his or her photos that things start to get really complicated.

In practice, photographers are basing their prices on four main models. Choose the wrong model for your images, you could well find that you’re priced out of the market and struggling to make sales.

Microstock’s royalty-free model is the simplest. Prices are low and once a buyer has bought the image, he can do whatever he wants with it, short of selling it somewhere else. So an image that might have cost no more than a buck or three can end up on the cover of a book, on the website of an international magazine as well as on blogs, marketing material and in low-cost newsletters.

Cheap and Simple

This model’s simplicity benefits buyers — and microstock agencies — most. Designers can go from needing an image to acquiring one in just minutes, and even for a low price, and the agencies make profits by taking a small cut of lots of sales. While that can mean plenty of buyers and lots of small opportunities, it does mean that images run the risk of being underpriced and overused. Publishers are usually willing to pay several hundred dollars for an image that will appear on the cover of a major book, for example. This microstock picture cost just a few dollars on Shutterstock.

That makes microstock a useful model primarily for images that are hard to place elsewhere and for photographers without helpful contacts. “Rich,” the microstock photographer whose photo was used on a children’s book cover, also has images on Alamy. They’ve brought him one sale. Shutterstock has given him almost 6,000.

“It is near impossible for a beginner photographer to first get represented by one of those agencies, and… to have their images shown someplace where buyers will actually get to find them,” he explained. “So in that situation I turned to microstock.”

Stock is Hard for Photographers – and Hard for Buyers

Those traditional stock agencies represent a very different pricing model, one that provides full value for the image but which is both difficult for photographers to break into and complicated for buyers who have to state exactly what they plan to do with the picture. It’s a model that’s under pressure and while it’s likely to remain for top photographers and the biggest buyers who need the most exclusive images, even Getty and Corbis have subsidiaries that offer royalty-free photos in the same way as microstock.

It’s also a model that’s based on long-term revenues. Microstock photographers often post images that they shot with at least one eye on the pleasure of creating a good image. That allows them to write off at least some of their costs. Professional stock photographers shoot with both eyes on the profit, and they’re willing to invest in an image, spending money on models and location, even if it means waiting a couple of years before the sales move the photo into profit. It’s a model for professionals with exceptional commercial photos and a solid track record. Even users of PhotoShelter, a site that allows anyone to license their photos themselves using the stock industry’s usage model, tend to sell to clients they already know.

Microstock’s low-cost, royalty-free licenses and traditional stock’s rights-managed licenses represent two extremes but there also different models opening between them.

Flickr’s Free Photography Market

On Flickr, where photographers tend have a much looser grasp of market rates and the potential value of their images, contributors negotiate freely. They also often make frequent mistakes, charging too little — and often nothing at all — for their photos.

As a model, receiving or inviting requests on Flickr is popular among photo-sharers and has the advantage of providing complete flexibility. Sellers receive an amount that they agree for their photos. There’s no framework, no rules and little attention to conditions, usage limitations or terms. It contains all the anarchy of the open market but one in which an experienced buyer will always have the upper hand over an inexperienced enthusiast.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a model to avoid though. Buyers are browsing the site looking for the kinds of unique images that are hard to find elsewhere, even from stock companies, so Flickr can provide a good model for creative photographers. But it does mean that those photographers will need to look at the stock licensing model to understand the kinds of conditions they should be demanding.

Limited Licensing for Small Niches

Finally, the method that photographer Craig Holmes uses to sell images can be seen as yet another way of buying and selling photos — and one which reflects the very processes that are changing licensing models. Like microstock, his own stock site prices images based on size not usage.  Unlike microstock though, the license is limited for a year and prices begin at £25. Regular customers can download freely and receive a monthly bill.

The ability to use that model comes in part from Craig’s knowledge of his buyers and their budgets — something to which users of PhotoShelter are able to relate — and also from years of struggling with usage rights. Clients, he says, just didn’t get it.

“Gone are the days when clients wanted to chat over the price of an image,” says Craig. “They simply see it, want it there and then for a fair price.”

It’s likely that all of these models will continue to operate side-by-side for different photographers and for different buyers. Professionals will continue to sell rights managed licenses through traditional stock agencies; enthusiasts will earn small amounts for royalty free microstock images; creative photo sharers will negotiate openly with buyers as they turn up; and niche photographers will create unique models that reflect their markets and the subjects of their images. When it comes to licensing models, there’s no one sticker price

The biggest difference between photography enthusiasts and photography professionals is what they’re hoping will happen when they put down the camera. A photography enthusiast hopes that he or she has captured an image that will make them proud, show that they’ve improved their skills and made use of their talent and technique. A photography professional’s aim is much simpler. They have to hope that they’ve created an image that sells. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the picture is or how much they enjoyed shooting it, if the picture doesn’t pay for the time it took to create it, they’ve failed. That requirement can dictate the subjects that photographers choose to photograph. As much as they might want to spend their days shooting sunsets and landscapes, most professional photographers will also have to make sure that they focus their lens on subjects for which they know there’s a market.

Often, that means topics that reflect businesses — which also happens to reflect the type of clients who buy them. Asked what sort of pictures sell best on his site, Oleg Tscheltzoff, CEO of microstock site Fotolia, once told us that it was always businesses and “everything around people.” Put a person in a suit and put them in front of your lens and you’ve got a much better chance of making a sale.

That’s certainly reflected in the sales figures that are easily available from stock sites. A look at iStockPhoto’s most popular files, for example, reveals that while the highest rated images tend to be artistic and natural, almost half of the fifteen most downloaded – the images that buyers actually paid for — contain people.

Not all of those photos are business-related (although more than half are, and two show families) but what they all have in common is that they communicate clearly. To sell multiple times, a stock image needs to be versatile enough to convey different messages, depending on the context and the text that will surround the picture. But they also have to be articulate so that whatever message the user wants to communicate comes across easily. It’s no coincidence that the most popular images on iStockPhoto include two with keywords in the title relating to “happy”, while others are particularly expressive.

Portraying one single emotion in an image might not require difficult poses or sophisticated techniques but, together with suits and office settings, it does produce pictures that sell.

Matching the Seasons

While around half of iStock’s most popular images are business shots, it’s notable that many of the others are seasonal. The most popular image over the last three months is a Christmas tree. (Look at the best-selling photos over the last month though, and it’s a Yuri Arcurs shot of a “happy businesswoman” in a suit that’s top of the list.) Other popular images include snowmen and tree decorations.

Like businesspeople, these may not be the most original subjects to shoot but there is a demand for them every year, and they need to be refreshed every year too. And seasonal images are in demand more than once a year. Christmas might only turn up in December, but businesses need pictures that reflect changes in the seasons, Easter, Chanukah, Halloween, Thanksgiving and any other calendar event that affects people’s lives. Even the Superbowl can make for seasonal sales as publications write stories about it and advertiser’s attempt to cash in on the event. Pictures like these might only sell for a few months, but in those months, they can pack in an entire year’s worth of sales.

So business pictures can sell, and so can images with clear messages and photos that reflect the calendar. Each of those kinds of photos can be shot by just about any photographer, so while they can sell, your submissions will need to be particularly good if they’re to beat the competition.

Create Exclusive Images

An alternative approach then is to take pictures for which there’s relatively little competition. Demand like this isn’t necessarily difficult to find. When Jennifer Hurshell co-founded GoGo Images it was because she’d noticed that clients were having so much difficulty sourcing multi-cultural images that they’d commission the shoots themselves. PhotoResearchers depends in part on photographers with access to science institutes to supply some of their more esoteric pictures.

But it’s not just access that can make a picture rare and in demand. Understanding can help too, and that can come from a photographer’s interest, passion or a hobby that isn’t related to either photography or the kinds of pictures they shoot professionally. It’s Andreas Reinhold’s love of cars — and his background in engineering — that wins him commissions from specialist magazines. It’s sports photographer Jerry Lodriguss’s fascination with the night sky that gives him a whole new subject to shoot, and an additional revenue stream. And it’s Sean Davey’s lifelong love of surfing that’s allowed him to build an entire career out of traveling to beaches around the world and photographing people in the waves.

It would be great to be able to say that if you photograph a particular list of subjects you’ll always have images that sell. Of course, that isn’t true. Photographers flock to fill demand and wherever there’s a need for a particular subject matter, you’ll always find photographers (both professionals and now talented enthusiasts) rushing to meet that demand. It’s not enough to produce pictures with the right subjects in them; to make sales, you also have to create photos that are shot the right way, at the right level of quality and that convey the right message.

But there are topics that are more in demand than others. Whether you decide to compete against the many photographers who put models in suits and hold clipboards or focus on a passion that allows you to bypass the masses and fill a niche, the only way to actually generate those sales is to consistently create good pictures.



Photography: illustir

The stock industry has changed. For established professionals who were already inside and enjoying the benefit of lifetime royalties from a reliable sales channel, it’s all been bad news. Competition has increased, and the prices — even of photos from companies as selective as Corbis and Getty — have fallen sharply. For enthusiasts, the kind of people who shoot for fun and hope to make a little extra money on the side, it’s been largely good news. Instead of hoping that one of the major stock companies would happen to look in their direction, they can now upload their pictures to a wide range of microstock firms with low acceptance requirements. If the image looks like it might sell, they can find an outlet willing to take it. But the news hasn’t all been positive. While microstock might be open source, it’s also underpriced. And the competition is fierce too. Fortunately, there are options that allow photographers to sell licenses for real money while still enjoying minimal acceptance requirements and open opportunities. Here are five of them.

FotoLibra

Based in the UK, fotoLibra calls itself an “open source picture library” rather than a stock company. The difference is important. Unlike most stock companies, fotoLibra will accept almost any image that a member wants to submit.

“There’s only one rule: no porn,” says founder Gwyn Headley. “We accept all images because our taste cannot be the same as the buyers.”

Gwyn, who had previously spent twelve years running a specialist photo library representing the work of about a dozen architectural photographers, illustrated how even experienced stock selectors can sometimes get things wrong. After pointing out an image that was so poor he thought it must have been uploaded by mistake, a colleague informed him that it had just been sold to a theater company for £450.

“Let the photographers choose what they feel will sell,” Gwyn concluded.

That’s easier to do when the company isn’t covering the cost of storage though. While microstock sites are free to join, fotoLibra charges photographers membership fees that range from £18-£45 per quarter depending on the amount of storage the photographer needs. The company also takes between 50 and 40 percent of the sales fee, depending on the type of membership. In return though, photographers receive full market value for their images. While microstock companies, which have more restrictive entrance requirements than fotoLibra, only offer low rates that vary with picture size, fotoLibra also has rights managed licenses with almost 1,500 different price points. Photographers are free to join but fotoLibra’s services aren’t free and neither are their images.

PhotoResearchers

FotoLibra accepts pictures on every topic (bar one). Other stock companies though specialize, a choice that means they’re always more interested in the image than in the photographer.

PhotoResearchers started in 1957 with an emphasis on travel photography. In the 1970s, it moved towards nature photography, becoming more scientific in the following years. Today, the company has a core group of 500 photographers, most of whom shoot images of animals and the environment.

“The best performing sector is science,” co-owner Bug Sutton has told us. “Nature is second, then natural sciences and behavioral sciences. We’re always looking for a scientific bent.”

The company is selective. The 4,000 images it adds to its inventory each month represent about a quarter of the submissions it receives. Redundancy is the main reason for rejection; PhotoResearchers is less willing to accept close similars than it used to. Prices vary too and depend on usage. PhotoResearchers’ biggest customers are textbook publishers, but they also sell to pharmaceutical companies, colleges and clients in continuing medical education. An image used in a convention might sell for about $7,000 but the average sales price is $450 — significantly higher than the sort of fees earned by microstock firms.

Today, most of the contributors are professional photographers but about 20 percent are amateurs, particularly doctors and scientists with access to universities and teaching hospitals. For scientific types with a love of photography, PhotoResearchers provides one valuable outlet.

FarmBoy Fine Arts

PhotoResearchers might be open to any photographer who has the right image but not everyone has the kind of connections necessary to create them. Farmboy Fine Arts, a Canadian design firm, accepts the sort of images that any talented photographer can produce.

“We are… looking for more content that is ‘art driven,’ conceptual and even a bit edgy,” says Todd Towers, company President.

Those images are added to the company’s collection and offered to clients looking for unique designs for their hospitality venues. Instead of seeing your images of happy executives and smiling receptionists printed in magazines and brochures, you’ll know that your artworks are decorating the walls of hotels and spas. Again, anyone can submit their photos and photographers can increase the chances of winning sales by contributing multiple images.

Although the ability to license artworks is a rare opportunity, prices at Farmboy Fine Arts have been reported to be low, and the company is relatively small. It might be a useful outlet for arty images that are hard to sell elsewhere but it’s not the kind of place that’s going to generate a lifetime of income.

CutCaster

One of the problems of selling photos through a stock site is that not only do you usually have to give up the right to offer the image elsewhere, you also lose the ability to set your own price. Fotolibra might have 1,500 different price points but the company has chosen them, not the photographer, and the prices are set. In practice though, buyers might well be willing to pay different amounts based on the quality of the image as well as the subject matter. The person best left to decide the value of an image is the person who created it.

That, at least, is the idea behind Cutcaster, which calls itself an “image marketplace.” Created by two former Wall Street traders, the company aims to combine open sourcing with flexible pricing.

“The idea was to create an electronic marketplace similar to the one we worked in, which gave control over pricing back to the sellers and buyers in the market and provided tools to educate the participants in order to make better decisions over buying, selling and creating,” said co-founder John Griffin. “We wanted to create a dynamic marketplace much like the NASDAQ stock exchange and also give people tools to educate themselves on what the marketplace was looking for, analyze the data surrounding their content and find available market research.”

Sellers can set their own prices for their images or choose to make use of the site’s own pricing algorithm. Images are sold on a royalty-free basis however, and the prices tend to be closer, although a little higher, than those on microstock. For photographers looking to keep some control over their pricing, CutCaster lets them offer their photos for sale without selling them for bottom dollar.

Your Own Stock Site

There are other sites that allow photographers to submit their images and offer them for sale, without touching microstock. GoGoImages is looking for pictures of ethnic groups; PhotoShelter lets photographers license images themselves. But these days, it’s also possible to create your own stock site. FolioLink’s Pro account comes with an archive site that allows photographers to set their own price points for each image they offer. It costs $695 a year and you’ll have to do all the marketing yourself. But you’ll also get to keep all of the sales revenue — and enjoy the freedom of being your very own stock company.

When her friend Ellis was posted to Iraq, photographer Kim Crenshaw decided to send him a care package. Like others hoping to support troops serving abroad, Kim filled the package with candy, soaps and snacks but as a photographer, she wanted to contribute a little more. She invited the soldier’s wife and son into her studio and photographed them lying on a bed, pretending to sleep. She then had the image screen-printed onto a pillowcase and included the bedding in the care package. The letter of thanks that Kim received from Ellis, in which he described the pleasure of laying his head next to his family at the end of a difficult day in the Middle East, brought tears to her eyes.

It also brought her a write-up in the The Apex Herald,  a newspaper in North Carolina where Kim runs her photography business.

Publicity might not have been the first thing on Kim’s mind as she looked for a creative way to make life a little better for a friend in Iraq, but it’s certainly a valuable result. Kim’s name is now known in her area. It’s also associated with generosity, care, patriotism and charity. When someone in Apex, North Carolina is considering booking a portrait session, they’ll think of her. She’s stolen a march on her competitors, won the kind of recognition that would have cost thousands of dollars in advertising, and picked up a halo that money can’t buy.

The Principles of Publicity

For many businesses, this kind of marketing looks about as reliable as winning the lottery. The media only has a certain amount of space to fill each month. There are no shortage of stories to fill those spaces, and the chances that a reporter or an editor will choose to write about you can look very small. Far better to put the effort into search engine optimization for your website or tweaking your Facebook ad than to spend it writing press releases that are only going to be ignored.

But while there’s no guarantee of success when you send out a press release about your photography business there are principles that, when followed, can increase your chances of seeing your name in print.

Linking your business to charity work helps. The press, especially the local press, loves writing about businesses that are going out of their way to help others. Bringing the public news about those efforts makes the reporters feel that they’re contributing too. And as Kim Crenshaw’s work showed, the more creative and original the contribution, the better.

Kelli Svancarek, a photographer in New Lenox, Illinois, did something similar. She teamed up with a number of local animal charities to offer a 15-minute photography session and a 5-by-7-inch portrait of their pet. In return, the pet owner had to make a $25 donation to the National Animal Welfare Society (NAWS) and buy an item from an animal rescue center’s wish list.

As a marketing technique, it was a smart move. The offer brought Kelli into contact with potential clients. It allowed her to show off her talent and gave her a way to provide samples. It also let her network with a bunch of different animal charities who might all be interested in using her work in the future. (In fact, the idea came after Kelli had already volunteered for the NAWS, shooting portraits of dogs available for adoption.)

It also attracted the attention of the local press. Like Kim Crenshaw, Kelli’s charitable act might have been made with entirely charitable motives, but it’s still strong enough to deliver valuable publicity, right in her market, and with a powerful brand identity.

Link Your Business to Valentine’s Day

Kelli’s story though didn’t appear just as a tale about a local business giving back. The first sentence of the article describes it as a Valentine’s Day story. Linking your business to a topical issue is another way of helping the media — who will then be more willing to help you in return. The press has to write about Valentine’s Day but they need an angle that they haven’t covered in previous years. Give them a press release that provides that new approach, and they’ll grab it.

That topic can be a date in the calendar but it can also be an issue in the news. When that happens, the publicity can spread much further than your local broadsheet. Andy Dare, for example, a travel writer and photographer, happened to find himself near Macchu Picchu recently just as floods and mudslides forced the Peruvian authorities to airlift stranded tourists. His pictures and account won him a write-up in Wanderlust, a UK travel magazine.

You might require a bit of luck to cash in on this kind of national publicity but that’s not always true. It’s also possible to use your photography deliberately to add a new voice to an ongoing debate — and win publicity for your efforts. As America military leaders review the country’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, for example, LA photographer Jeff Sheng, has released the first in a series of volumes of portraits showing gay men and women in the military. It’s a political issue that’s topical and it gives the press an opportunity to offer a new and human angle on a story that they have to cover. It was important enough to win Jeff coverage in The Los Angeles Times.

Winning publicity for your work then isn’t a matter of luck. It takes a good story that fulfills the media’s need to provide information to the public. A charitable act by your photography business can do it, as can a story related to a date on the calendar or an issue that’s already in the news. Nor does the kind of outlet matter as much as you might think. While a local newspaper will have a relatively small readership, if you only serve people in your area, you won’t need to appear anywhere else. And if, like Jeff Sheng, you do have a product that can be sold nationwide, it’s worth remembering that even the big outlets often take the stories from the small ones, letting you turn one small publicity success into another, giant one.

We’ve heard the hype before. Citizen photojournalism, we’ve been told, is the future of editorial photography. Newspapers are shrinking their photography departments just as cameras have become standard features on mobile phones. With a camera-holder at every news scene, all a media outlet has to do is ask for submissions from any accident, disaster, terrorist attack or demonstration to be immediately inundated with a choice of free, quality images. Why bother sending a pro when the amateurs are already there, good enough and willing to work for next to nothing?

It was that hope that led to the rise of services like Scoopt, which took open submissions of news images and distributed them to the media. It was the potential of citizen photojournalism that led Getty to buy Scoopt in 2007. And it was the limitations of citizen photojournalism – the poor images, the rarity of important enough events, the inability of agencies to get between the photographer and the media, the difficulty of distributing images it did have to the right outlets – that led Getty to shut the service down two years later.

But crowd-sourced photography is back, and this time, it might just be working.

As Seen in Le Monde

Citizenside has been around long enough to have seen both the hype surrounding citizen photojournalism and the risk of believing it. Formed in 2005 as Scooplive, it was inspired by the London bombings when co-founder Matthieu Stefani saw a need for a way to deliver the images shot by people at the scene to editors in the news rooms.

“We got the idea then that there might be a market for eyewitness photos and videos of newsworthy events,” Matthieu told us. “So we started building what is now Citizenside to help connect people on the scenes, whether pros or amateurs, with people in the media. Essentially bringing the supply to the demand.”

The site now has 50,000 contributors based in more than 100 countries, of which over 10,000 are active on a daily basis, submitting more than 500 photos and videos each day. More importantly, Citizenside, which is based in Paris, has also managed to forge good connections with the local media. In the last fourteen months, the company has signed agreements with the three largest French dailies, the most popular radio station, the most watched TV news network and the two best-selling gossip magazines. Those connections mean that when an important image does come in, Citizenside knows who to call first and can place while it’s still hot and exclusive. Top contributions are also placed on AFP’s ImageForum, making them available to 9,000 media buyers around the world. This year, Citizenside plans to make similar agreements with publications in the UK and in other parts of Europe.

“We will hit the US market too,” says Matthieu, “as we think there is a real need for media, newspapers specifically, to reconnect with their readers.”

Some of Citizenside’s customers have already bought subscription programs, locking them into the service and committing them to purchases of videos and photos on a daily basis. Other sales though are more occasional, at just “a few pictures a day.” The launch of Editorside, a microsite intended to help buyers find content, and which is now undergoing testing, should push that figure past ten sales a day and “into the hundreds,” predicts Matthieu.

Sold for $100,000

That might suggest that we’re hearing the same old story: excitement about the power of citizen journalists failing to translate into more than  a handful of real sales. But although Citizenside is interested in receiving “illustrative images” as well as its more  usual demand for news shots, and while contributions may be sold more than once, it’s not a stock site that needs to make large numbers of frequent sales at relatively low prices. According to the Guardian, Scoopt’s most valuable sale was a picture of a Doctor Who monster, which went for £2,000 to a buyer who never used it. Citizenside’s biggest sale so far was a video of Jérôme Kerviel, the trader whose losses were believed to have cost French bank Société Générale around €4.9 billion. That clip was sold for an impressive $100,000. The seller would have received around 75 percent of that fee.

Most prices, of course are lower, and depend on the publisher as well as the quality, exclusivity and comprehensiveness of the package. A local website might  pay only a few bucks for an image but a print publication looking for international exclusivity could pay tens of thousands of dollars.

Citizenside also tries to make use of Web 2.0 to turn its contributors into what Matthieu Stefani calls “a community of amateur reporters.” Members can communicate with each other, comment and vote on the stories they send in, and use the site as a source of real-time news. Citizenside is also able to use its members’ geolocation data to call for witnesses to particular events that it knows its buyers want to cover. Between three and ten such calls for go out every day for events that include bank robberies, natural disasters or violent demonstrations. The company is now working on an assignment service that will allow buyers to order images directly from locations where they don’t have staff photographers.

“The idea is that a magazine in San Diego might be interested in some event on the West Coast or in Europe, and could use someone qualified around the place where it takes place,” explains Matthieu.

But there will still be a difference between the kinds of images that an amateur shoots and the sort of pictures that a trained news photographer would produce, which is why Matthieu says that he regards his site’s contributors as witnesses rather than reporters, and their products as supplements to traditional reporting rather than replacements for it.

“We don’t believe what we do relates to ‘Citizen Journalism,’ but rather ‘Citizen Witnessing,’” says Matthieu. “We’re about facts and undeniable visual evidence.”

Maybe that’s one way to beat the hype about citizen journalism: rebrand it, then connect to the media and actually sell the pictures.

One of the biggest problems for photography studios is amnesia. Clients book a shoot, pick up their pictures… then forget who took them. They might show the pictures to friends occasionally but for the most part, the images stay in the album and the direct connection to the photographer – together with the potential for referrals, repeat sales and additional sales — is lost. That’s a problem that two portrait studio owners are trying to solve by allowing photographers to put not just pictures, but their entire studio in clients’ pockets.

Tim and Joy Vertz are co-owners of Shoot the Moon Photography, a Milwaukee photography studio that specializes in portraits and weddings. Together with developer Jason Kelley, they have created an iPhone app that aims to help photographers maintain a permanent link with their clients.

The app has five features. “MyDailyPic” delivers a new image each day through the app to the client; “News” lets studios offer promotions, bargains and other announcements; “Social” links the client to the studio’s Facebook and Twitter presence, and also allows them to send the app to a friend; “About” provides a space for the studio to talk about itself; and “For You” lets the studio create personalized benefits for each group of clients.

Get in Touch with Just One Touch

The idea for the app came just over a year ago, when Shoot the Moon was looking for some creative marketing ideas.

“We’re always looking for ways we can differentiate ourselves in the marketplace as well as finding ways for our loyal clients to help build our brand,” says Tim Vertz. “At first, we looked into just writing an iPhone app for our own studio – but then we felt we had something that would be extremely compelling to photographers and studio owners worldwide.

It’s all about a studio differentiating themselves and giving their clients the tools so they will want to help spread the word as to why their portrait studio is such a great place to have portraits done.”

Studios can create a new name for their app, add their own icon and show off their best images, social media information and promotions, delivering them directly to a device used by their clients every day. The benefits to the studio, Tim argues, can take a number of different forms. The presence of the app on their phones is likely to remind clients to call for an appointment and the app itself allows them to do so with one touch through the telephone, email or SMS. More powerfully, the app’s “For You” feature allows the studio owner to put together a selection of preview images and deliver them to the phone as a preview, generating anticipation before the sales appointment.

Photographers can also use the feature to develop and deliver incentive packages, offering a free online gallery after spending a set sum on prints, for example. And by delivering fresh images every day, the client has an incentive to pull out the phone and show off their new photos, spreading the name of the studio without having to remember where they had the pictures taken.

“Every time the client shows family, friends, co-workers, etc. their iPhone-only images – they have to go to their iPhone app – and naturally everyone will ask how where they had their portraits done.  The viral marketing effect for a studio will be huge!” says Tim.

Looking at Someone Else’s Portraits

Or they would be huge as long as the clients have a reason to download the app. While the benefits to a photography studio of putting an app in a client’s pocket are clear, the advantages to the client are less obvious. Asked why a client would want to download the app, Tim focused on the DailyPic, a feature that allows the studio to push a new picture to the client’s phone each day.

“The studio decides if these are complimentary images, paid images, how many, etc.  The studio has the control to determine exactly what is shared, what the price is, etc.  The client benefits in having this technology without unauthorized scanning.”

But clients are unlikely to want to hand over control of their viewing to the studio nor will they want to look at a portrait of someone they don’t know, however beautifully shot. And once they have their own photos, they can add them all to the phone’s photo album and look at them whenever they want. That the studio hasn’t “authorized” their scanning isn’t likely to motivate clients to download an app that delivers one picture they didn’t really want every day.

Curiosity might motivate them though, especially when they’re waiting for their prints or after they’ve made their booking. Tim described how one studio in Australia had sent out an email blast announcing its app and saw heavy use within 24 hours. The studio then offered a special promotion exclusively for app users. Within a few hours, the studio had booked a number of new sessions.

In that instance, Tim claim, the app paid for itself within a matter of hours – no small feat considering that while the app is free for clients to download, it costs the studio $249 to buy. Making the app pay then will depend on having a large client base already connected to the studio, perhaps through email newsletters, a Facebook page or a Twitter account, and ready to adopt it. Mentioning the app repeatedly will remind people to look at it – and see the promotions – and encourage new followers to download it too. And those promotions will need to be regularly updated too, together with the new daily images. In short, the app will need to be promoted if its promotional power is to be effective.

None of that though means the app can’t be helpful to photography studios. It can keep a studio on a client’s mind… but only if the studio remembers to use it.

Photography: Vanessa Dualib

Food photography is usually a difficult niche for a photographer. Getting the lighting right is only part of the challenge. You also need to know how to pose the food, prevent it from drying out under lights and make it look appealing and appetizing. Many specialist photographers work with professional food designers whose job is to prepare the plate while the photographer sets up the shoot. Sometimes though, it can pay for a photographer just to pull out her camera, open the fridge and play with her food.

Vanessa Dualib, an artist from Sao Paolo, Brazil, has three loves: photography, food and humor. She now combines all of those passions in a series of images that turn vegetables into animals, and the serious business of eating into the not-quite-serious business of funny food photography.

The photographs themselves are made up of food items carefully arranged into a humorous composition: baby carrots ice skate on a slice of pumpkin; fruit becomes a pair of amorous lovebirds; a sweet potato is transformed into the little-known dinosaur Potatosaurus Dulcis which became extinct during the “Plantzoic Period”.

The series began in 2008 when an illness confined Vanessa to her house, restricting her ability to photograph. Instead of shooting what she saw on the streets and in the parks, she began posing and shooting what she could find in her kitchen.

“It all started as a joke to keep me from getting too bored in my house,” she explains. “I love photography and not being able to photograph anything was driving me crazy…. Putting together the three things I love the most in my life was the way I found to express my artistic ideas while basically just trying to have fun and surprise people.”

Why I Turned Down Getty

It’s all fun stuff but it has developed a serious side. After Vanessa uploaded the images to Flickr, they began to attract the attention and comments of other photographers. That was rewarding enough but Getty had just started building its Flickr collection and was on the lookout for creative images to add to its inventory. The stock agency approached Vanessa and offered to license 26 images, including eighteen of her food photos – about 60 percent of her collection at the time.

Surprisingly, Vanessa turned Getty down, agreeing to license only four of her food photographs.

“I declined because of the two-year contract to manage all the rights that they impose,” she told us. “I actually ended up with some other plans for this project and I want to make sure I will have all the liberty to do as I please once I finally make up my mind.”

Photography: Vanessa Dualib

The four images she did supply have managed to sell “a few” licenses in the four months that they’ve been available through the agency, so it’s possible that had Vanessa agreed to offer more works, she would have made more money. But her decision does raise the question of whether Getty’s license requirements are too strict for non-professional photographers, like Vanessa, who are more interested in developing their photography than profiting from it.

It Takes Two Years to Test an Image

According to the Artists Relations team at Getty, the two-year exclusivity requirement is actually shorter than the three-year commitment usually demanded from the agency’s photographers. It’s also necessary as clients can take several months to approve an image chosen by a buyer at a design or advertising firm and presented in a pitch for a campaign, Getty argues: allowing photographers to remove their images at will might mean that an image approved by a client is no longer available. Relevance matters too. The image has to match market demand, something that can’t be assessed in less than two years.

“Leaving an image up for anything less than two years does not allow for the photographer to learn about the image’s relevance to customers,” Getty told us. “Most Flickr artists who participate understand that our investment requires at least this much time to see a return.”

For photographers who have created the images specifically as a long-term investment that will bring returns through stock sales, that commitment is a necessary part of doing business. While it’s possible for photographers to create their own stock sites — and some do — independent photographers will always struggle against the marketing power of a company like Getty whose subscription model, in particular, helps to lock buyers in. Many Flickr photographers too will find an offer of representation by Getty both flattering and potentially remunerative enough to be willing to close up their images for a couple of years, especially if they don’t have any other plans for them anyway. In practice, says Getty, the exclusivity agreement is not an issue that Flickr contributors raise very often.

One of the things that Vanessa wanted to do, however, was to bring her series of food photos together in book form. Friends had asked her to create a Blurb book and while Blurb sales can be relatively low, the results, she says, have been surprising.

“The response and interest to it once the book was ready was bigger than I actually expected,” she said. “I’m sure it could be doing better, since the books there can be quite expensive (even with a very low profit margin). But still it was an amazing surprise!”

Marketing for the book is currently limited to a mention on her Flickr page and website. Two international magazines have also been in touch and produced articles about Vanessa’s work, which should help to increase sales too. Whether the profits from the book outweigh the value of the sales the images would have brought on Getty is debatable but it is a debate that other photography enthusiasts with unique images and interest from large stock agencies will have to consider. Vanessa herself has no regrets.

“I actually still have a lot of ideas to explore on my Playing with Food series, and also different techniques I want to explore. We will see where this will end up.”

——
Update
Getty has asked to point out that “we do allow contributors to create/publish and sell their own books, including Blurb books, as they are considered self promotion… [B]ooks of the individual’s work, limited edition signed and/or numbered prints sold as fine art and photo sharing is all fine from our point of view.” We’re happy to do so.
___

Photography: Craig Holmes

It would be great if success at photography were only about talent, technique and the ability to produce a great picture. It isn’t. Earning a living behind the lens also means understanding the business of photography, knowing how to promote services, sell images, and protect yourself against the most damaging competition. That’s hard enough at the best of times. It’s even harder at a time when anyone can buy a good camera, practice taking pictures and start marketing themselves. But the same opportunities that now give enthusiasts access to buyers also allow smart entrepreneurial professionals to pull ahead. So what would a small, modern and successful photography business look like if it were run by a photographer who knew business?

It would probably look a lot like the business run by Craig Holmes.

While most professional photographers learn the art of photography and then struggle to pick up the commercial skills they need, Craig took up photography as a hobby while studying for a business degree in the mid-90s. His degree done, he then looked for a job that appealed to his passion rather than his studies and began climbing the career ladder of professional photography. Work experience at his local newspaper, which happened to be the UK’s largest evening title, led to his first assignment after a freelancer let the paper down. Soon he was being given regular — if low-paid – photography jobs, and after a year was offered a staff position, which he held for another year before branching out on his own as a freelance editorial photographer.

Get Big or Get Niche

The late nineties though might not have been the best time to be an editorial photographer. By 2000, Craig was finding that photography budgets at the publications he supplied were being slashed and sometimes even scrapped, a change that should have threatened his career. In fact, that shift in the market had the opposite effect.

“This was perhaps the best opportunity for me, as the magazines had space to fill and now the pressure was on commercial firms to produce their own photography and supply the magazines,” he told us. “Hence, I switched virtually overnight to being a commercial photographer that supplied the editorial market.”

Following the business principle of “get big or get niche,” Craig branded his photography as “location promotion.” He creates images that promote organizations, such as television channels, tourism businesses, government bodies and construction companies, within a certain area. For Craig, that’s the Midlands region of the UK. In practice, the images themselves might not appear too different from those created by other commercial photographers but the title allows him to broadcast the kinds of site-related photographs his business produces.

“Basically, it is my way of saying, ‘This is my niche geographical area, and I do commercial photography here.’”

But the niche branding is only one of the advantages that Craig has created for his business. He’s also developed three different revenue channels from that niche.

CraigHolmes.com is the site for his commissioned photography business. That makes up about 60 percent of his turnover. Images taken on commissioned shoots that aren’t used by clients may end up on Craig’s own niche stock site, ImagesofBirmingham.co.uk, together with self-commissioned images and shots taken by six other photographers. Those stock sales make up 30 percent of Craig’s income. And the most artistic, black-and-white images are sold as prints at CrowdedGallery.com, contributing a further 10 percent.

Marketing Photography with Twitter

Each of those channels is marketed and branded separately. Craig’s commissioned photography business relies mainly on word-of-mouth. Professionalism, he says, is the most important aspect of this part of the business, and apart from the website, it does very little traditional marketing. The stock site relies on search engine optimization, generated by well-captioned photos and pages that are search engine-friendly. Leads that can’t find the images they want on the site might then surf through to the commission site and ask Craig to produce the images for them.

“There is definitely a ‘complimentary’ relationship between stock and commissions,” says Craig, “something that would only exist in a niche area.”

Because print sales are worldwide, that part of the business relies on online marketing tools.  A blog helps, as have mentions in art magazines, but Craig also uses separate Twitter accounts for each branch of the business. His commission photography timeline lets him chat with clients; the stock timeline’s photo of the day has turned out to be one of the most effective ways of bringing visitors in; and the print site has its own timeline too.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Craig’s business though is the pricing. As other stock sites struggle with rights managed and royalty free models, Craig’s stock site employs its own pricing structure. Buyers pay a set fee based on the size of the image and are free to use the photo for twelve months. The prices range from £25 ($40) to £85 ($135) for images of more than 5000 pixels. It’s a move that came after six years of imposing usage licenses on clients who didn’t understand them.

“The clients we worked with just didn’t get it – often we were the first stock agency they had dealt with,” Craig explained. “It became clear that the library needed a new charging scheme, whilst not becoming a ‘royalty free’ site….  Gone are the days when clients wanted to chat over the price of an image; they simply see it, and want it there and then for a fair price.”

There is some flexibility. Craig recently agreed to supply 500 images for use over a ten-year period, but even this deal, he said, took just two emails and a meeting.

None of these revenue channels is particularly difficult to establish. A commissioned photography business may take time to build. It relies on connections, a recognizable niche and the kind of good service that generates referrals. But while Craig used a programmer in Norway to create his first stock site in 2003, his current version is powered by PhotoShelter, which also underpins his print site. Any photographer can do that – and now any photographer can build their own successful photography business.

Photography: Philip Brown

Philip Brown’s website makes very clear who he is and what he offers. At the top of the page, right next to his name, are the words “specialist cricket photographer.” In terms of nicheing, it doesn’t get much narrower than that. But it’s an approach that appears to have served him well. Philip works regularly for the UK’s Daily Telegraph, thousands of his images have appeared in newspapers, magazines and books, and he has edited two books of sporting photographs himself. It does seem as though there’s something to be said for tight nicheing.

Philip’s specialization however is relatively new. He’s been shooting for more than twenty years and until 2005, covered all sports. These days, he says, cricket makes up about 98 percent of his work. He now spends much of his time shooting in his native Australia, as well as in India, the West Indies and in other test-playing countries. He is currently in South Africa, covering England’s tour, a series that began in November and will continue almost until the end of January. The focus and experience clearly give him a good understanding of how the game operates, what is likely to happen next, and what he needs to do to get the best shot.

“I do think I can anticipate things in cricket after having covered matches for over twenty years,” he told us by email from Durban. “Sometimes I realise just moving six inches (15cms) can improve a picture substantially.”

Anything Can Happen in Sports Photography

While understanding the sport you’re shooting is always vital, it’s particularly important in a game as idiosyncratic as cricket. The action takes place a minimum of 55 meters from the boundary, where the photographers sit, forcing them to use long lenses. Worse, matches can last up to five days, providing plenty of opportunity for boredom and missed moments.

“During a test match there may be over 300 deliveries bowled and y