For most photographers, seeing their photo on the cover of a book should be a highlight of their career. It’s the cover that does the selling so when a publisher decides that their image is powerful enough to attract attention and pull in buyers, it’s a sure sign that they’ve take a great photo. They’ll be able to see their picture on the shelf every time they walk into a bookstore, enjoy the feeling that customers are placing it on their own bookshelves… and the remuneration should be nice too. It doesn’t always work out that way though. Now that images are available on microstock sites, photos are appearing on book covers without photographers being aware of the sale, without being credited for the picture… and without receiving pay that would even cover the price of a latte in Starbucks.

Weldon Owen’s Snapshot Picture Library series, for example, are 64-page children’s books made up of around 70 pictures and 800 words of descriptive text. Altogether, the series covers 26 topics including tractors, trucks, birds and puppies. The photo credits on the back cover of the Sea Creatures title list are typical; they describe the sources as Dreamstime, iStockPhoto and Shutterstock.

The Price Was “Pathetic.”

The book’s lead image, showing a sea turtle, came from Shutterstock and was taken by Rich Carey, an underwater photographer based in Dahab, Egypt. Rich had no idea that the photo was being used as a book cover until we contacted him. He took the picture last October and since then, it’s been downloaded fourteen times, all of them as part of a client’s subscription package. His total remuneration for the image, the amount he earned for all of those fourteen sales, was… $3.82.

“I realise this is a bit pathetic compared with what I would have received if the image had been bought through a traditional stock agency,” Rich commented, “but if it had been offered only [on], say, Alamy or Getty, it would probably never have been found and bought.”

Rich isn’t wrong about the fees being “a bit pathetic.” FotoLibra, a picture library, charges $314 to use this image of a turtle on a North American book cover. PhotoShelter, which uses fotoQuote software to estimate standard market prices, demands $840 for this turtle to appear on a book with a print run of up to 10,000 copies.

But Rich also isn’t wrong about the chances of selling the image through a traditional stock company. He does have pictures on Alamy, and a search for “turtle” will produce one of his photos. A buyer who sets the results page to show 120 pictures can find it on page 22, by which time he will have seen 2,520 other pictures of flippers and shells. It’s no surprise then that while Shutterstock has given Rich a total of 5,800 downloads since he joined last August, and “an income of a few hundred dollars every month” on top of the fees he usually charges for commissions, teaching and guiding, Alamy has given him just one sale.

“It would be great if I could sell on traditional stock agencies and get a good payout and credit every time one of my photos was used on a book cover,” says Rich. “Unfortunately, it is near impossible for a beginner photographer to first get represented by one of those agencies, and second to have their images shown someplace where buyers will actually get to find them, so in that situation I turned to microstock.”

Microstock Creates New Markets

You could argue then that microstock is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing: enabling new photographers to get their foot in the door and begin earning from their images, even if the amounts they receive for each sale are small. You could even say that microstock’s low prices are creating entirely new markets for those images. According to fotoQuote, a full page image used in a book with a print run of up to 10,000 copies costs $420. With 67 such images and three cover photos, Weldon Owen could have found itself spending up to $30,000 on photos for each of the titles in its Snapshot Picture Library series. Although it’s likely that the company would have been able to negotiate lower fees, it’s certainly possible that those expenses would have made the series unviable. The publisher wouldn’t reveal sales figures, but the books aren’t bestsellers.

That isn’t true though of C.J. Sansom’s Dissolution, the first in a series of historical thrillers featuring medieval lawyer Matthew Shardlake. The books have been commissioned by the BBC and will star Kenneth Branagh. One version of the cover however uses an image of an old book shot by Vladimir Stretonovic, and was bought from Shutterstock. Other books in the series use similar pictures even though, with a high-selling title, publishers Macmillan would have been able to choose from a broader range of suppliers.

For publishers then, microstock sites are providing a chance to create book series with low print runs and, when suitable, low-cost covers even for successful titles. But microstock isn’t replacing traditional image sourcing entirely. Not all covers are sourced from microstock sites and even Weldon Owen is now developing a new photo-based series that will license images directly from photographers. Executive Editor Elizabeth Dougherty says that she is looking for photographers with collections in areas ranging from celebrity bridal gowns to bicycles to sunsets. To apply, photographers can send a letter of introduction and a link to site that displays their work to elizabethd@weldonowen.com. And the fees for non-exclusive worldwide rights?

“…are fair,” she told us, “but on the lower side for promotional books. We try to make up for that by buying in bulk and establishing ongoing relationships with photographers – and as important being nice and fun to work with.”

With the right pictures, you might even find yourself with the cover.

Photography: chotda

The photography books that line the shelves in bookstores and fill your Amazon wish list might all contain wonderful images and beautiful pictures but they also tend to follow a format. The photos focus on a theme, are accompanied by short passages of text, and each photo both stands alone and contributes to an overall impression of the book’s subject.  When you’re looking to create your own photo book, those bestsellers always provide good models to follow. Stray out of the photography section though and you can find plenty of other books that are strong on photography and which reveal a number of different ways of publishing your images.

The easiest method, of course, is the traditional and that’s true even when you head away from the mainstream shelves completely and into self-publishing. Beth Dow, whose Blurb book “In The Garden” won the company’s 2008 Photography.Book.Now competition, says that photography books can take two different approaches. In the first, what she calls the “handmade artist’s book,” every detail is integral to the whole, from the choice of images to the font used in the text. In the second approach, and the one that she chose for her images of British gardens, the aim is simply to show the photos. Sequencing is still vital but white space puts the emphasis on the images rather than on the story the book is trying to tell.

“This is why I chose, for the most part, single image spreads to give a little breathing room around the pictures,” she explained. “Pictures tend to have an effect on each other… . Flipping through a book of landscape photographs feels to me like going for a walk. Each page leads somewhere else, and I start to notice visual patterns.”

Traditional Photography Books with Unique  Niches

The biggest challenge of creating traditional photography books like these though is that they’re difficult to market. When every photographer is doing the same thing, your photos—and your book idea—will have to be exceptional to attract the attention of customers. John Fielder, a photographer who also owned his own publishing company, solves that problem by specializing. He takes photos of Colorado. That gives his books a specific niche and turns his name into a brand for people interested in the landscapes of his state.

As a publisher though, John tended to focus on books that were either unique or which had an environmental aspect associated with an endangered natural resource or which contributed towards the goals of a non-profit. That’s not just because he liked the subject; it also made the books easier to promote. The media attention the books won…

“…reduced the need for paid advertising and support from the publisher… which in my case was me,” he told us. “And it’s easy to get a book into bookstores if there’s publicity.”

Both these kinds of books though—a self-published Blurb book, and a niched photography book on a media-friendly theme—are fairly traditional. They look like photography books. George Ancona’s books though won’t turn up in any bookstore’s photography section even though they’re created by a photographer and rely heavily on images. They’re children’s books in which the pictures and the text work together to inform readers about the topic, whether that’s native Americans, dolphins, bananas or any of the other subjects in the 113-plus books that George has created.

George first draws the books out. Using 3 x 5 file cards, he lays out the 48 pages each of his books contains to get a feel for whether it should be vertical or landscape, colorful or subdued. Once he starts shooting, of course, plans change. The people he meets while creating a book will lead him in new directions. In general though, George usually tries to focus on one person who will take him through the experience and enable him to portray accurately a child from a different culture.

“I’ll forget the book but I’ll always remember the people,” he says.

The result of George’s work is always a book which tells a story and provides explanations, while the images show the topics the text describes. The relationship between words and images is a little like that between the narrator and the film in a National Geographic program.

Photographs as Book Backgrounds

Mo Willems, takes a completely different approach in his Knuffle Bunny books. Although also aimed at children and dependent on images to drive the story forward, in these books the photos play a secondary role. Mo’s background is in illustration and animation rather than photography so after taking pictures of his New York neighborhood, Mo used them as a setting for his hand-drawn characters. He removed air conditioning units and garbage cans, and rebuilt signs with missing letters or numbers to create what he calls “emotional truth” rather than a completely accurate representation of his local streets.

“The images are almost more Photoshop Illustration than photograph by the time I’m done,” he says.

For a photographer, a book like this can be a fairly big challenge. It’s easier for a tech-savvy illustrator to take a picture of a street and turn it into a workable background than it is for a photographer to take good pictures then draw lovable characters onto them. But it’s always possible for a photographer and illustrator to team up to produce a book. The second Knuffle Bunny book, “Knuffle Bunny Too”, used a double page spread of Grand Army Plaza as the background to a scene in which the two girls exchange their fluffy bunnies. Mo felt out of his depth so he called in Tom Drysdale, an old friend and a professor of photography at New York University. They ended up spending the early morning together on the roof of the Brooklyn Public Library. Mo called the time out for the four seconds when the junction was traffic-free while Tom took the shot and tried to stop his 8 x 10 camera from being blown off the roof. It’s the kind of partnership that brings together the creative storytelling of the author with the technical skill of a trained photographer.

The traditional way of creating a photography book is always going to be the most appealing. It’s a channel that puts the images at the center and shows off your talent. But pictures are meant to tell a story so stepping back and allowing them to illustrate the book’s story by accompanying words, as George Ancona’s images do, or by providing the background for an illustrated tale, as Mo Willems’ pictures do, can be another satisfying way of getting your photos onto pages and into stores.

Photography: toastyKen

One of the biggest changes to hit the business world — including the photography world — during the last few years has been globalization. When you can pay someone on the other side of the planet half the fees charged by a local service provider and receive the same quality, the difference in time zones doesn’t look too awkward. For photographers, it’s created real challenges — and real opportunities too. Now that any photographer anywhere can offer their photos to any buyer, competition has multiplied. Reuters, for example, prides itself not on its ability to fly seasoned photographers from its head office to trouble spots around the world but on its army of local stringers already in place. That’s made it harder than ever for photojournalists with dreams of foreign assignments to get a foot in the door, but it has created plenty of opportunity for Iraqi photography students, Iranians with cameras and Afghans who know their Nikons. If photographers are now competing with peers everywhere, the flip-side is that markets everywhere are now available to any photographer.

That could be even more important than it sounds. While the US publishing industry continues its decline, the media in the developing world is growing at a cracking rate. According to a report published by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the newspaper and magazine industry in the sub-continent is now worth $3.2 billion a year, making it the third biggest English-language market in the world. By 2011, boosted by lower cover prices, growing literacy and rising incomes, that revenue is estimated to reach $5.8 billion. So what can you do to take a share of that cash and get your images bought by buyers in foreign markets?

Make the Subjects Match the Market

In theory, you don’t need to do much. Because images on stock sites can already be seen by anyone, simply uploading your photos to a microstock company is enough to make them available for sale. But whether they sell depends on the types of photos you’re offering. While a photo of a lemon or a tree is universal, it’s pictures of people that sell best. But people look different the world over and are moved most by images that contain faces that are similar to their own. Only 5 percent of current stock images however show the people who produce 65 percent of world’s gross domestic product — and who own 40 percent of the world’s purchasing power. It was that realization that led to the formation of Gogo Images, an agency that specializes in offering pictures of minorities to marketers and design agencies whose clients operate in different continents.

“While the company’s actual product photography can be used everywhere, their websites and sales materials need to be regionalized for every country in which they are engaged,” explains Jennifer Hurshell, the company’s Chief Creative Officer and co-founder. “And believe me, the General Manager of the company’s Brazil subsidiary is going to insist on having his marketing tools reflect images of Brazilians.”

One way to increase the chances of winning foreign sales then is to take pictures of foreigners. For Gogo’s photographers, that might mean “street casting” or using a model agency. More usually though, it means turning to friends and family who, conveniently, are also the type least likely to demand payment or refuse to sign model releases.

Gogo’s submissions requirements tend to be fairly stringent. The company only accepts images of 12 megapixels and above, but shooting pictures of minorities and uploading them to microstock sites or picture libraries will also put you in the running for one type of easy sale.

Microstock companies though have the disadvantage of paying very little, a downside that’s actually a problem in general when pitching to foreign markets. Even rights managed photos can cost less when the market in which they’re being used is outside North America. And we’ve seen before how some publishers in the developing world have the kind of purchasing budgets that would embarrass a student newspaper — even when those publishers are giant Western companies. In countries where the cost of living is relatively low, there’s always the temptation to pay the photographer peanuts.

Become World-Renowned

Perhaps the best option then is to treat global markets in the same way you treat local markets. While you can’t usually expect to live in the US and shoot the odd wedding job in France, you can send emails to publishers around the world and pitch your images directly. Local publications like the German magazine Visuell can point out good places to look in that specific market but  you’ll always have an advantage if you can speak the language, write a persuasive email, be able to follow up and, most importantly, have images that appeal to the publication. That’s the sort of thing that usually comes from reading it regularly and being familiar with its style.

The exception of course is if you’re an internationally known photographer. That might not be as hard as it sounds if you can find a niche small enough. The photographers at Del Sol Photography who specialize in Trash the Dress photography have been able to shoot weddings in six different countries. Because they’re among the leaders in their field, clients get to hear about them and are prepared to hire them even when the distances are enormous. While pitching to foreign clients should be one goal, a better goal is for foreign clients to want to pitch for your services.

Photography used to be an industry in which “international” meant heading out on assignment to exotic locations to shoot models in the surf or marines on beaches. It meant packing film into courier bags and spending too much time on planes. Today, the Internet allows photo editors anywhere to go online, search for photos and buy the images they need. They don’t care where the images come from or what kind of passport the photographer owns. They just want to know whether the picture tells the story they want. When the entire world has become a market, it’s up to you take your share of it.

Photography: Courtesy fotoLibra

Building a portfolio of images is a little like creating an investment portfolio. It’s an asset that should continue to bring in revenue on a consistent basis throughout the life of the photographer. For top photographers that’s certainly true. Annie Leibovitz was able to borrow $15.5 million using her images as collateral in part because lenders the Art Capital Group recognized that her work  would remain valuable enough to cover the loan. For more typical professionals, creating a stock portfolio is often an investment too, largely because it takes time to cover the costs. Ron Chapple, a stock photographer with more than 30 years’ experience, shoots with the idea of his  image sales covering their production expenses within the first year or two of release, with profits coming in years three, four and five. For occasional photographers though, the situation tends to be different. Old pictures often end up not collecting regular sales on Getty or Alamy, or even on iStockPhoto and Dreamstime, but stashed away in albums or stored in forgotten folders on hard drives.

If you really could make money out of those old shots though, you might find that your photo albums are more than a collection of memories and a bank of images that make you proud. They’re also an untapped treasure chest.

That’s a hope that’s now being tested on fotoLibra. At the beginning of October, the UK-based picture library launched its Historic collection, a portfolio of images shot before 1980. Sold primarily on the basis of their age, the photos are intended to show how ordinary people lived during World War II, how people dressed during the seventies (something that most of us who lived through the period would rather forget) or what house interiors looked like in the 1920s. They’re pictures sold as snapshots of time as much as aesthetic compositions.

“Whatever the subject of the book, feature or article, a single contemporary picture can capture the period more precisely than a thousand words,” explains Yvonne Seeley, fotoLibra’s marketing director.

Photos from The 1970s Are History

While fotoLibra accepts just about all images submitted to the site, the company differs from microstock firms by charging customers full market rates for rights managed images, and by charging photographers subscription fees. The fees range from £18 per quarter to £45 per quarter with the different membership plans providing different amounts of storage space and a higher percentage of the sales price. Although Historic images will be made available for the same fees as other rights managed photos, photographers can upload as many old images as they want without a paid subscription. To qualify though, the photos must include at least the year they were shot and have been created before January 1, 1980.

The cut-off date is slightly arbitrary. Yvonne explains that anything more than thirty years looks like history to a lot of people. More importantly, anything shot before 1980 will not have been taken with a digital camera, making it easier for fotoLibra to monitor the uploads. That also means though that the images have to be scanned in manually, then uploaded. That could take a lot of slow work but considering that fotoLibra is supplying free storage and the chance of a sale, it might well be worth the effort. FotoLibra itself was created after founder Gwyn Headley found himself standing in the contents of a burst water tank surrounded by floating photographs taken by his grandfather, who had built his own camera in the 1890s, and his father, an army chaplain who had photographed Singapore in the 1930s, West Africa, Austria and Berlin in the 1950s and London in the 1960s. Almost all the photos were destroyed in the flood. Four years later, fotoLibra sees its Historic collection as a return to its roots.

Got a Picture of Florence Nightingale?

Whether the collection will offer more than a kind of floodproof photo album though remains to be seen. The company is still waiting to find out what type of images will sell the best, and the submission guidelines point out that images that date from later than 1950 will be easier to sell with model releases, although it will accept for sale images without them.

“We have the only known photograph of Mary Seacole who was a contemporary of Florence Nightingale working in the Crimea,” explains Yvonne. “There is no model release, and the image has sold numerous times for editorial use with no problems.”

Mary Seacole though is long dead and unlikely to complain if her picture turns up in a book about nineteenth century fashions. Your old schoolfriend might not be pleased to see a picture of himself in a book about how crazy people looked in the 1970s, and the publisher will know it. Without an image release, he’s likely to pass. And, of course, the Historic collection has to compete with the giant collections of old and atmospheric images available under Creative Commons licenses. Yvonne Seeley might be right in noting that a picture can describe a period much faster than a thousand words but if that’s all a buyer is looking for, there’s little reason for him to pay standard rights managed prices when he can help himself to the contents of Flickr’s Commons library for free.

The real value of the Historic collection then is likely to lie not just in very old photos but in very rare images — images as unusual as a picture of Florence Nightingale’s colleague or perhaps cars of the 1950s. FotoLibra is encouraging people with “special, extensive or unique collections of heritage imagery to let us know what they’ve got.” Those sorts of picture may even be able to demand a premium price. While there are benefits to be had then from making use of fotoLibra as free, safe storage for digital copies of your old prints, if you’re looking to save time and make sales, you might want to focus on the rare and unusual images. They might be old, but those pictures always sell.

Photography: Del Sol Photography

One of the biggest challenges of wedding photography is cutting the kitsch. Unless you’re marketing yourself as a wedding photojournalist, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to dodge the formals. You’ll have to line up the family, shoot the rings and catch a shot of the flowers in the bride’s hand. Those sorts of images are standards; the bride and groom expect them and they leave very little room for originality beyond the lighting and composition.

There’s also a good chance though that you’ll be asked to create a series of romantic images captured before the wedding takes place. That should be an opportunity to be get creative. It’s just you, the couple, a picturesque location and a chance to create some beautiful pictures. But even those shoots come with a major limitation. Because the images are taken before the wedding, the clothes have to be kept spotless. The result is usually another standard series of couples kissing against watery backdrops and gazing at each other under blue skies. It’s the kind of the thing that pays the bills and makes clients happy but it rarely gets a photographer’s pulse racing.  But what if you saved the romantic shots until after the wedding, when the dress has done its job and before it’s consigned to the back of the closet? You could then get a lot more adventurous and create romantic wedding images that are unlike any other. Instead of shooting a couple in front of the sea, for example, you could shoot them in the sea. Or you could put the bride on a horse or the couple in a cornfield. You could open up a whole new range of creative opportunities. That’s the idea behind Trash the Dress, a branch of wedding photojournalism that’s growing in popularity.

The goal is to create images that are unique, exciting and — most important of all — radically different to the kind of photos that usually turn up in wedding albums. Clients, says Matt Adcock of Del Sol Photography, one of the leading companies supplying Trash the Dress shoots, are looking to break the rules.

“Most of our clients love the fact that they can be free with what happens to them after the wedding versus those who cringe to even let the dress hit the floor as they are walking down the hallway of a hotel,” he says. “I think our clients are living it up.”

Shooting in the Bat Cave

Del Sol, a six-person photography company run by Matt and his wife Sol Tamargo in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, has been offering Trash the Dress shoots since 2007. In the first year, they completed 28 shoots. In 2008, that total rose to 40 and it’s likely that this year will see a similar number. About half of the company’s jobs now involve Trash the Dress, including a quarter of its weddings.

Locations can vary widely. The most popular spot is the beach at Riviera Maya Mexico, close to Del Sol’s home base. Clients can then choose how far they want to go, from lying on the beach or paddling in the surf (a lightweight form known as “Wash the Dress”) to leaping in the waves and swimming under the water. Other shoots have used swimming pools, sailboats off the island of Cozumel, and perhaps most exciting of all, cenotes, cave networks filled with freshwater lakes.

“We prefer these locations because we can generally have more control over conditions and planning for shooting either in all sunlight, half sunlight, or total cavern environment,” says Matt. “We mix it all up actually.”

The most bizarre shoot took place when Matt was wandering around a site with a client and stumbled upon a ladder leading down to a cave. He discovered a platform made of mud, an underwater lake filled with clear water and the kind of romantic atmosphere you just can’t capture without getting your hands dirty.  There was just one drawback…

Batcave Trash the dress from del Sol Photography

“[We] discovered we were surrounded by bats and LOTS of bat poo,” Matt recalls. “What is most bizarre is that we were able to record the bride in the environment screaming at the bats and not believing where we actually were!”

Swimming with Your Camera

If Trash the Dress shoots demand courage from the client, they can also demand lots of organization from the photographer. Matt notes that while some jobs demand only a few phone calls to book the site and arrange transportation (as opposed to the sort of preparation involved in even a simple wedding gig), others can require multiple diver assistants, safety divers, dive masters and lots of specialist gear. Matt and Sol are both scuba-certified and use watersealed housings to protect their cameras while shooting.

Photography: Del Sol Photography

They also have big insurance policies. Watersealed doesn’t always mean waterproof and many of Matt and Sol’s camera bodies, flashes and pocket wizards have been swimming. Both use the Platinum Membership Plan supplied by Canon Professional Services.

“If you dunk a camera, repair can be much cheaper,” he says. “But if an 85 1.2 and a flash and a pocket wizard is attached to that Pro series body and it hits the agua… OUCH.  Hello insurance company!”

At least the marketing has turned out to be relatively simple. American Photo Magazine has listed Matt and Sol among the Top 10 Wedding Photographers in the world. Their work has been published in several national and international magazines and last year, they were asked to judge a Trash the Dress competition for the Wedding Photojournalism Association. All of that has helped to spread their name far enough for clients to ask for a Trash the Dress shoot without them having to offer it.

A strong portfolio helps too, and Matt recommends that photographers looking to break into Trash the Dress show the work they want to sell, even if it means hiring models and experimenting.

All they’ll have to do then is find a way to ask a bride how she feels about wearing her wedding dress in a cave filled with bats.

Photography: blackbiscuits

The toughest way to sell your editorial images is the one faced by most photographers: you have to pitch your photos directly and unsolicited to photo editors. They look at dozens of portfolios a week and only rarely find images that they like enough to pay for. Fortunately it is also possible to try a different way in. Instead of trying to sell your pictures, you pitch a story — one that comes complete with professional-quality photos.

That might not look like such a smart move. Story editors are just as inundated with pitches as photo editors are. But the queries they receive usually come from writers offering only text. If images are mentioned as part of the package, they tend to be the kind of snaps that might look good in the family album but which don’t reach the professional level publications need.

A photographer who can supply both a high quality article and the images that illustrate it is offering a complete package and solving two problems at once for the publication. He stands out from the crowd of photographers and writers trying to sell their ideas — and he gets a foot in the door that can lead to new shoots.

From Magazines to Galleries

It’s an approach that has worked for Ken Sullins, an equine surgeon and keen photographer. About ten years ago, he became interested in writing, and began successfully pitching stories to outdoors magazines. Soon, he began to put more effort into the photography and it wasn’t long before he was reaching for his camera more often than his pen.

“Very soon the photography became more interesting than the writing,” Ken says. “However, stories with photos still sell better than photos alone.”

Ken is now a semi-professional photographer who regularly sells his prints and whose works frequently appear in galleries.

The principle and process of pitching to story editors are similar to those involved in selling images. First, you have to read and follow the submission requirements. You can usually find these on the magazine’s website and they state exactly how the publication wants to see pitches. Following those instructions should be pretty straightforward — although lots of people still believe that their story ideas are different enough to ignore them, a quick way to be ignored themselves.

Much harder is to make sure that your pitch matches the publication. Magazines have both a specific audience and a specific style. If you tend to shoot photos of cars, for example, you can certainly submit your car photos to a wide range of different magazines but the story that accompanies them has to have the same voice as the publication as a whole. You have to identify whether it’s talking to mechanics who are comfortable with the jargon and the technical details, or whether it’s more likely to be read by young people who are more concerned with looks than specifications. The same story can be written in a number of different ways and it’s important that the pitch matches the approach of the publication. That’s something that can only come through lots of reading and a good understanding of the magazines on the market.

Editorial Photographers Know How to Tell a Story

It’s also something that requires some writing skills so writing your way into editorial photography is not going to be an approach that would suit everyone. But even when it comes to planning a story, photographers do have an advantage. Editorial photographers understand that there’s more to a successful image than the right composition or a pretty use of color combinations. The pictures have to tell a story, and a narrative is precisely what most editors are looking for — both story editors and picture editors.

“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,” says Whitney Lawson, a photo editor at Travel+Leisure Magazine. “This is more the essence of editorial travel photography than a bunch of scenics thrown together that don’t relate to each other.  I don’t need to see a photo of Angkor Wat followed by the Trevi Fountain. What’s the story there? ‘I flew to Cambodia, then I flew to Rome?’”

Whitney who, as well as commissioning photographers also writes and shoots for Travel+Leisure, suggests that photographers looking to make the first steps in travel photography begin by taking a weekend trip with friends, and shoot pictures that portray the vacation in a beautiful way. That’s not a bad way to start writing too.

Of course, pitching and writing aren’t the only ways to get your images into magazines. The best way, of course, is to be well-known. If your style is distinctive enough, when a publication wants pictures like the ones you shoot, they’ll call. You won’t have to do any marketing and when the buyer is making the approach, you get to set the rates.

And if you’re not at this stage yet, then knowing photo editors can help too. There’s no guarantee that they’ll buy, but when you have a friend at the photo desk, you should at least be able to get your pictures seen.

But neither of those routes is going to be open to everyone, so most photographers will find themselves battling the crowds surrounding the photo editor’s desk. Aim for the story editor instead, show that you’ve got great images to match the article and you should be able to give yourself an advantage that other writers just can’t beat.

Whether you then choose to remain a writer and a photographer will be up to you. Having sold images once, you should find it easier to make those sales a second time. But you might well find that you enjoy doing both. Ten years after submitting his articles to magazines, and although he has created a name for himself as an equine photographer, Ken Sullins still writes articles. And he still submits images with them.

Photography: Belinda Strodder

School photography is big business. With hundreds of portrait clients crammed into one space, a sales rate of between 70 and 85 percent, and revenues that can reach as high as $1,000 an hour, it’s no wonder that photographers are keen to get their foot in the school door. And it’s  no wonder too that the market is generally dominated by large companies who have the capacity to manage a stream of subjects, process the images and make them available to parents. When the organization is this important — more important perhaps than the quality of the photography — schools tend to stick with the firms they know. That makes life hard for individual photographers and small studios who also want a piece of the school action. But there are alternatives. Schools might be big and stuffed with children that parents want photographed, but increasing numbers of children are also taking part in after-school activities. While they might not pay a grand an hour, these classes can still generate a useful and regular income stream for independent photographers.

And it’s a growing opportunity too. According to a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, the percentage of students participating in clubs, community service, and sports increased between 2001 and 2005. Twenty percent of children were taking part in religious activities by 2005, 10 percent in Scouts and another 8 percent in community services. But the most popular after-school activities also happened to be the most photogenic. Sports, the most popular of all, saw the highest rise in participation from 28.4 percent to 31.1 percent of kindergarten through eighth grade schoolchildren.

A Market One-Third the Size of School Photography

Or to put it another way, aim to shoot after-school sports activities and you’re aiming at a niche almost a third the size of the high school photography market.

With that size though comes the competition. Much sports activity is organized through schools, giving school photography companies an incumbent’s advantage. TSS Photography even began with sports photography and later developed into school photography itself. Its 225 franchise units now photograph more than 1.5 million children every year.

Rather than try to compete with the big companies who already have the contacts to close down after-school sports activities then, it might be best to target those gyms and sports centers that aren’t connected to schools. Martial arts classes, for example, are very popular with even small children and offer plenty of opportunities to take great shots. The kids wear attractive uniforms, there’s lots of action and there are also regular graduation ceremonies and tests as the children move up a grade. Soccer and hockey too provide many of the same opportunities.

Alternatively, you can target an activity that’s at least as artistic as it is athletic. While religious activities came second in the list of most popular after-school activities — and make for pretty dull pictures — the arts came third, growing from 17.3 percent to 17.9 percent participation between 2001 and 2005. Trying to take pictures of sculpting or creative writing could be a struggle but dance classes offer an endless series of opportunities with frequent rehearsals, practices and performances.

Dance Photography Has Movement

Belinda Strodder, an Australian photographer, shoots for about 20 dance schools, picking up new clients through word-of-mouth referrals and some email-based direct marketing. Her shots may take place during a performance or in the studio while students practice, giving her two very different kinds of shoots.

“For performance photography, I shoot while the performance takes place,” she says. “What a buzz this is because you have to be on your toes with adrenalin pumping. For studio photography it is a mix of posed and candid. Students are  encouraged to dance on set so I can capture movement, and a more  portrait style of shot is captured when they are still.”

Whichever type of job Belinda is doing though, a good dance photo, she says, should contain movement, character and energy. And like sports photography, it helps if the photographer has a good understanding of the form. Belinda herself is a trained dancer and specializes in dance photography, giving her an edge when it comes to both pitching for jobs and landing the right images at the right time. The pinnacle of a movement or jump, for example, is caught by instinct, she says.

Because dance classes tend to be small in comparison to schools, the organization is less important than it needs to be for school photography. But Belinda still has to show the pictures she produces to parents and enable them to place orders. That turns out to be remarkably simple. Belinda uploads and displays the photos using Simpleviewer in conjunction with Porta, two software programs that turn photo directories into easily navigable Flash-based albums. Parents are then given a private URL that enables them to see the shots and choose the images they want to purchase.

All of that is easy to do for any independent photographer but Belinda does copy at least one strategy from high school photography. Part of the deal in winning a school photography contract will usually be a donation paid back to the school by the photography company. The amount varies. According to Chris Wunder of PortraitEFX, Inc. it can be as low as 10 percent in the Midwest and as high as 50 percent in the southeast. The national average is about 20 percent but schools can also ask for other services such as ID cards instead of cash.

Belinda voluntarily gives 7 percent of the revenues she collects back to the dance schools.

“For me it satisfies my need to contribute to a school that  supports my work,” she explains. “For the school I suppose it would help to pay for  hall hire/electricity/extra staff for the shoot day.”

And no doubt it also helps when it comes to winning jobs too.

School photography might be the biggest opportunity in portrait photography but students don’t learn everything they need to know in the classroom. Look to after-school activities and you can both sidestep the big companies and give yourself a far more interesting set of images to shoot at the same time.

Photography: Sarah Clark

Photography is a creative art. No two shoots are ever the same, and certainly no two pictures. But photography is also a business so photographers need processes they can work through, routines they can follow and results they can rely on. When you’re shooting for money, you have to be certain you can deliver and you have to be able to do it quickly and efficiently. Clients too have to know exactly what they should expect when you hand over the images if a commission is not going to look like a gamble. The result is that photographers play it safe. They stick to tried and tested methods, and the sort of traditional jobs that make up the core of so many photographers’ businesses can start to become a little dull — both to the photographer and to customers. Some photographers though are looking for new approaches. They’re trying to shoot traditional jobs in new and more interesting ways.

Wedding photography, for example, is the main revenue-generator in many photography businesses. And it’s also one of the most clichéd. The packages are clearly marked out as are the kinds of shots you can offer clients. There might be poses of the couple in full wedding regalia in a romantic setting, perhaps some images of the bride being made up, photographs of the rings and flowers, and lots of carefully posed formals of the families standing in neat lines. It sells, it’s what customers seem to want so photographers who have bills to pay make sure they offer it.

Wedding photojournalists however take a different approach. Instead of trying to corral the wedding guests into the right places and getting in the way of the proceedings in order to get the shot, these relatively new kinds of wedding photographers attempt to make themselves inconspicuous. Using on-camera lighting or natural light, they shoot like news photographers documenting a day rather than as a paid part of the wedding event itself. The result, says the  Wedding Photojournalist Association, which accepts just 5 percent of applicants, should be “real moments as they happen for the bride and groom.”

Or they could be very unreal moments too. One trend that has sprung out of wedding photojournalism is “Trash The Dress” (TTD). Instead of shooting the usual romantic images in the wedding outfit just before the ceremony, a shoot is held after the wedding has taken place when the dress can take a few knocks. That could mean anything from riding on a horse to walking through a cornfield but it’s also included climbing into a Mexican cave and shooting the couple in waist-deep water. That’s definitely not your usual wedding photography job.

Shoot Portraits Like Paparazzi

If wedding photography can be clichéd, portrait photography can be just plain cheesy. A stool, a non-descript background, a pose that has more to do with Rodin’s Thinker than the personality of the subject, and a tiny studio in a shopping mall are all it takes to earn a few bucks shooting images that will one day be shelf ornaments. It’s a job. It can bring in a few bucks but it’s a long way from the kind of creativity and originality that draw most camera-lovers into professional photography.

Brooklyn photographer Izaz Rony believes that he has found a way around those formulaic images. Rather than bringing subjects into his studio, or even standing them in a suitable outdoor location, he asks his clients to tell him where they’ll be at a certain time of day then shoots them from a distance. His $500-an-hour service provides clients with paparazzi-style shots that look natural and unposed.

And he’s not the only one offering the paparazzi experience. Celeb4aday provides the whole package, including limousine, bodyguard and publicist. The photography might not be the main feature but it is part of the deal (and the company has recently been looking for amateur and professional photographers to join in the fun. You can drop them a line at imcool@celeb4aday.com).

Cool School Photography

The biggest opportunity in portrait photography though lies in schools, where photography companies get to shoot hundreds of portraits in one session. It’s a niche that requires plenty of organization and often some fairly hefty marketing clout to beat off the large firms that already have their foot in their door.

Chris Wunder, producer of a series of school photography marketing DVDs, has told us that it’s possible to generate more than $1,000 an hour shooting school portraits, although not all of that will be profit. Despite these sorts of sums, most school photography tends to be both formal and formulaic: a class sits together on a bench, or a child sits quickly on a chair.

Sarah Clark, a British portrait photographer, tries to take natural-looking images at the one large school and two pre-schools where she shoots.

“My aim is to photograph a child in a school environment where they feel relaxed and capture their personality as well as reflecting the school’s ethos.  As a result most of my photography takes place outside,” Sarah says.

The shoot takes place quickly and efficiently so that the children don’t become bored and the school doesn’t lose too much time, she explains, but it’s filled with lots of chat and silly jokes. During the individual portraits, Sarah will often ask a child’s friends to make faces behind her so that the session is filled with lots of giggles and chattering.

“By following this approach with the children, they soon relax with me and my camera, as do the teachers,” says Sarah. “They start to realise that having your photo taken can be fun.”

Many of the photos will be black-and-white although shots of sports teams, nativities and plays are produced in color. Some schools also specifically ask for color photos but most important is that the images are natural, relaxed and match the school’s ethos. Part of Sarah’s marketing package includes allowing the school to use the photos for promotional purposes. Those unusual school photos then have to reflect both the personalities of the children and the character of the school.

That might be a challenge but it’s a lot more interesting than sitting a stream of kids on a stool and producing the traditional school portrait.

Photographers just want to shoot pictures. They want to be on the set, arranging the lights, telling the model how to stand, and looking for the killer composition. They want to be busy creating the perfect image that makes the client gasp and which gives them a belly full of warm fuzzies. They don’t want to be marketing. They don’t want to be interviewing assistants. And they certainly don’t want to be listing everything they’re going to need for a shoot and trying to figure out how much they’re going to have to charge for each item. But however large a headache invoicing and bidding might be, it’s an essential part of paid photography.

Lou Lesko, however, is trying to make it easier, less time-consuming and more efficient at providing buyers with the information they need to consider a photographer’s bid. A fashion photographer with experience of photojournalism, Lou moved into videography and in 1999, began directing commercials. As the work came in, he started looking for a way to spend more time behind the camera creating and earning, and less time in front of the monitor creating inventory lists for clients. The search wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be:

“As I was directing more, I had less time to do my own photography bids,” he told us, “so my producer and I went on the hunt to find easy-to-use software.  There really wasn’t any available.”

Rather than continue preparing his bids and invoices by hand, Lou created his own software program. He produced a design for a workflow and asked a programmer he knew to create a custom database. After working with it for a few months, he realized he had a product that other photographers might find useful.

BlinkBid Means You Don’t Forget the Talent

BlinkBid allows photographers to click and choose their way through a huge range of different options, making creating invoices and detailed bids simple and automatic. The program has already been used by thousands of creative professionals who work in four different languages and is particularly popular in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and New Zealand. In India, it’s used by videographers and it’s now taking off in Sri Lanka as well. At $229 it’s not cheap, but you wouldn’t need to save too many hours working with your own invoicing system to ensure that it pays for itself.

And it’s not just time that a proper billing and bidding system can save. BlinkBid also makes sure that any bid you submit is comprehensive and accurate.

“The biggest issue I had [before creating BlinkBid] was remembering everything I needed for a shoot,” explains Lou. “I was notorious for forgetting things like food and talent and — back in the day — Polaroid.  Also, I had no idea what a usage license was or how that all worked.”

Those details might seem small but they are important. Any creative professional knows the feeling of mission creep, when the client continually asks for just a little more and the professional ends up supplying a much bigger service than the quote originally included.

For creative types like photographers, it’s a real problem, says Lou, and one that can have a serious affect on your income even beyond the costs involved in completing one particular job. The more you do beyond your original agreement, the more you dilute your value as an artist, he explains. But when you’re faced with an interesting project, one that you’re actually going to enjoy shooting, it’s tempting to forget about the money and agree to everything.

“In a creative industry, especially when you’re providing service for money, you must have an agreement indicating what the expectations are for your talent, otherwise you’ll get cheated,” he says. “Paradoxically, creative people aren’t usually inclined for all this paperwork, because all we really want to do is create – whether we’re getting paid or not….

[T]here are times when I was jonesing so bad to be on a set anywhere, that I had to bite my tongue during negotiations to keep from saying, ‘Screw it, I’ll pay you, let’s just go shoot this thing.’”

Notoriety Affects Photography Prices

That’s also why BlinkBid won’t create the prices. It’s possible that the software simply isn’t set up to provide the kind of complex pricing information supplied by fotoQuote – data that involves thousands of different variables and needs to be constantly updated – but according to Lou, the lack of automated pricing is deliberate. The market value of a photographer, he says, depends on more than the product. Notoriety and reputation also have a huge effect on the price a photographer can charge; a photographer who is known for creating the kind of bold, innovative images that buyers are looking for will always be able to charge more than a less creative competitor even if both are bidding for the same job.

It might be best then to think of fotoQuote as a useful tool for pricing off-the-shelf stock images but BlinkBid as a method for assignment photographers to organize their invoicing and bidding, and ensure that their copyrights are protected.

For professional photographers struggling to create the kind of comprehensive bids that are clear, comprehensive and which avoid conflict with clients in the future, BlinkBid looks like a useful solution. But it also represents a model of untapped opportunity for photographers. Lou Lesko isn’t a programmer. He’s not a software designer and he’s not a coder. He’s a professional photographer who was struggling with one aspect of his photography business. When he created a solution to deal with that problem, he realized that he had a product for other photographers too.

If you’re struggling with some of your photography business then – whether it’s cataloguing, pitching, sharing your portfolio or preparing for art fairs – look for a way to automate the solution. You might just have found another way to make money with photography.

When you’re searching for a niche in which to specialize, there’s often one ideal place to look. Pick a subject that genuinely interests you, something that you’ve been shooting anyway just for  fun and you’ll not only be earning a little extra cash, you’ll also have that unbeatable feeling that you’re being paid to do something you find immensely satisfying. It’s the perfect combination: an interesting photography project that costs you nothing and that actually gives you money.  That’s what happened to Kevin Baumann, a photographer and Web developer from Detroit.

Kevin’s 100 Abandoned Houses project is a collection of images showing the derelict homes of his city. His images sell as prints, his online gallery earns ad revenue and his work has been highlighted in the New York Times and on ABC. Best of all, the attention his images have generated have helped him to bring donations to local charities that work in the subject his images portray.

Kevin had been a professional photographer for about five years, shooting architectural images, product photography and lifestyle photos for Michigan businesses. As the car industry continued to shrink though and as automotive photographers in Detroit began to look for other lines of work, so Kevin found the photography market increasingly saturated. Web development had looked like an interesting challenge and what was once a side job has now become his main profession, with photography a paying hobby. And it was as a hobby that he first began shooting pictures of abandoned houses. Kevin traveled around Detroit taking pictures of dilapidated properties that caught his eye. The pictures are shot front-on so that the building’s façade — and that façade’s decay – is clear. It’s a style that allows the building to speak for itself, with minimal interference from the photographer, Kevin explains.

70 Print Sales in One Week

After a few years, his trips had given him a large collection of images which he decided to turn into a series of 100 pictures.

“At first 100 seemed like a lot of abandoned houses, but it’s really not, and I’ve gone well beyond 100,” he told us. “Almost every abandoned house is interesting in some way, though I don’t photograph every single one I see. Some are more striking than others.”

There was no agenda, he points out. He wasn’t intending to make a political point about the city through his images or appeal for funds for renovation. The buildings simply fascinated him and in photographing them, he felt he was able to understand Detroit and its problems a little better.

Kevin placed the photos online and found that when the economy declined – and in particular, as the automotive industry declined – so attention turned increasingly towards Detroit’s problems. When the New York Times described the project in its New York edition, traffic to the website leapt. Around 8,000 unique visitors stopped by to look at his photos on the day the article came out, attention that led to a sudden jump in sales.

So far, Kevin has sold 100 limited edition prints and 25 prints in “other sizes.” The limited editions of ten 5 x5 inch prints sell for $35 each, plus postage, of which ten dollars is given to charities such as Habitat for Humanity and The Greening of Detroit. The larger prints, of course,  sell for more. Seventy of those sales came in the week the New York Times ran its article. The pages also have some carefully optimized AdSense units which do particularly well with visitors who reach the site from AOL. StumbleUpon and Digg both send Kevin lots of traffic but none of those users convert into buyers.

That might be because the images to appeal to a focused market. The prints are particularly popular with ex-Detroiters, followed by people who live on the coast. New Yorkers make up the largest geographical area for buyers, but no one living in Detroit has bought any of Kevin’s photos.

“[W]hy would they?” he asks. “I don’t think someone who lives among abandoned houses finds them to be intriguing like so many others do.”

None of the owners or former residents of the houses have contacted Kevin after seeing their homes on his site, but he has been asked by owners of other properties to take pictures of their old houses. Many haven’t seen them in years, Kevin explains, and wonder about their state.

Keep the Prices Low

For photographers looking for a project which would be both interesting and rewarding then, Kevin’s experience offers a number of lessons. The most obvious is to shoot what you enjoy first and then look for a way to make money out of it. Kevin was motivated primarily by his fascination with his city, and not by the attention or the money his images might generate.

When it comes to making those sales, it’s a good idea to keep the prices low – unless you already have gallery representation or a big name (and big value) to protect.

“Most people who are interested in photography can’t afford or won’t spend hundreds or thousands on prints,” says Kevin. “I will, and do sell, larger and more expensive prints, but the smaller less expensive ones allow more people to purchase them.”

Affordably-priced prints then are important, and Kevin is now working on a photography book that he’ll make available too. Finding a cause to support is helpful as well. Kevin stresses that he didn’t want take advantage of Detroit’s situation but rather do something helpful with  his project. The donations he gives to local environmental charities make his prices more appealing to potential customers who get to feel that they’re not just buying a print but also giving back to the community.

As for subjects, Kevin has been contacted by plenty of other photographers who want to do something similar in their areas, but he questions whether there would be as much interest in a city that wasn’t as politically sensitive as Detroit is now.  New neighborhoods though, especially those have not been completed and which also include abandoned houses, might make for some interesting projects, he says. That’s something to think about as the economy picks up.

Photography: Rachael Waller

Every niche requires specialized knowledge and a relationship with the subject. Few niches though demand a connection as close as the bond that equine photographers feel with horses. Whether they’re shooting portraits for clients, documenting action shots to illustrate magazine articles or creating fine art pictures that will hang first on gallery walls and then in the ranches of wealthy buyers, for the photographer, it’s always an affinity with horses and an understanding of the breed – as well as a knowledge of photography – that’s necessary to land the shot. That part of the craft has to be felt, not learned.

Rachael Waller has been a professional photographer for 20 years, and first learned her photography skills assisting her father, Robert James Waller, a photographer and author of The Bridges of Madison County. She later completed a BFA and MFA in film at California Institute of The Arts. But she has also been around horses since she was young, owns thirteen of them, is married to Rod Rondeaux, a Hollywood horse stuntman, and regularly helps equine rescue charities. That dedication, she says, is essential for creating effective images of horses.

“I have been knee deep in mud, asleep with hay in my hair… been smack dab in the middle of  wild stallions fighting on the range, and stood in a field with a herd passing me at a thunderous speed (I can still feel the wind in my hair from that one!), up all night waiting on a foal birth to photograph and if I didn’t love horses, I wouldn’t have experienced any of that or captured some of the most amazing moments in my life,” she told us. “I love the big faces that I see through  my lens, the messy manes, the deep expressive eyes, the personalities, a foal’s warm breath on a crisp spring morning.

“Anyone can snap a photo of a horse. In order to bring out their spirit and presence, that split second must be surrounded by love and compassion or it doesn’t work.”

Dedication then is one challenge that equine photographers have to overcome, and either you have it – in which case, it’s no challenge at all – or you don’t, in which case it’s insurmountable. But it’s not the only challenge. Equine photographers have to face the same lighting difficulties as other branches of photography. They have to make sure that feeder bins or bits of fencing haven’t crept into the shot in the same way that architectural photographers have to handle dustbins and yard furniture. But they also have to know whether a horse has had time to eat its breakfast, whether it’s been abused and is still healing, and whether it’s just unruly. Like portrait subjects, horses can also get tired, upset and annoyed, explains Rachael.

Equine Photographers Need Patience

If patience is a photographer’s most important tool after the body and lens then, it’s particularly important while photographing horses.

“I work with many rescued horses and waiting is part of the process,” says Rachael. “All horses will give you ‘their’ moment, when they are ready to.”

Rachael, who is also a documentary photographer and recently became Latin rock band Del Castillo’s official photographer, sells her work in galleries, to magazines and through interior designers. Every year, she submits images to a number of key galleries as well as to several juried exhibitions. Those submissions feed a word-of-mouth referral system that helps to bring in commissions.

Ken Sullins, an equine surgeon and part-time photographer, also finds that gallery exhibitions help his images to sell. While he has a website, sales from his online gallery, he says, are more occasional than brisk. A local gallery, where buyers can see his high-end canvases, tends to be more effective, and his business plan includes donating to charity auctions, which increases exposure.

But buyers differ too. Photo editors want pictures that tell a story but horse-lovers tend to buy the scenic shots and the “cute” mares and foals that Ken places in his online gallery, while equine professionals generally prefer to see something with a little more artistry and a deeper connection.

“It may be a close up of an eye, interaction of a team, athleticism or emotion of a mare and foal,” Ken explains. “It is however, more difficult to get those images in front of the right people.”

When it comes to access, owning horses is, of course, a big help. In addition to the horses on her own ranches, Rachael Waller has a network of friends, clients and horse sanctuaries that give her a palette of 400 horses to photograph, ranging from stallions and Mustangs to rescued horses with dorsal stripes. That provides plenty of variety. Ken Sullins tends to shoot at the horse farms which are his hospital’s clients, and he also attends the kind of events which he knows can provide the right subject material, light and access.

Make Friends with the Official Photographer

Those events can also be good entrances for anyone interested in trying their hand at equine photography, recommends Rachael. Most shows will have an official photographer so you should talk to them or the show officials first about shooting. Becoming an assistant can be helpful too, so it’s worth making sure that you don’t get in his or her way. Local horse groups and rescue centers can also be good ways in, and sometimes it’s possible to find a workshop that teach horse-lovers how to capture equine images.

Originality is also important for equine photographs. It’s a relatively small niche and most photographers can identify who shot an image just by looking at it, says Rachael. Copying someone else’s style won’t get you very far, but developing an approach of your own should help you to stand out.

“There is also only so many angles and parts of a horse we can all shoot so it comes down to style and vision,” Rachael points out.

It’s notable too that both Rachael and Ken Sullins do spend a great deal of time helping horses. Ken gives away occasional images and Rachael always donates a percentage of a sale when she photographs wild horses or works for a rescue center. Some of that is just good business, but most of it comes from the dedication to horses that an equine photography business depends on.

There are countless photography schools across America. Our list of the top photography schools describes 24 of the best. That list was never meant to be comprehensive though so it’s great that so many people have weighed in with comments about their own schools. But while photography courses today cover just about every conceivable photography topic from equipment and lighting  to post-production and editing, are there things that photography teachers aren’t telling students that – as they head out into the real world – those new photographers really should know?

Technique is certainly covered pretty well. Any accredited three or four-year degree course should have enough time to teach students about composition, lighting and equipment use. For the Art Institutes, a series of private art schools across America currently teaching around 2,600 photography students, those lessons are good enough to deliver an employment rate in a photography-related field within six months of graduation of 83.8 percent for Associate degree-holders and 90.4 percent for Bachelors degree-holders.

But today, photography schools don’t just teach what to do with a camera, they also devote at least part of their teaching time to running a photography business, skills that new photographers are certainly going to need. And those courses aren’t taught by academics who have never had to earn a living with their camera but by professional photographers who have faced the real challenges of finding clients and selling images.

“The curriculum consists of business-related courses like Advanced Communications, Composition and Language, and Business of Photography, as well as course-focused practicum,” Suzanne Cibotti, a spokesperson for the Art Institute told us. “Our faculty generally have backgrounds as photographers and have real-world experience in everything from fine art to event to photojournalism.”

And yet, when we asked a few young photographers what they wish they’d known before graduation, the answers were never about technique but always about specific aspects of the photography business.

How Much Am I Worth?

Ritchie Patton, a photography student at Glasgow Metropolitan College in Scotland, felt that his school did an excellent job at preparing students for the realities of the job market, emphasizing the importance of persistent networking and describing the legal aspects of photography, for example. But it was the nitty-gritty of pricing that was puzzling him as began selling his images.

“[A]s far as I know our lecturers don’t really hold anything back. The lecturers at Glasgow Met really are the business. It has been explained to us how difficult the market is and how the best way to get noticed is to just never disappear,” Ritchie says. “I suppose the one thing we haven’t covered a lot is the finance aspect of starting your own business. How much to charge clients etc. We have covered certain legal areas like copyright, model releases etc. but one thing I never know myself is how much my abilities are actually worth to someone requiring them. I think I tend to sell myself cheap.”

That’s a problem that even many old pros would identify with. Pricing is one of the hardest issues facing any self-employed professional and rates can vary tremendously depending on location, skill, experience and fierceness of competition. The degree to which you actually need the job plays a big role too. While there’s never going to be a simple answer to a student asking how much he should charge someone who wants to hire them for a wedding job, it is possible to explain the factors that go into setting a price — and point out that those fees will change with experience and specialization. And the good news is that photographers who charge too little tend not to do so for very long.

For other students though, the most important unanswered question wasn’t about money but visibility, especially when it came to landing their works in the most prestigious photography sites of all: art galleries.

“What is the best way to get my work seen? How do I really communicate and connect with galleries and art spaces?” asks Melanie Diaz, another young photographer.

Again, it’s easy to see why photography teachers might have skipped around this issue. Susan Kirchman of the Kirchman Gallery in Texas has told us that of the 50 enquiries she receives from photographers each year, she might accept just three. Walking in off the street with an armful of pictures and no appointment is never going to work but starting with juried group shows that build a resume and enhance credibility might. And following the submission requirements posted on the gallery’s website is always important too.

How Do I Persuade Someone to Buy My Pictures?

For any photographer though, much depends on an ability not just to shoot good pictures but to persuade a buyer or a gallery owner to look at them — and then to help them to recognize that the photos are sellable or usable. That’s an issue that concerns Caitlin Durlak, a young Canadian photographer who studied photography at a fine art school:

“I think showing your work in galleries can be similar trying to sell your work… They overlap when it comes to the idea of being your own representative or ‘salesman,’” says Caitlin. “You have to know not only how to talk about your own work  but also how to make different people interested in it. We never talked about this at school. Making photographs was always a very personal method of working, almost never working as a team or having to prove its worth.”

That’s certainly a big difference between school and the commercial world. In the classroom there are no consequences for failing to talk up your own work and the only benefit of doing so is the compliments of classmates or the grades of a teacher. In the real world, the ability to sell determines how much you earn.

But ultimately, a photographic work should be able to speak for itself and there’s a limit to how much you can teach the ability to pitch to wedding clients or gallery owners. And it’s also helpful that if no schools are teaching salesmanship then competitors aren’t going to know how to stress sales points and overcome objections either.

Photography schools have come a long way in preparing students for life outside the classroom. Most teach basic business skills. Some even have links to galleries that enable the best students to build their resumes. But really no school can prepare students for every eventuality that they’ll meet when talking to clients and selling their work. There are some questions that can only be answered with experience.

Photography: Matthew Fang

When it comes to winning sales, photographers have a huge advantage. Not only do they own one of the most powerful marketing tools a business can use, but they’re also experts at operating it. A camera – and the images the camera creates – is always a great way to engage leads and communicate your talent. But there’s one feature on a digital camera that has a marketing power all of its own, and it’s one that few photographers bother to make the most of. Shoot video as well as stills and the result can be a whole new way of talking to customers, winning trust and telling people what they can expect once they’ve hired you.

The footage you create can be given away as promotional DVDs, uploaded to a blog to give an insight into the way you work that can’t be communicated through a portfolio, and it can include still samples from the shoot to create an additional distribution channel for your portfolio shots. Altogether, shifting the function button from shooting to videoing can give you a whole new way of promoting your work.

Are You a Photographer or a Videographer?

Two photographers who do make use of videography are Lan and Bu Vui, brothers who together run a successful photography business. After finding that they were busy enough to give up their day jobs, they turned professional two years ago, and now offer headshots, wedding photography, commercial images and fashion shoots, dividing the work between them. In addition to their still photography services though, the brothers also offer videography, shooting ads for businesses and creating video-based electronic press kits as well as profile videos, live-streaming event services and Web shows.

“Our photographer friends see us as the video guys and our video and new media friends see us as photographers,” says Lan.

The move into video work began with an interest in video blogging. The Bui brothers were among the founders of the Yahoo! Videoblogging group, and in 2008 produced the The [b] School Blog, a daily educational videoblog for photographers. They were also the official photographers for the Streamys, The International Academy of Web Television awards. As they started shooting and uploading, each clip, they decided, needed to be better than the last. Although they often shoot on equipment no more complex than a point-and-shoot camera on video mode, and occasionally even a mobile phone, they soon found themselves winning commercial work.

Their background as photographers helps. According to Lan, his knowledge of photography has a strong influence on the way he shoots movies, enabling him, for example, to reduce equipment costs. As a natural light photographer, Lan says, he’s usually able to skip the tons of lighting equipment often used by film crews, and can even avoid using a reflector.

Lan and Vu’s knowledge of film-making has given them an additional revenue stream (and they now sell DVDs that teach others how to make DVDs) but it’s also helped them to promote their photography business. By placing behind-the-scenes clips taken at their shoots to their blogs, they’re able to talk directly to potential clients, show how they work and win the trust that leads to sales.

“Our videos really have done a lot for us that I don’t think a blog post or just some photos could ever do,” Lan says. “From a marketing point, I can’t think of a better way we can connect with our potential clients… and that is where we get hired… not from great work… not from a killer sales team… but by connecting with our viewer.”

At just over a minute, the videos are neither long nor outrageously sophisticated. Still images from the shoot are combined with comment aimed at the video camera, background music and questions and answers with the model to create an understanding of how the brothers conduct their photography. They’re entertaining and fun to watch, but they still broadcast a strong marketing message.

A Behind-the-Scenes Movie Should Be Part of the Shoot

Nor does creating the clips have to mean adding a great deal of work on top of the usual workload involved in shooting and processing the still images. According to Lan, a short behind-the-scenes promotional video should be considered as part of the shoot itself. Creating the footage can be as simple as holding up your iPhone and talking to the lens — something that Lan does often in his shoots — and while the clip might demand some editing, post-production work and uploading, photographers need to accept the fact that a clip will never be perfect. In fact, says Lan, a casual approach is actually the best way to go about creating a promotional behind-the-scenes video.

“[T]he most important thing to do is to talk to the camera and be yourself,” he advises. “Too often I see photographers post behind the scenes videos that are just music videos showing them holding a camera to their face… how can a client connect with you through that?”

Or better still, he advises, point the camera at the client and ask him or her to talk to the lens. Hearing you talk about the great pictures you’re going to produce has some marketing power, but hearing a client talk about the great pictures you’ve produced in the past for them makes for a fantastic video testimonial.

Photographers and videographers often have an ambiguous relationship, with each side sometimes seeing the other as a kind of creative rival. One of the responses to Flickr’s decision to allow members to upload files that are “like a photo but it moves” was the establishment of a group called “No Video on Flickr” which now has over 11,000 members. The “We Say Yes to Videos on Flickr” group has just 877 members. But videographers and photographers work together on weddings and the skills needed to do one job overlap with the skills needed to do the other.

Put the two together, add some new skills and you should find that you have more to offer and a better way of offering it.

Photography: ToastyKen

Photographers have felt the effects of outsourcing in surprising ways. Back in the glory days of photojournalism, shelling out thousands of dollars to ship a photographer to a war zone might have been considered as much a part of a news magazine’s expenses as typewriter ribbon, shoe leather and lengthy bar tabs. Today, with subscriptions falling, advertisers turning to the Web, and perfectly good local photographers with top-of-the range equipment available in locations from Afghanistan to Zambia, it makes little sense for a publication to pay a foreign photographer’s per diems, let alone the plane fare. When the war in Iraq was at its hottest, many of the images that appeared in the world’s top news publications were shot by local photographers who were working for the wires. But how has geography affected other aspects of photography, and are the price differences something that smart photographers can take advantage of?

Clearly, the differences in the cost of living around the world offer plenty of advantages for clients. When Grazia, a style magazine originally from Italy, opened its ninth edition in India in April 2008, local assignment and fashion photographers should have been rejoicing. They now had an opportunity to shoot for a prestigious magazine that valued images and would pay a professional rate. The reality though was slightly different.

Major Magazine Publishers See Local Photographers as Cheap Labor

To judge by an ad placed on Lightstalkers.org by the magazine’s photo editor, Natasha Hemrajani, Grazia appears to have seen its location on the sub-continent as a chance to tap into some particularly cheap labor. The magazine was looking for a photographer in Kerala to take a portrait of a Yoga teacher for one of its first editions. The budget for the shoot was 2,000 rupees. That’s about $50.

The request caused a bit of a storm and to her credit, Natasha, a freelance photographer herself, did sound embarrassed to be making it:

“[F]or some reason we’ve been asked to launch on a ridiculously low budget and shoots come to my department pre-expensed,” she wrote. “[I]f this doesn’t work out we’ll have to run with images sent to us by the subject herself but I’m hoping that there’s someone out there who’ll do shoot for us at this price.”

It’s possible that she got lucky. The average income in India is about $66 per month so $50 for a day’s shooting (minus expenses) might not look like such a bad deal — at least to the magazine. But for a local photographer who’s still had to buy several thousand dollars’ worth of camera equipment, it would make more sense to stay in bed.

Or turn to wedding photography, where prices can be more comparable with other parts of the world. At least one Indian photography firm is offering shoots that range in price from 20,000 rupees to as much as a million rupees. $500 might sound like a bargain rate for a wedding shoot, but it’s likely that most customers are taking packages that are much higher. Frank Chen, a photographer based in Shanghai, for example, charges 20,000 yuan for a typical wedding package. At around $3,000, that’s roughly equivalent to the amount typically paid in the United States. (Although if he were in the United States, it’s possible that Frank, a particularly experienced wedding specialist, might be able to charge more.)

It’s likely that other photographers — those who don’t speak English, don’t advertise on the Internet, and who target only local markets made up of people with average incomes — are charging a great deal less. It is clear though that for some photographers it is possible to charge a rate that’s close to the amount earned in richer parts of the world. Whether they actually get those rates as frequently though, is a different question.

Who Cares Where the Stock Photographer Is?

The situation looks a little rosier for stock photographers. While the prices of rights-managed images are set in part according to the location in which the image will be used, in practice, the region appears to have little effect on the fee. Changing the area in fotoQuote, for example, software that generates Rights-Managed quotes according to the industry standard, has far less effect on the price than changing the usage. EnviroSEA, a photography organization that promotes the work of photographers in Southeast Asia, charges up to $149 for prints of its members’ images and uses fotoQuote to generate its fees, rejecting any image priced under $49. Even its royalty-free images start at $69 for a 500 pixel “Web” image and rise to $289 for an “original size” photo. There are plenty of microstock photographers in places more expensive than Thailand who would like to be earning sales prices like these.

But EnviroSEA’s approach makes sense. When it comes to buying images, clients don’t care where the photographer who produced it lives. They only care whether the photo can do the job they want and whether it’s worth the price that’s being asked.

The effect of geography on photography then is mixed. For clients, the presence of a professional close to the location of a shoot can have a dramatic effect on the expenses involved in getting the picture. Natasha Hemrajani wasn’t just looking for a photographer in India; she wanted one in Kerala who could reach the subject of the shoot without incurring more than ten or twenty dollars’ worth of expenses. But the price of the equipment alone means that there’s a limit to how low photographers can cut their prices even in parts of the world with low incomes.

On the other hand, when it comes to selling pre-made items such as stock images on a global market, the location of the photographer has little effect. If a buyer in London or New York is willing to pay several hundred dollars to use an image, he doesn’t look at the photographer’s bio to see where he is. He just pays the fee and takes the picture… and uses it on the other side of the world.

Correction: The original post incorrectly described Amit Bhargava as the photo editor who posted Grazia’s ad. He is not a photo editor at that magazine nor, he says, would he “offer or work for such a ridiculous amount.” Our apologies to Amit.

Twitter’s limitations mean that it might not be a great place to show off a photo gallery, but the site can still be a valuable resource for photographers, both amateur and professional. We’ve scoured Twitter and produced a categorized list of all the accounts that can help photographers improve their picture-taking, and produce and sell their images. This isn’t a list of photographers on Twitter; it’s a list of businesses, organizations and outlets on Twitter that can help photographers. We’ve provided the name, the Twitter username and, in most cases, an edited version of their bio.

Photography Organizations

Wedding and Portrait Photographers International @WPPI_2010

professional photography organization that puts on professional photography trade show and convention every year.

S F Camerawork @sfcamerawork

A non-profit organization that encourages emerging and mid-career artists to explore new directions in photography and related media.

The Lucie Foundation @luciefoundation

Non-profit photography organization aimed at encouraging and exhibiting photographers of all styles.

North American Nature Photography Association @nanpa_news

National Press Photographers Association @nppa

National Press Photographers Association: advancing professional visual journalism through education, information, networking, business resources and advocacy

White House News Photographers Association @whnpa

White House News Photographers Association

NAPP @NAPP_News

National Association of Photoshop Professionals (led by Scott Kelby), resource for Photoshop training.

ASMP @ASMP

ASMP – American Society of Media Photographers

PPA @OurPPA

Photography association

Photo Labs and Supplies

Apollo Photo@apollophoto

Online, full-service photo lab specializing in digital prints, press-printed photo products, specialty photo items, and studio marketing products and services.

F-11 Photographic @F11Photo

Photographic supplies store and full service lab.

McKenna Pro Lab @McKennaPro

Pro Lab.

PhotoWeek @Photomart

Digital Photographic Supplies

Pictureline @pictureline

professional camera store.

foto care@FotoCare

sales, support and rental of all of the latest gear.

Jennifer Vasile @probackdrops

Professional Backdrops

Elephas Creations @SudhirShivaram

Nature and Wildlife Photography Solutions. Lens Library (lens rental), Photography Workshop, Outdoors, Stock Photography.

Photography News @PhotogNews

News about new cameras, digital photography tips, equipment reviews, and examples

Nikon Pro @NikonPro

Nikon news, Nikon tips, and information about photography and Nikon equipment. Written by Mike Downey @mdowney

DigitalFusion Rental @DFrental

Professional Digital Photography Equipment Capture and Rental

Doug Murdoch @thinkTANKphoto

professional photography equipment manufacturer

Robert Medina @thelightcaddy

Off Camera Flash Photography Equipment Bag

Chris Klapheke @ChrisKlapheke

Online nature photography equipment retailer

Sinar Bron USA @Sinarbron

distributes professional photography equipment in North America

Photography Reviews @photoreviews

Providing reviews of photography equipment, cameras, tripods, lenses, monopods and more

Camera Cart @Cameracart

photography rental equipment

Owen’s Originals @OwensOriginals

Photography Equipment Seller

Intova @Intova

Carl Fischer @nikoncameralens

blog on digital camera lenses.

Peter Wipf @alzodigital

Designer and manufacturer of video and photography equipment

Henry Posner @bandhphoto

B&H: The Professional’s Source since 1973

Lee Filters @leefilters

Cameta Camera @cameta

A Camera Store

LensRentals.com @LensRentals

Internet photo/video rental company, presently carrying 2014 copies of 281 lenses, plus cameras and accessories

Calumet Photo @calumetphoto

Camera retailer selling Nikon, Canon, Hasselblad and more.

Leica Camera AG @leica_camera

Hasselblad USA @hasslebladusa

Stock Agencies

John Lund @stockphotoguy

Stock Photographer, Stock Blog, Photog Interviews, Photoshop stories…

iStockScoop @iStock

iStockScoop: The ultimate (unofficial) resource clearinghouse for all istockers!

istockcharts.de @istockcharts

Shutterstock images @Shutterstock

Subscription Royalty-Free Stock Photography

Tyler Olson / Leaf @microstockgroup

A meeting place for microstock photographers.

iStockphoto @istockhelp

Online Stock Photography Community

Getty Images @GettyImages

Dreamstime @dreamstime

Image Source @ImageSource

royalty free stock photography.

Sodapix Photo Agency @Sodapix

Stock Photography @dynamitestock

Stock Photography site offering low cost economical images for immediate download.

painet @painet

Stock Photo Agency & Photograph Search Engine & photography research. Painet publishes topical websites of images as Twitter Tweets.

Maggie Hunt @StockShop

Exclusive Model Released Stock Photography

Phototake, Inc. @Phototake

Medical Images – Illustrations-Photography-Microscopy & Custom Work

Stock Photos @Colorado_Image

Stock photography focused on Colorado, licensed for advertising and promotional use… follow for newest photos

Aurora Photos @Aurora_Photos

Stock photography agency based in Portland, ME with offices in NYC, CA and London offering an archive of exotic, visually dynamic, and diverse imagery.

EmageStock @emagestock

The Site of Natural Photography Stock

picNiche @picniche

Automatically reporting stock photography niches found scoring above 400. Follow (@bobbigmac for info )

Matt Brading @OzImages

Stock Photography Co-op. Follow for photographer and library updates.

AVID StockPhoto @AVIDStockPhoto

royalty-free stock photo subscription

Amy J. Boyd @amyjboyd

IPhoto Researcher for a stock photography company, also directing and producing my first independent documentary about a local non-profit cinema arts co.

fotosearch @fotosearch

Stock photography and stock footage website.

NoEquivalent Art @noequivalent

A fine art and stock photography store ; focus on High-end Wall Decor and Unrestricted Exclusive Stock images.

visualsafari @visualsafari

Creative Wildlife, Landscape, Nature & Travel Stock Photography.

colouria Stock Photo @colouria

Edited stock photography collections

Cutcaster @cutcaster

Product Outlets

Zazzle.com, Inc. @zazzle

custom products marketplace

cafepress @cafepress

Etsy! @etsy

handmade marketplace.

blurbinc @blurbinc

Real books. Made by you.

SmugMug @smugmug

Photography Magazines

LayersMagazine @LayersMagazine

The How-To Magazine for Everything Adobe®. 

Jpgmag @jpgmag

Magazine made by you.

Photoshop Creative @PshopCreative

magazine for Adobe Photoshop inspiration and advice

Advanced Photoshop @advancedpshop

The magazine for Adobe Photoshop professionals

ePHOTOzine @ePHOTOzine

photography community.

Lens Culture @lensculture

online magazine celebrating current trends in international contemporary photography, art, media, and world cultures. Edited by Jim Casper

1854 @1854

weekly magazine for professional photographers.

Photography Monthly @Photomonthly

The photographic community. Galleries, camera equipment reviews, tips, techniques and locations.

Amateur Photographer @AP_Magazine

photography magazine

414 Magazine @414Magazine

BCP Magazine@BCPMagazine

Breakfast Club Photography Magazine, a magazine by photographers

1000 Words@1000wordsmag

online magazine dedicated to highlighting the best of contemporary fine art photography in the UK and beyond.

LiveNLoud Magazine @LiveNLoud

Music Photography Magazine

PicturaPixel @picturapixel

Pictura means painting, image. Pixel is the smallest element of an image. PicturaPixel is a multimidia magazine dedicated to photography.

dphotomagazine @dphotomagazine

New Zealand’s Photography Magazine

Light Leaks Magazine @LightLeaksPress

Nature’s Best @naturesbestpics

Displaying the beauty of nature through the art of photography.

Flare @flaremag

German magazine for young photography

Susan A. Zadeh @EyemazingSusan

Photography Director EYEMAZING magazine, International Contemporary Photography magazine

koko magazine @kokomagazine

New Music, New Fashion, New Photography.

WINk magazine @WINkmag

Photography News and Views

Smartphotography.in @SPmagazine

India’s  photography magazine

Santa Art Magazine @santamagazine

A leading Brazilian magazine about visual art and photography.

BlackFlash Magazine @BlackFlashmag

photography and new media in art. art from Canada, USA, Europe and beyond.

L’image Magazine @Limagefashmag

Photoicon Magazine @PHOTOICON

Popular Photography @pophoto

New York Times Photo @nytimesphoto

Photography, Video, and Visual Journalism from The New York Times

Awards & Prizes

Just Add Stock @justaddstock

A new international awards scheme for design that uses stock imagery.

Digital Camera POTY @DCPOTY

photography competition, brought to you by Digital Camera magazine.

Pixelglo @pixelglo

Social monthly photography contests

WorldPhotograhyAward @WorldPhotoAward

Sony World Photography Awards: global competition open to Professional & Amateur photographers. Prizes include being exhibited globally, cameras & cash.

Photoshop

PSD TUTS @PSDTUTS

Tutorial9 @Tutorial9

Photoshop_GU @Photoshop_GU

Roger Ridpath @campphotoshop

David Peters @davidpeters4

garaham Taylor @Photoshopinaday

Photoshop-Pack.com @pspack

Scott Rouse @TheLightroomLab

mcpactions @mcpactions

LeetMindz.com @ LeetMindz

Jim Sichinolfi @EssePhoto

HowtoCapture @HowtoCapture

photoshopcafe @photoshopCAFE

FreakingNews.com @FreakingNews

Freaking News Pictures, Photo Hoaxes, Photo Illusions, Photoshop Satire, Image Manipulations

Rodney Urton @Leica1956

ADD YOURS

If you know of any other useful accounts that we missed, do feel free to add them in the comments!

(And if you want to learn how  to make the most of Twitter to earn some extra revenue, do check out the Twitter Business book from our sister-blog Geekpreneur.)

Photography: © Copyright Dave Le

It’s no secret that today’s photographers need to have skills that go beyond shooting pictures. Just as the old-timers needed to understand film, know how to develop negatives and learn darkroom techniques to make a photo look its best, so no modern digital photographer will get far without a basic understanding of image editing.

In fact, photographers often spend more time in front of their computers processing images than they do behind the lens creating them. It’s not unusual for wedding photographers, for example, to give quotes that include two hours of editing time for every hour of actual photography. And only a fraction of those photographers outsource that editing to assistants.

So what happens when professional image editors – designers who make a living out of their ability to communicate with pictures — pick up a camera? Do they have any advantages in the photography marketplace, and can their successes suggest skills that digital photographers should learn too?

Microstock’s Biggest Earners Are Designers

Certainly, for a number of designers, the decision to create photos has proven to be a very lucrative one. Both Andres Rodriguez and Lise Gagné, two of microstock’s highest earning photographers, started life as designers. Chuck Anderson’s application of his graphic design skills to his photography has won him clients from Adidas to Young & Rubicam. And Michelle Kwajafa, who describes herself as both a photographer and designer, has won enough of a name for herself to see her work featured in The Photoshop Tennis Book.

Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Any designer who wants to create their own image will still need all of the technical and creative skills of a photographer. But adding their design knowledge to  that photographic talent should give their pictures something extra – something that the market can only value at a premium.

Dave Le, for example, is a freelance designer who has created designs for clients including Apple, GM and Nike in a career spanning thirteen years. Since 2003, he has also worked as a part-time photographer. He’s shot three weddings this year, created several commissioned portraits, completed a product shoot and will soon shoot a catalog for a luxury furnishings and home décor retailer.

According to Dave, his background in design affects every aspect of his visual life, including his approach to a shoot:

“In the process of creating an image with the camera, I run through some of the same
mental checklists as I do when creating a layout,” he told us. “What is the message I’m trying to get across with this image? How do the elements in the image support the concept? What is the context in which this image will be viewed, and how will that affect the read?”

Of course, smart photographers without a design background may well ask those questions too but it’s also likely that many photographers are more concerned about the technicalities of creating the image than producing a product that a designer will have to use. They want to create good photos. And even those photographers who do understand that a good commercial image isn’t just one that’s well-focused and finely-composed but also usable, might not consider whether there will be room for text or a headline if the image is run full bleed on a layout, or how the background elements may enhance or obstruct type and graphic elements laid over the photo. Those are all things that Dave Le says he considers when shooting products.

Photography Is Just One Part of Design

Unfortunately, the technical benefits don’t seem to flow the other way. While Dave’s photography may be enhanced by taking a design approach to his images, his design work, he says, hasn’t been affected by his interest in photography. Graphic design, he notes, is about integrating color, type, illustration and photography in the service of communication. Photography is just one of the elements he has to consider when putting together a final picture.

His photography knowledge though has made him more marketable as a freelance designer. Understanding how the images he works with are created means that Dave can give clients more accurate estimates and proposals, communicate better with art directors, and he can even bundle his own photography into a proposal.

“Dealing with fewer vendors is always a bonus for clients,” he points out.

Some of the benefits that a design background can bring to photography are simply better workflow. Photographers might know how to remove wrinkles in Photoshop or whiten the eyes in portraits but few photographers know all of the different ways of completing the same procedure in the way that designers do, allowing them to choose the best method for the job. They probably enjoy doing it more too.

But the biggest advantage, it seems, is not the technical, image manipulation skills that designers know how to do but the understanding of what images are for. For photographers photographs are their finished product – the end result of their talent and skills. For designers though (and that includes designers who also photograph), the photograph is just one element in a process that will go into creating the final product. That’s a little humbling, but it is something that photographers can learn – and understanding the role of the image can improve your photography.

“Understanding how the photo component fits into the product development process is invaluable,” says Dave. “Consider the context in which your work will be viewed, whether it’s in a magazine layout, on a package, on-screen, hung on a wall, or all of the above. Context plays a huge role in how an image is perceived. Taking this fact into account when creating an image will open your eyes to new opportunities as well as focusing your attention on communicating the concept in the most effective manner… it will help you to generate a better image in the end.”

This might be a bad time to be a banker, an investor, a property developer or… well, just about anything really, but a few branches of photography are still bringing in the cash. In fact, some types of photography might even be doing better than ever.

There are no current figures easily available that cover every aspect of photography but it’s a safe bet that the difficulties faced by both the car industry and the advertising industry mean that car photographers are feeling the squeeze at the moment. And while couples are continuing to get married, worries about job stability and income should mean that wedding photographers will need to emphasize their lower-priced packages rather than the deals that deliver everything, all-in with the frills on top. Stock photographers, and in particular microstock photographers though, are one group that do seem to be sitting pretty.

In November 2007, Getty Images predicted that revenues from its iStockPhoto division would reach $262 million by 2012. The microstock site had earned $71.9 million that year and was expecting to make $122 million in 2008. Chief Operating Officer Kelly Thompson, however, recently told Photo District News that iStockPhoto  would clear $200 million this year already.

Fewer Stock Sales, Higher Stock Prices

That suggests that producers of low-stock images are still looking at boom times – good news for the mostly part-timers who create them. But as Dan Heller points out, the statistics hide as much as they reveal. The old microstock model of a dollar an image (and cents for the photographer) is now giving way to higher priced photos. iStockPhoto recently introduced its Vetta Collection, which charges between $20 and $70 for a high quality image submitted by one of its exclusive contributors. Other microstock companies are pushing subscription plans which appear to offer greater value but which in practice result in more money earned from fewer downloads to locked-in buyers. The one-dollar image now tends to apply to the kind of tiny low-res images that compete only with Flickr’s CC-licensed photos.

Microstock companies then might be making more money but it does look like they’re coming from fewer sales. Again, that should be good news for photographers. It means photos are more valuable than they might have thought. Or alternatively, that stock photos are worth exactly what microstock’s critics said they were worth and that the microstock companies have been underselling them for years. Either way, being able to make more money for fewer sales is still good news for microstock photographers.

And tough times have turned out to be surprisingly good too for real estate photographers. That may appear surprising. With house prices a fraction of the amounts they were worth a year ago, Realtors should have fewer incentives to splash out on marketing. In fact, as our previous post pointed out, there is in fact very little correlation between the price of a property and the desire of a Realtor to pay a photographer to shoot it. The difficulty of selling particularly high-priced homes  may even act as a disincentive against making the investment in professional photography.

“Generally, photo shoot prices are more tied to time spent on the job or licensing for different usage than the home price,” real estate photography specialist Larry Lohrman told us. “Realtors selling upper-end homes are more likely to use photos for magazines and fancy brochures than [they will for] lower-end homes. However, upper-end homes can take years to sell and Realtors may lose the listing and never get paid for their marketing (photographer) costs so Realtors are cautious with their marketing dollars.”

In practice, real estate photographers have found that the glut of properties on the market has led Realtors to look for new ways to help their homes stand out – and those methods include professional photography. As a result, real estate photographers have been able to raise their prices. Hopefully, that’s a trend that will continue after the property market recovers when Realtors recognize the value of professionally-shot images.

Star Photos Still Burning Bright

And a third photography niche that doesn’t seem to have been too bothered by the collapse in the economy is celebrity photos. Perhaps most famously, British weekly OK! has just paid $500,000 for what it claims are the last pictures of Michael Jackson alive. He’s on a stretcher and not looking very well. Forbes notes that in comparison to other celebrity shots, that half-million dollar fee is small change. It was less than a year ago that People and Hello! paid between $11 million and $15 million for pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s twins. That might suggest that the celebrity photo market has suffered a horrible collapse but all of the ten most expensive celebrity images are posed shots that show either a star with a baby or a star in her wedding dress. A snap of a very sick-looking singer is always going to be worth much less in terms of extra sales, website traffic and branding for the magazine. It’s not a feel-good image.

As long as an exclusive celebrity picture can sell as many as 500,000 extra copies though (and Forbes claims that the picture of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s oldest son, Shiloh Nouvel, which cost $4.1 million in 2006, moved an extra 800,000 copies), the prices for them will always be big. Movies remained popular even in the Depression, and the same is likely to be true of paparazzi and celebrity pictures even in this recession.

So the picture for photographers who hope to make money during difficult economic times isn’t entirely bleak. The value of the photos you can upload to stock sites is rising even if the number of sales is falling – and that means more money for less work. If you can get your foot in the door of real estate companies, you should be able to catch a niche on the rise, and if you can persuade Hello! to let you take a family portrait of some A-list celebrity, you should certainly have plenty of cash. All you then have to do is figure out where to invest it.

Taxes are a nightmare at the best of times. There’s the form-filling, the receipt-keeping, the revenue-calculating and finally, the check-writing. That always hurts. And there’s very little escape from it. Even part-time photographers have to do the tax thing and hand over large chunks of their sales to the IRS – at least, they’re supposed to. Some photographers though have found that the tax authorities can be particularly mean, landing them with some unexpected bills of eye-watering sizes – and for some very odd reasons.

Sports photographer Eugene Amos, for example, has reason to feel particularly aggrieved. On January 15, 1997, he was photographing an NBA basketball game between the Chicago Bulls and the Minnesota Timberwolves when Dennis Rodman fell off the court and landed on him. Amos received minor injuries but these were compounded when Rodman kicked him in the groin, say representatives at the Risk Law Firm.

The two sides reached a settlement in which Rodman agreed to pay Amos $200,000 in compensation.

The IRS Lands a Second Blow

And that was when the tax authorities gave Amos a second kick. The IRS sent him a note of deficiency, informing him that only one dollar of Rodman’s payment was for his injuries and therefore tax-free. The remainder was taxable damages.

The Tax Court took a more generous view, allowing Amos to deduct $120,000 of the payment from his gross income as compensation for his injuries but claiming that the remaining $80,000 was in return for the confidentiality clauses that were included in the agreement. As part of the deal, Amos had agreed not to defame Rodman, disclose the terms or existence of the agreement, publicize facts relating to the incident, or assist in a criminal prosecution against Rodman in relation to the kicking he was said to have delivered. The details were revealed in the court ruling, effectively negating their apparent $80,000 value.

The IRS is believed to actively search for large damage awards, and issues its field agents with special guidelines regarding lawsuit awards and settlements. That’s something to bear in mind next time you’re agreeing a figure with a celebrity who’s just bounced your camera off your head.

Leibovitz Pawns Her Images to Pay the Taxman

If Amos might feel he was hard done by, he could at least count himself lucky to hold $120,000 in return for being squashed by a pile of tattoos. Annie Leibovitz, however, has much more reason to feel bitter. When her partner Susan Sontag died in 2004, Leibovitz, Vanity Fair’s in-house photographer, inherited her estate. Had the couple been legally married, points out Queerty, the inheritance would have brought no tax liabilities at all. Because they weren’t married though, Leibovitz is faced with paying up to 50 percent of the value of an estate that had once belonged to an internationally-renowned author, film-maker and intellectual.

It’s a bill that comes at a particularly bad time for Leibovitz. Renovations on her three adjoining townhouses in Greenwich Village have turned out to be more expensive than she anticipated. She recently paid off a lien placed by federal and state authorities in response to tax demands of more than $1.4 million, and a lighting company and stylist are suing her for more than $700,000.

The financial difficulties are so tight in fact that last fall, Leibovitz borrowed $5 million from lenders Art Capital Group. A few months later, she was back with a request for $10.5 million more. Her collateral included the townhouses, a country house… and the rights to all her pictures.

It’s nice to know you’ve got valuable photos, but it’s nicer still if you can keep them out of the hands of the pawnbrokers.

Do Photographer Services Require a Sales Tax?

Eugene Amos’s problem was relatively rare. It’s not every day that a celebrity with lots of money and an image problem mistakes a photographer for a soccer ball. The size of Annie Leibovitz’s tax and debt issues are worries for millionaire photographers. But the tax code is so complicated that even small photographers can easily slip through the net and get picked up by the tax authorities. That’s especially true when it comes to sales tax.

When Ted West, a photographer in Oklahoma, was audited for the period between March 1, 1992 and February 28, 1995, the tax authorities discovered that he did not have a sales tax permit for his photography business. He paid sales tax when he bought supplies, rented equipment or developed film but he didn’t collect sales tax from customers that included advertising agencies and commercial clients.

West argued that the demand for sales tax was wrong because even though he gave the completed film to the clients and didn’t even retain copyright over the images, his transactions were for services rather than tangible personal property. He also claimed that his relationship with his clients was that of employer/employee – a definition even few photographers would want to support. That meant the client always owned the photographs and he didn’t need to pay sales tax for what was effectively a salary.

The court, perhaps not surprisingly, didn’t agree. He was ordered to pay 4.5 percent of the gross receipts of each sale for the three years covered in the audit.

West’s case was relatively straightforward. If you hand over pictures to a client and they pay you for it, you’ve made a sale and have to collect the sales tax. Fail to do that and the IRS will come round with a big bill. But what happens when no images change hands?

In April 2009, the North Carolina Court of Appeals heard an appeal lodged by the state’s Secretary of Revenue against a decision made in favor of Carolina Photography Inc., a photography firm that photographs high school students. In June 2002, The company was audited for the period between March 1, 1999 and January 31, 2002, and ordered to pay sales tax for “retouching fees,” “copyright fees” and “sitting fees” that were levied before an order was placed.

But while every student that sat for a picture paid a sitting fee, only 70 percent bought an image. Carolina Photography paid the sales tax for all the fees then asked the court for a refund for the 30 percent of sitting fees that didn’t produce a sale. The Trial Court agreed to the refund. The Appeals Court saw things differently. It assessed that the sitting fee was part of the sales price – in effect, it was a labor fee to fabricate the printed photographs – and therefore needed sales tax. It overturned the Trial Court’s decision.

It would be nice to say that there’s a moral here, that the tax laws are straightforward as long you sign the checks, collect the sales tax and pay the bill. But if there is any conclusion you can draw from this, it’s that you’ll always end up paying taxes, it will always hurt — and it’s worth listening to a professional tax advisor.

Photography: Pete Prodoehl

Brand yourself an expert and you’ll have already overcome one of the toughest challenges in marketing yourself as a photographer: you’ll have given yourself an edge over the competition and buyers a reason to choose you instead of someone else with a camera. Nor do the benefits end there. Photography knowledge — particularly the kind of strange, specialized photography knowledge that few others understand — is a valuable thing. It can be shared for a fee and, no less importantly, it can be demonstrated to buyers, create a unique brand and win some useful, free publicity.

And marking yourself as an expert isn’t difficult to achieve. The processes themselves require effort and time, but they aren’t impossibly challenging. Anyone can do it; the benefits derive from the fact that so few people actually do.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any challenges at all though, and the first is to choose what kind of expert you want to be.

How Specialized Is Your Photography Knowledge?

Clearly, the type of expertise that brings the most benefits is one recognized and appreciated by the largest number of people. Scott Kelby’s field of expertise, for example, is digital photography, which is a broad enough topic to make him an expert in the eyes of anyone who puts images on memory cards and manipulates them on monitors.

Lots of people know how to do that and many of them may know how to shoot and edit digital images at least as well as Scott Kelby does, but because Scott has the reputation and the expertise, his images are treated differently to those produced by his competitors. Buyers and clients familiar with his name assume that his products and services are good. Because he’s an expert, they’ve already given him the most valuable thing any marketing effort can win: their trust.

Pick a topic as broad as Scott’s though, and you’ll be facing a large amount of competition. Your knowledge – and your ability to share it – will need to be particularly high if it’s to survive the scrutiny of a large number of critics. The more prominent your position, the greater the number of people who want to take it.

That’s less true when you choose to stand out in a niche. Alan Detrick, for example, is the author of a book on macro photography. But that too is a relatively broad field with no shortage of other experts competing for attention, so Alan brands himself even further by showing that he specializes in a particular kind of macro photography. His website focuses on “garden and landscape photography” and his book is aimed at “gardeners and nature lovers.”

That limits his market. There are fewer potential buyers of garden photography services – or books — than there are buyers of digital photography knowledge. But those who are interested in the topic will consider Alan Detrick an expert, and the top buyers will turn to him first. He’ll also have less competition for the top expert brand.

Alan Detrick though is primarily a macro photographer. It’s likely that he could also create other kinds of macro images if he wanted too, but his main interest is floral. Every photographer has interests that specific. You might enjoy shooting landscape images but it’s likely that you tend to shoot a particular type of landscape, whether that’s a certain kind of location or in a particular kind of style. So you could brand yourself as a landscape photography expert in general – and battle with lots of other landscape photographers – or you could position yourself more easily but more narrowly as an expert on Utah landscapes, abandoned spaces or images taken at twilight.

Four Tools to Make You an Expert

Once you’ve chosen your field, demonstrating your expertise is remarkably simple even if it does require a little hard work. There are four main tools that can move a photographer out of the crowd and up to the head of the pack.

Teaching is always one option. The better the school, the greater the appearance of your expertise but teaching an adult education course or even an online course can deliver expert branding power. It’s unlikely that the instructors at BetterPhoto.com are more (or less) knowledgeable than the average successful professional. But because they’re instructors, they appear more confident and more competent too.

In part though, that comes not just from their teaching but also because many of them are said to have written “how-to” guides, and book-writing is another way to demonstrate expertise. These days that’s easier than ever. While winning a traditional book contract may take some persuasion, it costs nothing but time and effort to produce an ebook, a Blurb book or a print-on-demand book. And you still get the cachet of saying that you’re “the author of…”.

Easier still is to create a blog. While that demands a long-term effort, rather than the one-off investment involved in writing a how-to guide that shares your techniques, blogs do cost nothing to produce and, with advertising, are easier to earn from. Lee Torrens is certainly not one of the highest-earning microstock photographers, for example, but his informative blog Microstock Diaries, has won him a great deal of respect in the industry, just as David Hobby’s Strobist blog has positioned him as an expert on lighting.

And finally, you can write press releases. These take the least effort of all but the expert branding power is also temporary. Offer reporters a story about photography — whether that’s a photographer’s take on a story in the news or something seasonal such as tips for better picture-taking while on vacation – and anyone who sees your quote will assume that the reporter considers you an expert. That means they’ll consider you an expert too and as an added bonus, you’ll also get to say in your marketing material that you’ve appeared the New York Times, or whichever publication ran the story.

Press releases do tend to be a little more hit-and-miss though, and you often have to write plenty of them before you strike a story. Unless, of course, you’re already an expert.

Photography: Robert Buelteman

Every photographer has a different vision of success. For some, life would be perfect if Time Magazine were to send them and their camera bag to Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan. For others, sipping wine at a gallery opening while collectors battle to buy their art would be the ultimate sign that they’ve arrived. And for many, just being paid for a picture or winning a commission for a portrait would tell them that they’ve got talent, technique and an audience for their work.

But what happens next? What do you do after you’ve got used to phone calls from editors, when you’ve seen the red stickers on your framed photos or once sales and commissions have become a standard part of your life?

That was a dilemma faced by Robert Buelteman, a 51-year old landscape photographer known for his pictures of California. His black and white images had already been published in two books. His photos form part of the permanent collections of Yale University Art Museum and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art. And a steady supply of commercial assignments meant that he was able to earn a rewarding living from his camera.

Ansel Adams, Fiber Optics and Sculpted Plants

For most enthusiasts that would be the stuff that photography dreams are made of. But the death of a number of relatives and a desire for new challenges led Buelteman to look at a completely new way of creating pictures.

“It isn’t that I was running from dissatisfaction so much as I was seeking new possibilities for myself and for my art,” he explains. “As a witness to the loss of four family members to cancer in the late 90’s, I had learned that life is short, and didn’t want the precious gift that my life is to be spent doing what had already been done by so many so often.”

Twenty years earlier, Sarah Adams (the granddaughter of Ansel) had shown Buelteman Walter Chappell’s Metaflora portfolio of flower images at her home in Lee Vining. As he searched for a new outlet, Buelteman recalled that meeting and an idea he’d had about combining photography with fiber optics.

The result was a method that draws on his studies in chemistry, physics and optics at Berkeley to create a new kind of Kirlian photography, a technique that involves passing an electric current through an object on an a photographic plate to generate an image of the corona discharged around the object’s edges.

Buelteman’s approach though is particularly difficult. He takes live plants and “sculpts” them with a scalpel until they’re translucent. Working in the dark, he then prepares an “exposure matrix” made up a sheet of 8×10 tungsten-balanced transparency film mounted on an easel. This is supported by a sheet of metal in a solution of liquid silicone, which itself is sandwiched between two sheets of Plexiglas. To create the image, Buelteman connects to the metal sheet to a spark plug cable, places the sliver of plant material on the film, and fires 80,000 volts through the metal — and the plant. The current leaves a glow on the film in the shape of the plant. Finally, Buelteman uses strobe lights and fiber-optic cables to add extra light effects.

3,000 Exposures… 30 Images

It’s a process that can demand a great deal of time and experimentation. A single photograph can take anywhere from an hour to create to a number of months spread over several years. Calla lilies, for example, only bloom for a few weeks, creating a short window each year to get the picture of the plant right. The 30 images contained in Buelteman’s first portfolio “Through the Green Fuse” took 3,000 exposures and 60 hours a week for two years to produce.

“This is not a technique that one perfects,” Buelteman told us. “It reminds me of dancing.  Dancing is its own reward, and once you try to do it right, you’ve lost the rhythm.  This process, impossibly difficult with so many variables that it defies the traditional controls that we have come to expect as photographers, is a roll of the dice.”

The images though, shot without a camera and dependent on the corona created by the electrical charge are unique, and certainly very different to the traditional black and white photos Buelteman had produced in the past. The response though has been phenomenal. Galleries have snapped up his photos and the Santa Fe Institute invited him to be an artist-in-residence, giving Buelteman the freedom to continue developing his technique.

At the same time though, Buelteman has continued shooting and selling his black and white landscapes which he prints himself. Without those sales, he points out, he might “you know, have to get a job or something.” And creating the pictures helps to keep him grounded and engaged in his art, he says. It’s something he predicts he’ll never give up.

It would be wonderful to say that the moral of Buelteman’s story is that it’s always possible for a photographer to change direction, branch out into new areas and succeed. But of course, that isn’t the case. There was no guarantee that Buelteman’s technique would work, that any of the images he produced would be attractive or that anyone would want to look at them or own them. But that wasn’t the reason he did it. Being a successful photographer might be rewarding and satisfying but the thrill of success itself is never a reason anyone ever picks up a camera. That’s always done for the pleasure of creating pictures that make you proud. Buelteman himself notes the most important characteristic he looks at to measure the success of his technique isn’t the number of exhibitions, print sales or media  interest the images generate but his personal excitement and passion to continue doing it.

“When, as an artist, you have tapped into that special place where you no longer feel separate from the rest of life there is a spontaneity and a beauty and a rhythm in your art that others respond to,” he says. “While this is a place available to all of us, I find myself able to visit only occasionally.”

And, of course, if it turns out that people like your new images well enough to buy them as much as they like your old ones, then that really is the stuff of dreams.

Photography: Chris Burkard

The Web might have made it easy to show your images to admirers but the appeal of the old methods of displaying pictures still hasn’t disappeared. Photographers continue to look enviously at gallery walls, and a name on the cover of a photography book still delivers the kind of warm fuzzies that no website can ever inspire, however flashy.

There’s no shortage of photographers hoping to see their images gathered together, surrounded by text and sitting on bookstore shelves or, even better, decorating coffee tables around the world.

Part of that comes from the thrill of publication itself. When persuading a publisher to bet on your book idea is so difficult, success feels like an endorsement. An expert hasn’t just complimented you on your photography; he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is. You don’t find that often in the comments on Flickr and in terms of support, encouragement and kudos there are few stronger endorsements of your talent .

Publishing a Photography Book Is Not About the Money

But part of it is also the quality. The publishing company might take a big cut of the sales price, but they also know what makes a book sell and they employ professional designers, editors amd marketers to make sure that the images are placed on the best possible platform.

“For us it wasn’t about the money,” says Chris Burkard, a 23-year-old professional photographer and co-author of The California Surf Project, “we just wanted it to be the best it possibly could be.”

Chris’s book was the result of a road trip taken with co-author Eric Soderquist along the Californian coast. Chris, who had been shooting surf pictures professionally for three years, handled the photography and image editing while Eric did the writing (and all the surfing, notes Chris). Neither had planned the trip with a book in mind, but saw the images and text as a way to share what they loved about California and inspire others to explore the state.

“We had no idea it would ever actually turn into a real deal book,” Chris recalled. “We were inspired and just did it because we wanted to, book deal or not. Needless to say when we came to Chronicle and presented the idea, it was pretty much a packaged deal. They were stoked on the idea and the motivation behind it.”

Persuading Chronicle to publish the book was perhaps a little easier than the experience encountered by most photographers. Chris’s editor at Surfline.com had published a book with Chronicle in the past, and gave Chris and Eric an introduction. Chronicle saw their vision, loved the photography and, importantly, allowed the authors to take part in the development process, retain creative control and ensure that the book was not over-designed. The company also supplied a publicist and marketing manager, paid for printing and distribution and even came up with an advertising budget. Chris and Eric were able to focus entirely on quality control and photo quality.

The Marketing Is Up to You

That’s unusual. According to John Fielder, a professional photographer and former owner of Westcliffe Publishers, a publishing company which he sold to Big Earth Publishing after 26 years, the support of publishers tends to stop at paying for the production and distribution.

“The rest is up to you,” he told us, “including most of the marketing.”

That suggests that book authors could find themselves faced either with high advertising bills — as they try to promote their book themselves — or low sales, as the publication withers for lack of exposure. When it came to publishing his own books, most of which focused on Colorado (his latest is about Coloradan ranches), John tended to use two strategies that enabled him to reach a large audience without having to rely on a large advertising budget.

The first was to focus on publishing books that were unique and which didn’t compete directly with other published titles. And the other was to produce books that had an environmental component. They might have related to the protection of a natural resource or benefited the goals of an environmental non-profit organization. The idea, says John, was to attract the media to report on the project it covered.

“This reduced the need for paid advertising,” he explained, “and support from the publisher… which in my case was me. And it’s easy to get a book into bookstores if there’s publicity.”

Choosing to photograph a controversial topic that can pick up media attention then might be one way to make publishing – or at least marketing – easier but what about landing that first publishing deal?

Put yourself in the publisher’s shoes, recommends John. Imagine what it would take for the book to sell then submit your proposal. Tell the publisher whether the book is  unique in the market, how well competing books have sold, who will buy it and why, as well as technical details such as format, page count, photo count, price and proportion of photos to text.

Or alternatively, you can do what John did when he produced his first calendar back in 1981: create your own publishing company, self-publish, then commission books from other photographers as well.

While that would guarantee that you get to see your images in print though, it’s still not going to guarantee that you see any money. John says that his books paid him well because they sold in relatively large quantities.

“In general,” he says, “a photographer cannot rely upon book royalties alone.”

It seems that it’s not only the appeal of photography books that hasn’t changed; the pay hasn’t improved either.

Photography: Yahta Natanzi

Is it really possible to make money as a citizen photojournalist? It’s a question that must have passed through the mind of every wannabe news photographer. Anyone can now earn money from stock photography. Persuasion, a portfolio and word-of-mouth can bring in occasional event commissions. But photojournalism? That means selling to news editors, and when it comes to buyers, they’re perhaps the pickiest bunch of all.

Events, though, provide a chance to find an answer. The demonstrations in Iran have created exactly the circumstances in which amateur photojournalism should thrive. Official journalists were restricted to their offices, the location was inaccessible enough for the mainstream press to have few resources on the ground, and the demonstrators’ strategy of uploading images and videos to the Web made crowdsourcing both expected by the media and accepted by the public.

And the result? Some amateur photographers in Iran did indeed make money.

One Image in Four Sold

Demotix, a service that supplies images from amateur photographers to the mainstream news media, received some 200 images from Iran during the recent demonstrations. They were submitted by more than ten photographers. Of those, Demotix was able to license some fifty photos to media outlets that included Reuters, EPA, The New York Times and “various national English dailies.”

That’s a remarkable success rate, and the payments the photographers received for those images were reasonable too.

“I am still working on the total remuneration numbers because some of our customers are self-billing and received our images through our FTP feed,” Jonathan Tepper, Demotix’s Chief of Operations, told us. “My estimate is that each photographer will have made an average of 500 dollars, some more and some less depending on how many of their images were used and the placement.”

Considering the quality of the images and their appearances in leading publications those figures might not be too surprising, but they did come in an environment in which demonstrators were constantly uploading images and videos, and making them available for free, both to viewers and — through Creative Commons (CC) licenses — to publishers as well.

Demotix’s success in competing against those free images – even as the mainstream press struggles with costs and falling subscriptions – reveals both the value of professional-quality photography and the importance that the press still places on sourced material. A picture uploaded by an anonymous photographer in a crowd lacks context, explanation and the ability for the outlet to check that it does indeed show what the caption says it shows. Those remain important features for news outlets, and ones that they’re willing to pay for.

“The reason our content is valuable is that even CC stuff has to be vouched for. We know our photographers, can vouch for them. They are part of our community. Simply scanning Twitpic or Flickr isn’t the same,” explains Jonathan. “Those [free] images haven’t hurt us at all.  People go for quality and verifiability.”

For photographers who would like to double as occasional freelance photojournalists then, that all sounds very reassuring. The mainstream media don’t just want the image, it seems, even it’s good and available for nothing on a website. It also wants the verifiability that can only come with a personal submission and a connection to a photographer.

You Need to Be Talented, Available… and Lucky

But the events in Iran might not be the most representative of the opportunities available to amateur photojournalists. It’s fairly rare, for example, for professionals to be deliberately excluded from a news event on threat of expulsion or worse. (Although even amateurs were targeted by the Iranian government’s thugs-for-hire; one of Demotix’s contributors received a beating from the Basij. Taking pictures of thuggery does tend to put you next in line.) And while Iran is far enough away for even the biggest of the mainstream news outlets to  have few of their photographers on the scene, that also means it’s hard for many amateur photographers to reach too.

Jonathan Tepper pointed out that photos of the rallies that were easier to reach have been much harder to place.

“[D]emonstration photos outside Iran are a harder sell. There is no shortage of photographers in NYC or London covering demonstrations.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We have come across semi-professional photographers who regularly submit — and sell — images of demonstrations. Those sales were usually made possible though with a solid understanding of the kinds of images outlets want of political events and a connection too with at least one outlet.

Perhaps the best evidence of the characteristics needed to sell amateur news images though is Janis Krums’ picture of US Airways Flight 1549 floating in the Hudson River. The quality was low. The image was shot on a mobile phone and uploaded to TwitPic, a service that allows users of Twitter to attach images to their tweets. And yet it was a photo that was shown repeatedly on news outlets around the world.

But Janis Krums wasn’t a professional photographer or even an amateur photographer. He was just someone who happened to be in the right place at the right time. While there are things you can do to increase the chances that you’ll be in those kinds of places — like reading the news or following celebrities as they leave their homes – much comes down to luck. Services like Demotix benefit by aggregating the luck (and photographic talent) of lots of people around the world but for individuals, making money out of semi-professional photojournalism is usually going to be a fairly occasional affair.

Unless, of course, you’re willing to move to a far-away trouble spot like Iran.

Photography: ©2009 Scott Hargis Photo

The recession might be bad news for banks and terrible news for Realtors but it’s been good news for at least one group of professionals. Real estate photographers have reported a rise in demand for their services – and at least some of those photographers are responding with higher rates.

Faced with a glut of properties on the market, brokers are discovering a need to market their properties harder and enable them to stand out from competitors. They’re turning to professional photography to give their listings greater appeal.

“As the RE [real estate] industry has been tanking, I’ve found that my services are actually in greater demand than ever,” freelance real estate photographer Scott Hargis told us. “I’ve raised my rates twice in the last two years, with another increase likely this fall.”

The ability to raise prices though — like the rates themselves — depends on location. Scott operates in the San Francisco Bay area where rates typically run from $150 to $550 for a three-hour shoot (including travel and post-production time) that produces from twelve to fifteen images. Panoramas and video, as well as additional services such as websites and floorplans can bring in extra revenue. According to a poll on the Real Estate for Photography blog, an authoritative source for real estate photographers, those rates represent almost the complete range that photographers might charge. More than half of the photographers who voted report receiving less than $200 for a shoot and 49 percent say that real estate photography brings them under $20,000 a year (although 8 percent reported earning over $100,000 shooting images for the real estate industry.) Little more than a third of those polled though said that they shoot real estate full-time. Scott, who has been taking pictures of real estate for four years, also does portraiture and advertising work, areas he’s looking to expand.

A Real Estate Photography Business in One Year

Before a photographer can raise his or her prices though, they first need to  have clients. That can take a while. Photographers typically mention a year as the time it takes to build up a viable real estate photography business. The best place to begin is by approaching the top 10-20 percent of listing agents in your area.

“It is relatively easy in any area to make an ordered list of what Realtors are selling the most homes in the area,” says Larry Lohrman, the Real Estate for Photography blog’s publisher, and author of The Business of Real Estate Photography ebook. “Often the very best prospects are the ones with ‘kind of good’ photos — they’re the ones who have already thought about better photography but who haven’t yet achieved it.”

Many Realtors though work independently and tend to be very aware of costs. High-end homes, for example, the type that look like they could benefit most from professional photography, may take years to sell during which time a Realtor may lose the listing, together with his investment in the photography. For lower-priced homes, you  might have to do some hard persuading to prise Realtors away from their camera phones. The most effective tools are usually a website and a pile of finished products, such as brochures, leaflets and flyers, that you can leave with the Realtors and which contain your URL so that they can see more of your work. Once you land your first clients, you should find that referrals and word-of-mouth marketing bring in others.

One controversial issue is whether to offer free samples as a way to initially demonstrate your work and the benefits it can deliver. Larry Lohrman argues that free samples lower the value of the work overall and are  not necessary, but he also points out that many photographers do it anyway. It is a method that Scott Hargis used to win his first real estate clients:

“When I was just starting out, and had neither clients nor a portfolio, I went around on Sunday afternoons to open houses and asked the agents if I could photograph their listings for free, just to get experience and a portfolio. That worked really well for me.”

Even Scott though recommends restricting your free offers to only the top-level agents and making a sample shoot part of a personalized pitch.  William C. Hutton Jr., who has been shooting real estate for just under a year, suggests offering the first shoot at cost — which may be half price. The most common reasons that Realtors aren’t already using photographers, he notes, is that they don’t know about photography, don’t know how to contact a photographer, or don’t believe it’s going to be cost-effective. Free samples rarely help to remove those obstacles.

Keep the Walls Straight

Real estate photography then may be a relatively easy field to break into, especially at a time when property is hard to sell and brokers are looking for every advantage they can find. A good website and high-quality printed material may be enough to get your foot in the door, and a year of patience as your name spreads and the referrals bring you a solid base may be enough to give you a business. But you will need the photographic skills. Real estate photography has to be effective rather than creative, and provides different technical challenges to those presented in architectural or interior design photography. The shots tend to be wider — between 18mm and 24mm — but must still keep the walls straight and vertical. The rooms need to be bright and airy, the colors vivid and accurate, and the view through the window is an important part of the final image and not a distraction that can be blown out. Scott Hargis offers specialized workshops but nothing beats practicing on your own.

“Before  you find your first client, practice on homes of friends and family members,” recommends William C. Hutton Jr. “Keep a diary of each shot… [and] photograph the same interiors on bright sunny days and cloudy days.”

And it might be a good idea to do it now, before the economic climate warms up again

No, this isn’t a list post. We’ll spare you having to read a list that long on your monitor. And a list that consisted of little more than 99 headings and a line of explanation would always be of limited value. It’s not enough to know that you can make money selling textures, teaming up with hotels, or creating photo products. You want to know how to do it, what you need to shoot, how much you can earn… and where to begin.
We couldn’t fit all of that information in a single blog post, and to spread it across the blog would make the different methods too difficult to browse. So we’ve gone analog and put it all in a book. It ran to 340 pages.

99 Ways to Make Money from Your Photos took more than a year to produce. It draws on interviews with photographers, businesses and buyers. Its recommendations are based on case studies and success stories that reveal exactly how amateurs, enthusiasts and professionals are making money from their images.

A Comprehensive Guide to Making Money with Photography

We’ve tried to cover as broad a spectrum as possible. Professionals should find plenty of information in the book about licensing, upselling and joint venture opportunities. Semi-professionals can learn the basics of part-time stock photography and discover niches that they might never have considered such as pet photography, children’s photography and food photography. And occasional shooters can discover how to combine their hobbies with image-making to sell their crafts and create products that they can place in stores to bring in a little extra cash.

We’ve also tried to cover as many different aspects of making money with photography as we could. So some chapters focus on particular types of photography, revealing, for example, which images sell the best on eBay and suggesting novel ways of providing portrait services. But we also look at marketing methods, with chapters on iPhone-based promotions, working with sales reps and building subscription lists. Of course, we’ve also discussed the most effective Web-based photography services, explaining what you need to do to make the most of those sites and maximize your earnings.

Most of the ideas in the book describe activities and strategies that are already in use. We’ve talked to photographers who are actually making money from these methods, the companies that act as intermediaries between buyers and producers, and the customers themselves. Occasionally though, we also discuss opportunities that we’ve spotted but which have yet to be exploited by independent photographers (such as creating your own specialized sets of trading cards) or at all (such as working with the homeless to spread your photos and build a brand while benefitting the community). We’ve tried to be both creative and pragmatic, practical as well as inventive.

Filled with Little-Known Opportunities

Some of the opportunities we discovered surprised us. We assumed that children’s dance schools, for example, represented no more than a yearly opportunity to supply photos that parents might otherwise shoot themselves with their camera phones. In fact, we were told that new performances are usually held several times a year and that each performance creates a new opportunity for a photographer to make money. While school photography companies compete fiercely to gain access to high schools, nimble independent photographers are discovering the benefits of extra-curricular classes.

Each chapter is divided into concise sections that explain what that particular method involves, what you need to shoot, how to do it and where to break in. We even offer expert tips for success in each field and talk you through the first steps. It’s always knowing what to do at the beginning that poses the biggest problems. Once you’ve shot the images and discovered the marketing channels necessary to sell them — and certainly, once you’ve made your first sale — whichever method a photographer uses tends to develop a momentum of its own. You discover for yourself what works and what doesn’t and, in time, build a customer base that’s loyal, stable and buys regularly. 99 Ways provides 99 different entry points into the world of paid photography.

So far, the response to the book has been immensely gratifying. Jeff Beaver, a co-founder of Zazzle, has called it:

“[A] great resource for any photographer serious about turning their passion for photography into real money.”

Oleg Tscheltzoff, CEO and co-founder of Fotolia has said that:

“99 Ways to Make Money From Your Photos is an excellent guide for both novice and experienced photographers…. Whether you just invested in your first digital camera or you’ve got an image library spanning years, this book will give you a step-by-step resource for capitalizing on your images.”

And Andreas Reinhold, a professional engineer who now wins regular photography commissions from top car magazines, told us that

“Several of the shown ways to earn money with photography work for me. Some of the given hints were new to me and proved to be successful and this is why I also recommend this book even to more experienced photographers who already earn money with their pictures. This guide is so comprehensive that any photographer should be able to find a good starting point to get his business going.”

Clearly, we don’t expect you to use all of the methods that we’ve described in the book. But you don’t need to. Start selling images with just one or two of the strategies that the book contains, and you’ll already be in profit, whether you’re a professional looking to expand his or her business, or an enthusiast looking to earn a little extra income.

This is the first of a series of publications that Photopreneur has in the works. 99 Ways to Make Money with Your Photos is a print book but we’re also about to release online a collection of premium reports revealing how to make money as a pet photographer, sell microstock images, and market your Photoshop skills, as well as two professional guides to using Flickr commercially.

99 Ways to Make Money with Your Photos is now available for sale at Amazon.com.

These aren’t the easiest times to be an entrepreneur. Banks aren’t lending. Customers aren’t buying. Funding for even the best ideas is about as easy to find as four-leaf clovers and winning lottery tickets. And yet never have entrepreneurs had to shoulder so much responsibility. As even America’s biggest companies drop into receivership, it’s becoming increasingly clear that small businesses and talented individuals – people with smart plans and the drive to succeed – will be the ones who will create the recession’s green shoots and encourage new growth.

That, at least, was how things looked to Allana Taranto, a professional photographer. After attending an entrepreneurial workshop in January of this year, Allana decided to use her skills to create what she discovered  many of the entrepreneurs at the workshop lacked: a professional portrait that was compelling to their target market and which provided a narrative to their brand.

At the same time, she realized, taking those pictures as she and her husband, Trent, drove 4,000 miles across the country during a relocation move, would give her a unique opportunity — a chance to capture the face of today’s ‘American Entrepreneur.’

“The idea of the American Entrepreneur Project was a way to get more involved and give back to the entrepreneurial community by bringing attention to how entrepreneurs are dealing with the economy and by providing portraits free of charge,” Allana explained to us by email. “Trent and I had a once in a lifetime experience, met inspiring entrepreneurs across the country and the entrepreneurs we met will receive professional photographs to use for their Web presence and great exposure… We hope this will continue to grow their businesses.”

Finding the Cash

As any entrepreneur knows though, having an idea is always the easy bit. The difficulties come when you start looking for the cash and putting the plan into action. Allana started by telling a friend at LaunchSquad, a boutique PR company, what she wanted to do. Her friend put Allana in touch with Infusionsoft, a software company that caters to small businesses.

“It turned out that our idea for the project was perfectly in line with Infusionsoft’s message – that this is the age of the entrepreneur and that small business growth will be the key to bringing the country out of our current economic situation,” said Allana.

Infusionsoft accepted her proposal so with funding secured, Allana then turned to Mike Michalowicz of Toilet Paper Entrepreneur,  one of the speakers at the Monetizing Your Passion conference, where Allana had first had her idea. Mike put up a blog post and sent an email to his subscribers inviting entrepreneurs to take part in the project. With additional input from  Infusionsoft and word-of-mouth recommendations from friends in specific communities, Allana’s initial plan to photograph and describe twelve entrepreneurs in cities across America grew to twenty. Profiled on Allana’s blog, they include Adam Theurer and Alex Wander, founders of Lone Oak Organics, an organic hydroponic greenhouse, Paul Scheiter, founder of Hedgehog Leatherworks, a leather design firm, and Tom C. Zdunich and Dan Debenham of LENZworks, a video production company.

Altogether, the entrepreneurs cover a huge range of different types of businesses, different niches and different ways of working. All of them though, Allana said, had shown tenacity, self-determination, a willingness to adapt in the face of change, support from family and
community, and a passionate belief in the importance of their  work, characteristics that make up much of what it means to be an entrepreneur in America today.

“Although individual entrepreneurs definitely have unique ways of approaching life and business there is an undeniable mindset they generally hold in common,” Allana explained. “The ‘American Entrepreneur’ has a surprising and inspiring capacity to harness any fear or anxiety and create energy, passion and excitement. The ‘American Entrepreneur’ uses that energy to face challenges. The ‘American Entrepreneur’ doesn’t take work, clients, or paychecks for granted. All of the American entrepreneurs I met were interesting to talk with, passionate about what they do and very much alive.”

A Photographic Entrepreneur

Many of those characteristics,  of course, apply to Allana herself. A graduate of the Photography and Media Studies departments at Hampshire College and a Master of Arts in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art, Allana had spent several years as an art teacher before setting up as a professional photographer. Like many of the entrepreneurs she interviewed, Allana points to the support, optimism and advocacy of her family during her first years as a sole proprietor. She could also point to the challenges met in raising the funds for her project, planning the logistics and putting together the content, all challenges familiar to anyone trying to create a small business.

The final stage is yet to come though. Allana is working with Infusionsoft to create a more exciting online presence for her images and interviews than the project’s current life on her blog, and she has to capitalize on the publicity and the branding that the project is bringing her with the help of LaunchSquad.

And in that too, she’s following a strategy that she says is vital for every small business:

“[B]eing willing to outsource what you aren’t good at  in order to focus on what you are good at doing is difficult for many entrepreneurs, but is absolutely essential,” says Allana. “Focus on the value that you love to create and support your business by hiring experts in other areas. From my observations, it’s the smartest way to create a profitable business that can grow.”

Wouldn’t it be great if selling your photographs was a great deal easier? Wouldn’t life be so much smoother if you didn’t have to deal with the printers, handle the packing and mailing or even collect your customers’ credit card details?

You could just shoot the pictures you want, put them on the Web and let some automated system sort out the headache of taking the orders, managing the prints, and processing the payments and shipping.

Of course, you can do that now. Put your images on Flickr, Imagekind  or even Zazzle, and thos sites will deal with all the fiddly bits of the purchase themselves, leaving you free to shoot and upload.

But none of those sites is yours. Their buyers are looking for photographs, not your photographs. You get little reward from a new buyer at Zazzle for having a reputation for creating outstanding pictures and you don’t get to show your images in the same way or with the same freedom that you can on your own website. And if you want to sell the same photo in a number of different ways, you usually have to spread them out over a number of different sites, each with their own specialty.

“There is a problem with the existing solutions for photographers to  sell their photos,” explains Ahmad Khariostami, co-founder of Fotomoto, a new photography fulfillment service. “First of all, if photographers want to sell  photos, they have to upload their photos to ‘photo supermarkets’ and  create a store there, and they have no control or a very limited  control over the presentation of their photos.

“And then, for different products, they have to go to different ‘supermarkets.’ For example, to sell prints they have to create a  store on ImageKind, and to sell licenses they have to send photos to  iStockPhoto, and for postcards or calendars they have to go to CafePress. We wanted to offer all this in one place, the right place, which is the photographers’ own website!”

Let Javascript Sell Your Images

Fotomoto aims to make that possible with a few lines of Javascript. Placed on a website, the script ignores graphic ads and images that are part of the site’s design, but adds a “purchase this print” button and an email link to the photographer’s marketable photos. When buyers press the purchase button, they’re offered a range of different size options, and a choice of paper types. Photographers are free to set their own prices for the images, with Fotomoto taking a 15 percent commission in return for processing the order.

The service has only been live for a couple of months, and is still in closed beta. But Fotomoto sends out around 50-60 invitations a week, and has already signed up about 300 photographers who together offer some 35,000 photographs. Prices for the images tend to start at $20 and rise to several hundred dollars. Sales, says Ahmad, are in “lower three-digit numbers at this point.”

David Nightingale, a professional photographer and photography trainer, is one of the people who has contributed to those sales. David was contacted  by Fotomoto in late 2008, but only implemented the code on his website, Chromasia.com, a month ago. Most of the images on his site are now available as prints through Fotomoto, and he has, he says, “made a small number of sales.”

“Previously, people would need to email us, then make a manual payment. Once we received the payment we would need to order the print, check it, mail it to the client, and so on. With Fotomoto all we need to do is upload the high res’ image when a new print is ordered,” David told us. “[W]e’re definitely satisfied and would recommend the service. It’s very well implemented, the print quality is high, and it’s a relatively painless way of providing a service to our clients.”

For David though, the benefit of Fotomoto isn’t necessarily the extra sales — he was selling prints anyway — it’s the time and effort saved by having someone else handle the logistics even as he continues to sell from his own website.

Print Sales Are Rare

But in practice, those sales are going to be relatively few (even with the discount coupons and analytics that Fotomoto provides). While prints might be the most attractive items for photographers to sell, they’re also among the hardest photography items to promote. Stock buyers need new images every time they release a new article or bring out a new brochure. Art buyers tend not to buy more photos once their walls are full. Josh McCulloch, a professional outdoors photographer, notes that while Fotomoto’s service looks interesting and might appeal to hobbyists and advanced amateurs who can integrate it easily into their sites without being limited to a template, it’s not something he would be using himself.

“I prefer seeing each and every print that goes to a client to make sure they’re happy,” he says.

Nor does he put much faith in the ability of print sales to make a large difference to a photographer’s income. Dismissing print orders as “few and far between,” Josh is betting on online consumption — rather than online ordering alone — as the main way for images to change hands.

That’s a direction that Fotomoto is moving too. In addition to expanding its range to include calendars and postcards, the company is planning to add usage licenses to the services it wants to offer photographers. It’s even considering creating a separate site where buyers will be able to browse all of the images offered across its contributors.

Of course, that would mean tagging and keywording, as well as uploading. And it would mean too that buyers who want a broad choice of images will no longer be looking at the photographers’ websites.

Selling prints from your own website using an effortless, automated system might be nice. But it would be nicest of all if you could rely on print sales to fund your photography. Not even Fotomoto can make that happen.

Keywording probably has to be the least popular part of any photographer’s workflow. Creating the images is always fun. Even editing and enhancing your pictures requires almost as much creativity as technical skill. But listing the words that a searcher might use to find your photos is about as enjoyable as reading a thesaurus – which, of course, is often part of the process.

It is important though. While stock agencies do provide categories for their image libraries, buyers generally prefer to search rather than browse, typing in the terms that they consider the most important. Miss the words  a searcher might use, and you’ll cut yourself out of the running for a sale. The first problem then isn’t just deciding what your picture portrays but trying to second-guess how other viewers might see it — and then including all of the possible different terms that they might use for the same motif.

“Not only does an interpretation of an image vary from viewer to viewer (add to this cultural differences) but also we have the flexibility of natural language,” explains Liisa Kaakinen, a professional keyworder who also teaches photographers and libraries how to categorize their images. “‘Pool’ can refer to a body of water, billiards game, swimming pool etc., and Wellington boots can be called ‘Wellies’,’ Rubber boots,’ ‘Galoshes,’ ‘Gum boots’ etc. Even with rigid and solid keywording rules in place keywording is always changing – language changes as do the market demands.”

And those changing demands don’t just come from buyers. They can also be found across different agencies. There is no one standard set of keywording rules that can be applied universally, so photographers need to know the rules for each agency to which they’re submitting.

The Key Difference between Getty and Corbis

Some companies are more helpful than others. Alamy requires photographers to include all variants, synonyms and even misspellings but Getty and Corbis both employ thesauruses on their sites so photographers need only include the most specific terms. The sites then add the synonyms and lexical variants, such as plurals, themselves. Getty also asks customers to clarify search terms with more than one meaning to ensure that the site turns up useful results.

But even for those two companies, the giants of the stock industry, the differences in their use of controlled vocabulary — set terms with pre-defined meanings — can lead to some head-scratching for both photographers and customers. Getty, for example, defines a “mid-adult” as aged 30-39; Corbis uses the same term to refer to someone aged 25-45.

“My favorite one is the keyword ‘Looking at camera,’” says Liisa. “At Getty this means the model is looking directly into the photographer’s lens, i.e. the viewer, whereas at Corbis this means looking at the device shown in the image. Corbis uses ‘Eye contact’ when the model is looking at the photographer’s camera.”

Keyworders then need to use a little creativity themselves to ensure that the buyer gets to see their photos. Sara Woodmansee, Senior Editor at iofoto.com, a part of Ron Chapple Studios, says that she tries to get around the age problem by using multiple age ranges for models whose appearance might allow them to fall into more than one category. Models, she points out, can often look younger or older than they really are.

And to enable buyers to find pictures of models looking directly at the cameras, she uses the phrase “Looking at viewer” which she hopes can be understood on any site.

“The question is if I use ‘looking at viewer,’ and a site’s ‘normal’ accepted phrase is ‘looking at camera’ will the site ignore my phrase?” she asks.“Hopefully not, if they have a good synonym system in place.”

Sara’s approach also increases the risk of employing too many keywords. She tends to use anywhere from 20 terms to as many as 40 or 50 for a particularly complex photo, using a base list that covers ethnicity; age range; gender; number of people; emotion; nouns; actions; concepts; description; indoors/outdoors; format; and sometimes location. While the numbers can be flexible though — and depend on the nature of the image — relevance is key. According to Liisa Kaakinen, nothing deters buyers more than irrelevant search results, and some agencies even penalize photographers who use unrelated terms.

One Photo, Five Minutes

Bearing all that in mind, says Liisa, and after some serious training, you can expect to be able to process around 80 images in a day — about one photo every five minutes — a figure confirmed by Sara Woodmansee.

“It does depend on the subject matter, of course.  Images of ‘people in action’ take more thought, obviously, whereas landscapes or still-life are easier,” she says.

One option then is to skip the whole thing and automate the process. ImageKeyworder is a program that automatically adds synonyms and variants to images. It even has templates to add similar sets of keyword to similar photos, and now has a dedicated Alamy mode to combat that site’s special demands. But even ImageKeyworder won’t usually shorten the time spent adding the phrases, Yvan Cohen, director at OnAsia, the program’s creators, told us. While you could get through up to 150 editorial images a day with ImageKeyworder, conceptual photos will take much longer. The service largely optimizes the workflow, making it more comprehensive and efficient by drawing on a structured and managed thesaurus.

Perhaps the best solution to the difficulties created by keywording then is to think ahead. Grab as much information as possible during the shoot so that whoever is doing the keywording knows exactly what the picture is about, what it shows and where it was taken.

“I have known keyworders who get images and have no earthly idea what they are looking at,” says Sara. “Then they spend a lot of time researching the photo when they could be keywording…. [I]f I was photographing a welder working, I should ask and take notes on the equipment the welder is using, and the proper terms for his technique used.”

That a picture speaks a thousand words might be an old cliché, but its description of a photo’s  narrative power is a flattering one too. Until a stock agency asks you to write them all down.

Photography: burtonwood+holmes

It sounds about as modern and up-to-date as silver-gelatin prints and watching the birdy. In the age of social networking and pay-per-click advertising, the idea of sending marketing material via the post office feels like a trip back to the 1950s, the time when mailboxes first started filling up with unwanted bits of paper.

And yet, as any trip to your own mailbox will tell you, businesses still do it. In fact, Americans receive a total of about 4 million tons of junk mail every year. That’s an awful lot of overflowing recycle bins but if businesses are still filling envelopes, then there’s a good chance it still works. According to the Direct Marketing Association, an advocacy group, more than $173 billion was spent on direct marketing in the United States in 2007, generating over $2 trillion in incremental sales. Eighty percent of advertising material is at least scanned before being binned, the organization says.

At Least Paper Junk Arrives

The association’s definition of direct marketing is likely to be pretty broad to incorporate those sorts of figures – and its idea of “scanning” might well include a glance to affirm you’re not throwing out the gas bill — but it is easy to understand the appeal. Eight out of ten mailbox leaflets might be seen but spam filters knock out around ninety percent of marketing material sent by email. At least paper junk reaches its destination.

Direct marketing firms are also much better at targeting than in the past. DirectMail.com, a company which used to be known as the DM Group and which has been in business for 35 years, now has a “geoselector” that allows businesses to build a list of recipients by location and lifestyle, and even to see pictures, a “personality tree,” and a detailed profile of the sort of people they’re aiming at.

And the product range is broad too. Direct mail companies will print and deliver door hangers, rack cards and calendars in additional to the traditional catalogs and flyers.

But is this an approach a photography business should take?

In theory there’s no reason why not. The flexibility of today’s list builders make it possible for photographers to identify businesses that might need photography services, young families considering portraits and even new graduates in the first years after college who might be thinking of hiring a wedding photographer.

The costing isn’t unattractive either. To send 1,000 postcards using DirectMail.com will cost a little over $400. With an average response rate that ranges from 0.25 percent to 1 percent, a wedding photographer could reasonably expect to pick up between 2.5 and ten jobs from that mailout.

Or to put it another way, direct marketing can let a photographer buy a job for between $160 and $40. For work that can cost several thousand dollars, that might not be a bad deal and it might well be more effective than a newspaper listing or even pay-per-click advertising.

Make your Junk Mail Valuable

Those response rates are a typical figure supplied to us by DirectMail.com, but when it comes to direct marketing, photographers might well have an advantage. One of the rules for handing out anything for free – even ads – is to make the freebie valuable. It’s hard for a plumber to make a postcard valuable, but photographers sell postcards. A photography marketing piece that included a beautiful image is much more likely to kept, stuck to the fridge and eventually acted on than a leaflet with a phone number and a drawing of a blocked sink.

The fact that it’s also possible to focus a list on a specific area means that the photographer could even make sure that the image had local appeal. Instead of just showing a photo of a wedding couple, for example, the photographer could make a local landmark the focal point of the image with the couple providing an additional romantic touch. Recipients could be tempted to hold on to the image because it’s pleasant to look at – exactly what a photographer is supposed to do – while couples could find the romantic addition inspiring enough to make contact.

And if a business holds on to your calendars because the receptionist likes the pictures, there’s a good chance that their own marketing people will understand the benefits of producing their own professionally-shot calendars for their clients.

Of course, direct marketing like this isn’t for everyone. Junk mail is, after all, very annoying and while you might pick up one job for every 100 postcards you send out, it’s possible that you’ll alienate the other 99 recipients. Other marketing methods can also be at least as effective without any of the drawbacks. Craigslist, for example, is free, annoys no one and according to photographers we’ve spoken to can deliver a budget wedding booking for every ten to fifteen listings.

But it always pays to diversify your marketing streams and for photographers targeting businesses in particular, a trip back to the world of print and paper might be one effective way of getting your foot in the door.

The two most inspiring people on Flickr are really Matt Smillie and Cherry Vega. During a trip to Japan in 2004, Matt shot this picture of a tattooed woman taking a picture of some dancers and uploaded it to Flickr. A friend of the woman in the photo, Cherry Vega, recognized the tattoo and told her about the photo. Cherry left a comment on the image, the photographer got in touch, traveled the length of Britain to meet and — as far as we know – they’ve been together ever since.

They’re unusual. Flickr doesn’t usually inspire people to go out and fall in love — although it would be nice if it did. It’s much better at inspiring us to go out and become better photographers.

Or rather, the people on Flickr inspire us to become better photographers because that’s what Flickr’s really all about: looking at great images, chatting to fantastic photographers and using their examples and their advice to get better and better every day.

Here are five of the most inspiring people on Flickr.

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir

Photography: Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir

Icelandic photographer Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is, of course, a Flickr icon. Her self-portraits have won her stacks of fans who follow her website and her blog. Her photos have grabbed the attention of picture thieves who swiped her images and sold them for profit. But most inspiringly, her images have also landed her a prestigious shoot for Toyota (who thought her “multiplicity” series matched the twin power sources of the Hybrid) and the chance of a whole new career as a professional photographer.

Not bad for someone who is still an art student and originally used Flickr as a place to show her sketches.

Rebekka’s pictures are an inspiration for anyone who wants to take beautiful, unique and creative images, but also for anyone who hopes to find success through Flickr.

So who inspires Rebekka?

“Three people come to mind right away,” Rebekka told us. “Dr Joanne was the first self-portrait artist that seriously inspired me to work harder and put more effort and thought into my self-portraiture… I had of course previously been inspired by a number of well-known artists, Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman for instance,  but I remember seeing Joanne’s work inspired me all over again.

“Notraces’ long exposure photography inspired me to try my hand at that,
and continue to work on it until I started getting more than just
mediocre results.

“

And last but not least, Antimethod (Cole Rise) was probably the first person on Flickr whose work left me speechless. Opened my eyes to a lot of things, and I admire him greatly.”

David Hobby

Photography: David Hobby

David Hobby is better known by his online moniker, Strobist. His blog is one of the most popular — and for anyone using artificial lighting, one of the most useful — photography sites on the Web. His Flickr group though, has almost 20,000 members, helping both pros and amateurs get to grips with innovative lighting techniques.

As for the people David has inspired, here are the words of just one photographer who responded to a researcher’s question about the effect of Strobist:

“I never used a flash until January of this year (2007) when I discovered Strobist. In march I quit my job as a car designer and went freelance. I just did a job yesterday for $2,500 with only two SB600’s. That’s more than my monthly living expenses. In a day!”

David Bean

Photography: David Bean

David Hobby is an inspiration because he is able to take the advice he turns out on his blog and turn it into the sort of collaborative affair that can only happen on a Flickr group. David Bean, the founder of Pro Corner, runs a Flickr group that’s a lot smaller but just as important at handing out advice, helping amateurs step up and professionals stride ahead.

“Pro Corner takes up a few hours a month,” David told us. “I would dedicate more but as a full-time photographer who shoots and travels all the time, it’s hard to keep up. I made two people moderators so they could help police the group. They’ve done a great job with it.”

John Watson

Photography: John Watson

All of the people we’ve mentioned so far are known for their photography or for the advice they give about photography — or both. John Watson, who uses the name FD on Flickr, is famous for his huge range of Flickr tools. From magazine covers and galleries to jigsaws and a Warholizer, John has almost 40 ways to help people enhance their photos… and according to his site, they can be used on almost 1.5 million photos a month.

“It started out very small,” John explained. “Folks wanted to create badges but most of them didn’t have Photoshop or know how to use it well enough to make one. So I created the Badge maker toy. It turned out to be a huge success and the rest is history.
The bottom line is that it’s a project that is a great deal of fun to work on and I’m immensely grateful that I can make something that brings a little happiness to so many people.”

Julie Kertesz

Photography: Julie Kertesz

French photographer Julie Kertesz might not be as well known as Rebekka or Strobist, but it’s her attitude that we like. Julie was already over 70 when she discovered blogging and Flickr which was then still in Beta. In addition to her blog called  “Il ya de la vie après 70 ans” (“There is life after 70”), she also created groups called
“Never too old (to enjoy life),” “Strangers no more” and “People Reading.” It’s her Afterclass learning group though that takes up most of her time.

“[W]e learn every month another theme about photography, created [and] organized by me,” Julie said. “[It’s] now in its nineteenth month and [has] about 2,100 members… some contributing to the discussions, every month [with] another leader.”

Who inspired your photography? Tell us here.

While sharing images on the Internet is as simple as creating a website or uploading to a Flickr stream, earning revenue from the people who look at your pictures has always proved difficult. Writers can embed AdSense ad units into their articles or keyword terms with Kontera but photographers have had to hope for the occasional print sale, usage license or commission to make money from their online galleries. Even Google struggles to match ad inventory with images, and the sight of a beautiful picture in the middle of a screen is always going to distract viewers from the ads on the side of the page.

That might be about to change though if a new idea pioneered by FlipGloss proves successful. Rather than surround a picture with advertisements, FlipGloss incorporates ads into the images  themselves. Placing the cursor over a picture element highlights that element and allows the viewer to bring up a floating layer with more information. So users interested in fashion can easily learn more about the handbag carried by the celebrity in the picture or the dress worn by the model. They can learn who the designer is, see thumbnails of similar designs and click through to stores where they can make a purchase, and all without taking their eyes off the picture.

By using large, high-quality images, the ads become content in the same manner as the full-page spreads in glossy magazines like Vogue and GQ.

The site was created by Kerry Trainor, Mike Randall, Robyn VanTol and Christopher Shattuck, the team that had previously founded Launch.com, a digital music service later sold to Yahoo! According to Kerry Trainor, glossy print publishing represents a similar opportunity for digitalization that music represented in the 1990s.

“The print publishing industry is a huge part of the traditional media world, that consumers and advertisers love, that has yet to be translated well online,” he told us. “We are inspired by the unique environment and consumer passion for beautiful, photo-driven print experiences and finding a way to bring their impact online while adding exciting digital features like search, sharing, recommendations and, ultimately, personalization.”

Looking and Clicking at the Image

The photos are displayed against a black background that makes them the focus of the page and are larger even than the flickthrough galleries used on news sites, a welcome degree of respect for a photographer’s work. The question though is whether the advertising model will  hold up and how far it can extend. The site has only just launched in Beta so it may be too early to tell how clickthroughs on these ads compare with traditional advertising responses. Advertisers however are charged on a combined CPM (cost-per-mille) basis, which pays a set rate for every thousand impressions, as well as on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis, which pays for each click on an ad link.

That combination is likely to be necessary. At the moment, FlipGloss focuses on beauty and fashion, the same types of images found in popular glossies. But ads in those magazines are intended as branding tools. While lots of people may want to look at professionally shot images of models in designer clothes, few will click through to a designer’s site with an intention to buy a Versace dress or a Martin Katz diamond necklace. Charging on a CPM basis ensures that the site can also earn from the bulk of people who simply want to flip through the images as they would do in a magazine. The attractiveness and large size of the images may also allow FlipGloss to demand a higher price than usual for the ads.

“Our display ads will carry a significant premium because they are ‘full page’, and presented right in the content stream (not tucked around the sides of the page as most display ads are today),” Kerry said. “When you offer brands truly integrated marketing solutions that compliment the user experience, they will pay a premium for it.”

As FlipGloss expands into other categories, including travel and lifestyle, it will be interesting to see how the figures work out and whether advertisers are willing to pay serious amounts for the branding value of the images or prefer to pay more for clicks.

Photographers Wanted

Interestingly, that expansion is being helped in part by photography enthusiasts rather than professionals. FlipGloss has created a Flickr group to accept contributions from photographers and currently works with about a dozen contributors. That may be as much as the site’s small team can handle at the moment, but there are plans to allow photographers to contribute to the site directly, like a photo-sharing site, with the aim of displaying their images supported by embedded advertising.

That sounds like it could be a valuable opportunity but for  now at least, the site isn’t paying. According to Kerry, the only reward on offer to photographers during the Beta stage is the thrill of publication but, he assures us, that will change as the site grows.

“[B]uilding a real revenue stream for photo contributors is one of the central goals of FlipGloss. Everybody loves the power of the Web, but one area in which it still fails the creative community is compensation for quality work,” he said. “We plan to share the revenue opportunity fairly with the creators and publishers who contribute content to the experience in the future. We will be announcing some of our first advertiser relationships soon, and opportunities for creators to share in that soon after.”

FlipGloss may yet turn out to be a nice idea that just didn’t work. But it could also represent a new model for ad-supported content and one that benefits photographers by displaying their images online in the size and quality they deserve while still providing an effective way for them to earn from those images. If that does happen though, it could create another problem. Online advertising rates tend to be a fraction of those paid to print magazines. If FlipGloss allows advertisers to move online without losing their branding power, it could be left to photographers who contribute to glossies to worry about ways to generate revenue.

What do photographers want most? Do they want to sell their photos and enjoy the income that their talent can bring? Or is it enough simply show their pictures to as many people as possible and bask in the acclaim and praise of their peers? In practice, of course… photographers want both, and they want them as much as possible. Being told time and time again that your photos are wonderful, that you’ve done a great job and that you definitely have a photographer’s eye never gets old.

But there’s no more powerful proof that you’ve got it what it takes as a photographer than finding someone’s name at the bottom of a check. And spending the money is nice too.

The problem is that it’s much easier to persuade people to look at your pictures than it is to persuade someone to buy them. When it comes to sharing your photos, there’s a whole range of different channels to choose from. While galleries might be the most prestigious way of showing your pictures, you’re likely to pick up more image views on a website, on a popular blog and on a well-networked Flickr stream.

And now you can pick up millions of views – every day, provided your images are good enough — by submitting them to CoolIris.

10 Million Image Views a Day

CoolIris, once known as PicLens, is a browser add-on that allows users to surf the Web graphically. The News category, for example, appears as a scrolling, three-dimensional wall of thumbnails. Choose one thumbnail and the image expands to fill most of the screen, revealing a caption and a link to the news page on which the photo appears. Instead of choosing content according to the headlines, Internet users can find what they want based on images. So far, the application has been downloaded 10 million times and is used by photo enthusiasts, as well as tech types and “avid mainstream media consumers,” says the company.

One of the channels that CoolIris offers is called Photos of the Day. While some of the images in that channel are sourced from premium providers like AFP and Getty, since March 6, 100 photos each day have been selected from user contributions submitted by photographers through the company’s Flickr group. Selections are made on the basis of quality and relevance, and the top photos are released throughout the day within hours of being submitted.

According Laura Holmes, Product Manager of CoolIris’s Discover Channel, and Discover Team Member Maria Ignatova, the thumbnails that appear in the channel’s Photos of the Day are viewed a total of 10 million times each day.

“Photos of the Day allows you to display your photo in a beautiful 3D environment along other very high-quality photos,” they told us. “Submitting your photos to our Discover channel exposes your content to millions of users worldwide.”

That’s all very enjoyable, of course, and CoolIris’s Photos of the Day wall is certainly eye-catching, impressive and attractive – a good place to have your pictures seen. But none of the photographers whose images have appeared on the wall has told CoolIris that they won a sale as a result of the appearance, and the group discussions are quiet on that point too.

Nor does CoolIris pay photographers whose images it chooses, so the wall effectively functions as an elite extension of Flickr – a place to show your photos to as many people as possible and enjoy the warm fuzzies that come from knowing you have talent.

But when your photos are good enough to stand alongside those created by the professional news photographers of AFP and Getty, surely that means they’re also good enough to be sold.

Making the Most of the Image Wall

The sales can’t be made on CoolIris itself – the application doesn’t provide a way for viewers and photographers to communicate directly – but there are a couple of ways to turn your appearance on the wall into a licensing agreement or a print sale.

The first is through the caption. Photos of the Day takes the original title of the image as the caption. Those titles are usually entirely descriptive, such as imfreelykeely’s “Does your delectation come from 92/65” or Kathy~’s “Reflection of a Sunset.”

Although those sorts of description tell the viewer something about the image, they don’t tell potential buyers what they really want to know: whether the image is available for licensing or printing. It wouldn’t take a great deal of effort – or harm the viewing experience too greatly – to also mention in the title that the image is available for purchase. “Reflection of a Sunset (Available for licensing and purchase)” isn’t a major change to the image but it could make a big difference to the results of placing the image on the wall.

The other way of making the most of a CoolIris wall appearance though is even easier. Because the images are taken directly from the Flickr stream, clickthrough data is recorded and counted.

“You can see how many times your photo has been viewed because every hit within Cooliris counts as a hit on your Flickr page stats tracker.”

As long as you have Pro membership of Flickr, you’ll be able to see how often an image is clicked and which kinds of images generate the most views. Even if that particular photo doesn’t sell then, you can see which subjects generate the most traffic flows through your Flickr stream as a whole.

In theory, the more people who see your images the more sales you’re going to make. In practice, it doesn’t always work that way. The more people who see your images, the more comments, praise and confidence you’ll generate. But you’ll still have to take steps to pick up the sales.

There’s only one thing worse than creating images that no one buys: seeing other photographers creating images that people do buy. Now that it’s possible for anyone with a camera to put their photos in front of image users, talented photographers should expect to pick up sales. If that’s not happening to you, there’s probably a good reason.

Or rather, there could be one of several reasons.

The first – and least pleasant to admit – is that your images just aren’t good enough, at least not yet. With such a huge choice of photos now available, buyers are only going to pick the best, and those shots are going to be very good indeed. Your best image might be excellent in comparison those you’ve created before but it also needs to be excellent in comparison to everyone else’s to win a sale. The lighting has to be perfect, the composition exactly right, and the amount of noise at a level suitable for use. A photographer’s justifiable pride in a good image can get in the way of an objective assessment of the photo’s quality. Place similar compositions from other photographers side-by-side and ask someone else which photo they prefer. If they don’t point to yours, you’ll know why your picture isn’t selling – and what you need to do to improve.

Your Images Need to be Good – and Usable

Good though isn’t the same as usable. Stock sites are filled with wonderful pictures of sunsets, flowers and beaches. Buyers need images that can match sales messages, have room to add text or which can illustrate stories. While many photography websites allow viewers to order prints, selling artistic pictures online is notoriously difficult. You’ll always find it much easier to make those sorts of sales on a site like Etsy, possibly on eBay and far more likely away from the Internet at an art fair where browsers are in a mood to buy and you’ll be able to talk to them directly. When you’re looking to make sales online, it’s important to make sure that at least some of them are the sort of pictures that don’t just look good but which a designer can use as easily the top stock images too.

There are though plenty of both excellent and usable images on the Web that could win sales and never do. One reason that can happen is that buyers don’t know they can buy them. Photographer Chris Lupetti reminds viewers on Flickr that his photographs are not available for free use by repeatedly stating that they’re copyrighted. But he also invites buyers to contact him by email if they’re interested in licensing them. He places a message under the image and even tags the copyright message on the photo itself with his website address and an invitation to contact him for creative commissions. That doesn’t just tell buyers how to make an offer. It also tells them that he’s used to doing professional work and available for hire.

Buyers browsing Chris’s images are left in no doubt that they can make contact and pitch him an offer for his photos. That makes it much more likely that they will.

And the fact that they know how to do it is important too. With a million-and-one images to look at and the next good photo just a click away, buyers won’t want to waste too much time hunting around for contact details, an email address or a purchase form.

One reason you’re not selling your pictures could be that buyers simply don’t know how to buy them. Alongside each of your images, include a call to action telling buyers where to go if they’re interested in using the photo. You’ll be helping them to make the offer and helping yourself to land the sale.

You’ve Got to Push to Sell Pictures

Of course, for that call-to-action to be effective, potential buyers will need to see it, and that’s probably the most common reason that good photographers fail to make sales: they’re bad at marketing.

This is a challenge for every creative entrepreneur. The kind of skills and the drive necessary to create good photos are rarely the same as those needed to be a good salesperson. Most photographers would rather be out with their camera, lining up shots and playing with the lighting than optimizing their website for search engines, researching competitors’ packages or pitching to editors and buyers.

For too many photographers, marketing means keywording, tagging and hoping.

But there are a number of small, simple things that any photographer can do and which can have a dramatic effect on the chances of making a sale.

Networking on Flickr, for example – joining groups and talking to other photographers – can be both fun and educational, and raise your profile high enough to be spotted by a buyer. It was her popularity, after all, that attracted a Toyota executive to Rebekka Gudsleifdottir.

An act as simple as sending an email to a photo editor can be enough to persuade them to look at your images and — if they’re good enough — license some.

And even search engine optimization doesn’t have to be too big a drag, especially if you’re prepared to pay someone to do it for you.

Marketing might not be the reason you picked up a camera, but it is something you have to do if you want to make sales.

And there is one more reason that you might not be making sales: the numbers are against you. There are already millions of images available for sale on the Web and while demand for older images can fade away, some sites are adding new images at a rate of almost half a million a month. Oleg Tscheltzoff, founder of Fotolia, once estimated the demand for business images at around two billion a year, but he was probably being optimistic. Photography remains horribly competitive. If your images are good enough, if you tell people how they can buy them  and if your marketing is strong enough, you should make sales. But you’ll still have to push hard to do it.

There’s often something a little demoralizing about browsing the calendars and cards in a bookstore. You spend hours in the studio wracking your brain to come up with new angles and new approaches to creating pictures. You try to think of creative ways to photograph daisies, daffodils, and other people’s dogs. And then you walk into Borders and see almost exactly the same posters, calendars and cards that they were selling last year.

The photos are still top-quality. They’re pretty and technically perfect. The colors on the petals are vibrant, the pets’ expressions are cute and the printing is second-to-none. And they express concepts that are about as original as the idea behind a fourth Hollywood sequel.

But if major publishers – the companies with the sort of distribution channels that can land them front-of-shop placements across the country – are consistently producing photo products that look the same year after year, there’s probably a good reason. They know they sell, and that can’t be said of products with more imaginative shots.

Pictures of Flowers Sell…

And you can see this outside the walls of Borders and Barnes and Noble too. Browse the most popular items on Zazzle and topping the list of calendars isn’t twelve unique pictures of Lego characters recreating classic images or expressive self-portraits but… flowers. They’re closely followed by images of Japan shot by the same photographer, and in third place are… more flowers.

“[N]ature, travel, architecture, landscape and historical photographs sell well,” Josh Elman, Zazzle’s one-time Head of Marketing has told us. “For instance, with nature, many contributors take flower photographs and see interest.”

Nor is it just uncreative concepts that can help to secure sales. The types of products on which those floral scenes are printed is important too. Zazzle might have made it possible to stick your photos on anything with a surface, from shoes to skateboards, but the most popular products for photographs remain posters, cards, stamps, prints and yes, calendars.

Of course, producing a photography product that sells still isn’t going to be easy, even when the subject matter is obvious. It may not take a great deal of thought to dream up the idea of creating a calendar with twelve pictures of stamens and stalks but it will take some great photography and smart marketing to beat the competition. Zazzle lists over 1,130 calendars tagged as depicting flowers while Cafepress offers a mind-boggling 1.55 million calendar designs of which more than 26,000 may contain floral scenes. If coming up with a simple plan takes the strain out of trying to be original it does leave an even bigger battle with the hordes of other photographers doing the same thing.

Clearly, one way to beat the crowd is always going to be to create professional quality images. While Etsy charges contributors to sell their products, both Zazzle and Cafepress allow open access. That’s good news for no-budget hobbyists but it does mean you don’t have to look too far to find products decorated with images that might have been lifted straight out of a snapshot album. The subject matter might be old but having the technique to shoot the pictures well can go a long way towards lifting your products out of the pack.

…and So Do Photos of Funny Animals

And depending on the product itself, you can get a little creative with the way the images appear. That’s particularly true when you’re putting the pictures on clothes –  another competitive area but one which does provide a little more room to be flexible. Josh Elman pointed out that Zazzle sees “many users create t-shirt and apparel products using photographs modified with special graphics and design effects.”

Darren Glenn, a designer who told us that he has been “very successful” on Zazzle recommends making a few simple changes to the image to improve its chances of selling when it’s placed on an item of clothing.

“I would suggest (for t-shirts) clipping out the subject of your photo,” he told us in a comment. “A square on a shirt looks bad. Clip it out, give it some text…something clever and funny, and save it as a png.”

Darren also mentioned the importance of meeting changing demand and producing new, relevant items constantly. Political shirts sell well during election campaigns. And, he added:

“Funny animal shirts sell good on Zazzle.”

The good news is that there is still room for creativity when you’re looking to sell photo products. Tried and tested ideas may be a safe bet provided you can pull them off at the right level and back them up with a marketing push to bring buyers into your store (Darren Glenn, for example, doesn’t rely on sales through his store on Zazzle; he has also placed his Zazzle store on his own domain, allowing him to market his products separately). But taking a few risks and shooting what you love will always be more fun even if it’s not more financially rewarding. Vlad Gerasimov has built himself a presence on product sites with t-shirts, pictures and illustrations based on his creative designs.

Perhaps the best strategy if you’re looking to put your images among the top-selling photography products then is to do both. Accept the technical challenge of creating eye-catching images from traditional subjects and concepts — and enjoy the cash those sales bring – but also leave time to experiment, test the market and produce a range of products that are a little more edgy. You might never see them sitting on a display case in your local bookstore and even on the Internet, you may find them harder to sell, but they’ll be good for your soul.

And who knows, they might prove so successful, you’ll be tempted to produce sequels of those too.

Photography: Gil Plaquet

There are few moments more exciting, more thrilling and more satisfying than your first paid photo shoot. And if that first shoot is a wedding, there are also few moments more nerve-wracking. A couple have hired you to document the most important day of their lives. They’ve trusted you to produce the pictures that will spark their memories, record their celebrations and which they’ll show their children and grandchildren in the years to come.

Get a portrait shoot wrong and the client will go to another photographer. Get a wedding shoot wrong and there are no second chances. The couple will have nothing but poor shots to remember their day – and nothing but word-of-mouth criticism to offer other couples instead of positive recommendations.

And wedding shoots aren’t easy. They can last for hours, require the co-operation of dancing, boozy guests and demand lots of preparation and plenty of post-production. But they are the bread and butter of many photography businesses and for good reason. While retail firms may cut back on their product photography and magazines can reduce their budget for editorial images, people will always get married. And they’ll always be willing to splash out when they do.

My Mother’s Friend’s Wedding

Winning that first job though is perhaps the hardest part. Without a portfolio of shots to show a client, persuading a couple that you have the temperament to handle the pressure and the skills to create the photos isn’t easy. Many photographers, in fact, begin by shooting for friends or family, people who already know and trust them.

Gil Plaquet, a journalism student who usually shoots for StampMedia and occasionally for local Belgian newspaper Gazet Van Antwerpen, recently completed his first wedding shoot. He picked up the job through family connections.

“They were friends of my mom’s who knew about my photography and wondered if I wanted to document their very special day for them,” he told us. “I was honored to do so, met up with them, showed them my portfolio and discussed pricing and the itinerary with them.”

To fix the prices Gil contacted a friend who had done wedding shoots in the past and followed his rates, lowering them a little because it was his first job. He also managed to upsell the clients an interactive DVD and a dedicated website to show off their images. Other photographers though have been known to shoot their first job for free in return for the portfolio. Joanna LeMasters, for example, shot her first wedding in December 2008 as a wedding gift to a former colleague. The couple agreed that she would use the photos in her portfolio and they would link and credit each photo to her.

Although she didn’t regret that choice, it took Joanna about half an hour after arriving at the church to decide that the work and planning involved in wedding photography meant that this would be the last time she shot for a gift.

Guests Placed My Posed Photos Online in a Day

When it came to the shoot itself, Joanna did have the advantage of having assisted her father, a professional photographer, at wedding jobs in the past. Gil, despite also coming from a family of photographers, hadn’t even attended a wedding for a number of years. Both were surprised at the co-operation they received from guests. People were generally willing to do as they were asked, Joanna found, and even the minister asked her how the wedding was going to go and when she wanted him for the shoot. The only trouble came when she chose to take the posed photos of the wedding party immediately after the ceremony.

“The subjects were very willing to obey. The guests who remained inside the church caused some problems though,” she recalled. “The groom and bride asked them more than once to quiet down and stop taking pictures. Still, some of my posed photos showed up on the Internet less than 24 hours after the wedding via the other guests’ cameras.”

Joanna can probably put that down to experience and now recommends that photographers get the posing and special requests out of the way as early as possible while there’s still light and before the celebrations begin. She also suggests using a flash for everything to save on post-production, taking multiple shots whenever possible, and above all, remembering that you’re the photographer, not a guest. While that means you have to wolf down the food quickly at the reception — a good opportunity, she discovered, for candid shots — it does provide a little leeway to be pushier than others. You can interrupt the couple to ask them to pose, suggest that subjects adjust their hair and clothes before you shoot and stand with your back to other guests as they take their own pictures. Gil too discovered the value of discussing the itinerary with the couple before the shoot, knowing exactly what they expect, and making sure that you’re properly equipped with enough batteries to get you through the day and either a versatile lens or multiple cameras. The practice at shooting portraits and documenting events was useful, he noted, and of course, the extra money was certainly helpful too.

Despite the difficulties, both Gil and Joanna indicated that they did have a good time shooting their first wedding and would want to do it again the future. And having done it once, winning the second job should be a lot easier too.

“All in all, I enjoyed the experience,” said Joanna. “Giving them the finished product and reading/hearing compliments on your work is very rewarding. The nice thing about shooting a wedding is that there are often quite a few friends of the happy couple who will soon be getting married themselves.”

Photography: laffy4k

The ability to display images on the Web has made it very easy for photographers to put their work in front of buyers. Unfortunately, it’s had another effect too. It’s also made it very easy for buyers to pick up images for free. When a buyer sees a photo he likes, whether it’s in someone’s Flickr stream, on their blog or sliding across their website, the first step is often to praise the image… and ask if they can use it for nothing. Flattery — and the thrill of publication – are often enough to persuade the photographer to agree, winning the photo editor a great image without touching his budget, and no doubt giving him a smile from the boss too.

This Creative Commons-licensed nature shot, for example, was spotted on Flickr and featured in Maxim magazine, a publication that’s certainly used to paying for its photos. The photographer received nothing more valuable than bragging rights.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Many publications, including Maxim, have a budget for buying images. They’d just prefer to get them for nothing if they can. It may well be possible to negotiate a payment with an image user that wants to skip the fee, winning both the kudos that comes with publication and a check too.

Low Res Images are Free, High Res Images Require a Fee

That begins with knowing who you’re dealing with. Different users always have different budgets which is why stock companies offer a bewildering range of rates for different types of usage. Software like fotoQuote can provide an idea of what exactly those rates should be (and it’s possible to pick up ball park figures by looking for similar uses on PhotoShelter, which incorporates the program) but even before you start negotiating, you have to decide if the request comes from someone who has the money to pay at all.

In general, you can assume that a print publication has a budget and the willingness to stump up the cash, while a blogger with a small site is more likely to keep looking than dip into limited funds.

Win a request from a large company then and you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for a fee, start negotiating at the market rate, and walk away if the buyer balks. Publication is nice but being paid for publication is even nicer. And being taken for a ride is certainly nothing to boast about.

One way to lower the risk of losing the opportunity to see your image in print while still asking for payment is to place only a low-resolution of the image on the Internet with a Creative Commons license. When the request comes in, tell the buyer that he’s welcome to use that version for nothing but point out that a higher resolution version is available at a fair price. Bloggers will be happy with the small picture; serious publishers will want the big image.

It’s likely though that most requests will come from websites and Internet publishers without budgets to buy images – there are more of them. But it is possible to earn even from these image users. They might not be willing to pay a fee but small online image users are always willing to supply credit and a link, a demand that’s usually a requirement of the CC license.

It Pays to Advertise

Make sure that the page the image links to provides plenty of information about the photo to build interest in the subject. Then try to monetize the image by offering prints of the photo for sale to the public, and by indicating to buyers that higher-resolution versions are available for licensing. You might not earn directly from that image user, but you can turn the request into a chance to advertise your photos to editors who do have budgets.

There is a good chance that buyers of those sorts of images will see your photo and click through to see what else you have available.

The biggest opportunity though isn’t using a publisher as a billboard for your photos, and it isn’t even turning a request into a one-time payment. It’s the chance to turn that image user into a regular buyer. That’s always going to be difficult and clearly, it will depend on who’s doing the asking. But it can happen. After Diego Lema sold a self-portrait to a publisher for use on a book cover, for example, the authors asked him to supply more images for their next three books.

The hardest part of selling to an image buyer is always making the first sale. Once the deal has been done, trust  has been established, a rate has been set and the buyer understands the type and quality of the images the photographer can supply. Repeat sales should then be easier. Add the buyer to your mailing list and when you produce a new series of similar images, let him know.

And finally, every time an image is picked up by a buyer – even if it’s for nothing – cash in on those bragging rights. The fact that you’ve been published lets other photo editors see what your images look like on the page and tells them that other image users think your photographer is professional quality too. That reassures them about making an approach.

It has become almost a tradition now for photo buyers to begin their negotiations at zero. Too often though, that’s also where the negotiations end. But whether a photo is used by the buyer for free and by you for advertising, or whether you’re able to receive a fee for a higher resolution image, you should get something out of every request.

For photographers looking to show their work to photo editors, life should now be easier than ever. If once they had to stuff a pile of prints into a envelope or make an appointment to show off their portfolio, today they can wow editors with the images on their website even while they’re out completing another job. But that easy option throws up a bunch of new difficulties. With websites so effortless to build — and with so many to choose from — how does a photo editor decide which photographer’s online portfolio to examine in detail, which photographers to hire and which to ignore? And what can a photographer do to make sure that his or her work receives the attention it deserves and wins a commission?

The first requirement is perhaps the most surprising. Despite the whiz-bang features and slick animation offered on so many sites, simple is usually best. Editors are short of time, and faced with a large number of images they want to gain an understanding quickly of what the photographer can do. They’re less interested in what the photographer’s Web developer can do.

“There is no secret that photo editors like clean, clear, unfussy websites,” says Whitney Lawson, photo editor at Travel + Leisure, a travel magazine. “I personally won’t last long if the photos are going by in Flash animations.”

Images should be grouped into themes, she recommends, with an ideal website showing between five and ten different series, followed by a selection of tearsheets. These don’t have to be from a national publication but they do help photo editors to understand how the images look in an editorial context.

The Image with no Sky’s the Limit

Obviously, the images have to be technically correct too, and digital problems can be one reason that photo editors click away. “Acidy” reds and greens or a magenta cast are the worst giveaways, says Whitney, and the sky should be detailed rather than left to disappear into the background.

“If the sky is blown out, with no information, it’s not for me,” she says. “I am not talking about a white sky, I’m talking about a no-information sky… It is not just negative space to me.”

It’s not just the tearsheets and the stories told in the professional series that can help win a photographer a job though. Personal projects are also important and reveal a great deal about the person behind the camera, what they like to photograph, and perhaps most importantly, how they’re likely to act on a shoot.

That’s a feeling common to all photo editors. Ryan Gamma, photo editor at Eastern Surf Magazine, tends to look particularly closely at personal projects when assessing a photographer for the first time.

“It shows me their range and helps me to judge how effective a photographer could be in an assignment situation,” he says. “Especially when it comes to a new photographer who I’m still trying to figure out.”

Creating a simple website is reasonably straightforward, especially if you’re willing to hire a designer to do it for you. Whitney pointed to Anna Wolf, Amanda Marsalis and Joao Canziani as three examples of young photographers with particularly strong sites. All of those photographers have multiple series, and Joao’s website even suggests that he has multiple portfolios. Putting that website in front of the editor though requires a different set of skills.

Whitney says that she looks at around 25 photographers’ websites every week. Some of them she finds by searching for photographers in locations where she will be holding shoots but others she discovers as a result of promos and emails sent to her by the photographers themselves.

Good Subjects Attract Photo Editors

What the photographer puts in those emails then is always crucial and especially what they put in the subject line. Messages with titles like “New work” and “New website” arrive in Whitney’s inbox every day – and are usually ignored. More interesting, she says, are emails with subject lines that reveal a specific detail, especially the sort of location detail that would interest a photo editor at a travel publication. Emails with subject lines like “Photographer based in Vancouver” or “New series from my recent trip to Argentina” are more likely  to be opened.

With a little consideration then, attracting the attention of a photo editor shouldn’t be too difficult. Ryan says that surf photographers find him and that he looks at everyone’s portfolio, new photographers and old. Persuading him to hire them though is a little  harder. Ryan wants to see that the photographer has a firm grasp of the medium but more importantly, he wants to see that the photographer has something fresh and new to offer to his publication.

That’s perhaps the easiest mistake for a photographer to make. When catching a photo editor’s demands little more than a well-worded email, it can be tempting to shoot out messages to every photo editor you can find. That might bring in views but to win the commissions, the images the email points to also have to match the needs of the editor – and the publication – they’re being sent to. Whitney Lawson mentioned one photographer who sent her an email with a link to his website that included a series about bullfighting. That was an instant rejection.

“I remember seeing a dead animal on one of the first photos on the site,” she recalled. “No thanks. I am not in the dead animal business.”

One of the biggest advantages of showing your images on a website though is that a rejection doesn’t have to be the final word. Asked what advice she would offer a photographer building a professional website, Whitney suggested befriending a Web designer.

“Treat them really well, buy them dinner, because the best website is the one that you can update all the time with all of your beautiful new work!”

Photography: Sadik Demiroz/Shutterstock

It took Shutterstock two years to gather its first million images. It took the company just over three months to increase its library from five million to six million photos. That growth represents an acceptance rate of around 70,000 new photos every week — and yet, Shutterstock says, it continues to reject more than 60 percent of the submissions it receives.

Shutterstock’s landmark was reached at the end of February 2009 but more interesting even than the fact that photographers are submitting to the company at a rate of 112,000 photos a week was the photographer who created that six millionth photo. The image depicting flowers on the British coast was taken by Turkish photographer, Sadik Demiroz.

Unlike many of Shutterstock’s 144,000 contributors, Sadik is not a part-time shooter hoping to earn a little extra cash from his  hobby. He has an MFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design, and teaches in the Fine Arts Faculty of Maltepe University, Istanbul. In the fifteen years that he has been shooting professionally, Sadik has had seven solo exhibitions and his images have picked up more than 200 awards, including Best of Show at the Hasselblad Austrian Super Circuit and the Gaudi Medal at the 39th Gaudi Photographic Exhibition in Spain. He has been selling his images through traditional stock companies since 1997 and shoots every day, sometimes placing his images on stock companies, sometimes on microstock and often working directly with clients as a commercial photographer.

If You Can’t Beat Microstock, Join It

While many professional photographers remain appalled at microstock’s low prices, others, it seems, have decided that the best response is to join in.

“Microstock represents the direction in which the industry is moving,” explains Sadik. “I chose microstock as a sales channel because I believe it represents the future of stock photography and I want to be a part of it.”

At the moment, microstock represents only a small part of Sadik’s photography earnings. Forty percent of his sales still comes from traditional stock and just 15 percent from microstock. But Sadik has only been submitting microstock images for five months during which time he’s managed to create a 1,100-strong portfolio at Shutterstock while also contributing to Dreamstime, Fotolia, iStock, PantherMedia, BigStock and 123rf. Numbers, he argues, are important. The more images in your online portfolio, the greater your chances of making money. In the future, Sadik sees himself shooting only low-cost, royalty-free images.

That’s a career plan that’s likely to horrify professional photographers who see the value of their portfolios decline as buyers too turn to microstock for their image sources. No high-quality photograph, they would argue, should be sold for a dollar, and photographers who offer good images for those prices are undervaluing their work and harming other professionals. Nor do they understand why anyone would choose to sell their photos for a buck when they could sell it for far more elsewhere.

Simple Images Sell Best on Microstock

The answer, Sadik argues, is income that’s both regular and reliable. Even though the individual payments are small, the frequency and reliability with which they arrive outweigh the occasional nature of regular stock sales and the difficulty of achieving them.

“What some people might not realize is that microstock images continually produce income,” he says. “A good image posted on a microstock site is like an investment because it constantly returns profits for years down the line…. As many professional photographers can attest, it is not always easy to secure a fair payment for rights-managed images.”

The shift away from traditional stock is not entirely straightforward, however. Although Sadik expects most rights-managed photos to become microstock eventually, his editor currently helps him to choose which images he sells on a rights-managed basis and which he offers royalty-free. Good artistic photos, and even good traditional stock photos, do not necessarily sell well in a microstock environment Sadik has discovered.

“I have found personally that images that get one clear message across are the best: a hand reaching for a heart, or two businessmen shaking hands, for example.”

Sadik’s top-selling images include close-ups of food, as well as rural landscapes.

Of course, Sadik isn’t the only professional photographer to be attracted by frequent, if low-priced, sales. Yuri Arcurs famously rejected an offer from a traditional stock company to remain with microstock and stock photographer Ron Chapple has created his own microstock portfolio, iofoto, licensing his images through a dozen different microstock sites.

Ron though continues to shoot traditional stock, selling through Corbis, JupiterImages and Getty. The diversity, he argues, makes good business sense. Standing in both camps gives his company stability even as the market environment continues to change. Rights-management also allows him to negotiate appropriate usage for images that lack model or property releases.

While Sadik seems to be preparing for a world without Getty – or rather, a world in which Getty sells its licenses through iStock – that combination of traditional and microstock sales is perhaps a more likely future. Getty itself has just launched its Flickr collection, offering the high quality images it’s found on the photo-sharing site on both a royalty-free and rights-managed basis. Instead of simply placing the photos on its microstock outlet, Getty is demanding prices that range from around $50 for a royalty-free photo to several thousand for a rights-managed image depending on usage.

It’s unlikely then that traditional stock photography is going disappear altogether. Buyers still see a difference between the simple, single-idea shots that sell well on microstock and the more complex and varied photos available on stock sites. We just might find that more professionals like Sadik are tempted by microstock’s frequent sales — and that Shutterstock’s seventh million photo won’t be too far away.

You can find them all over the Web. Publishers want photos. They want them for a wide range of different subjects. They want them for a bunch of different uses. They want them now.

And in return, they’re prepared to offer… an impressive portfolio. Well, that’s more valuable than money, isn’t it?

Tell that to a professional photographer and he’s likely to demonstrate a novel use for his longest lens. Tell that to an enthusiast though, and there’s a good chance that he’ll be so thrilled at the idea of having an image published that he’s prepared to accept it.

That’s why Flickr has around 81 million images covered by some sort of Creative Commons license.

But Flickr isn’t the only place that publishers can turn to pick up free images easily. Some stock sites offer freebies as a way of bringing in buyers and a quick search of Google turns up all sorts of sites that just can’t wait to give away photos.

Morguefile is one of them, even if it doesn’t quite intend to be.

An Online Picture Cabinet

Created in 2001 by Michael Connors, a New York-based multimedia artist, the site aims to function as a reference center for creatives looking for inspiring images. The service is named after the file cabinet used by newspapers to store paste-up flats and the pile of material used by comic book artists for inspiration.

“If you had to draw a picture of a super hero foiling a robbery in a supermarket, you might need a photo of the supermarket — from top of the shelves, from the store room, a picture of someone holding a gun, the cash register, etc.,” Michael explained. “Stock photos never really concerned themselves with that type of concept and that’s where a morgue file comes in.”

Currently the site has around 2,500 creatives who have contributed about 197,000 images. Those figures are likely to grow though following a revamp which has added two new services. In addition to offering free photos, contributors can now create portfolios complete with copyright protection, and use online storage centers.

According to Michael, people who make their images available for free on the site can enjoy a number of benefits. Photographers with images that haven’t sold can find that their pictures have uses beyond the stock site. (Shots rejected by sellers can sometimes be a photographer’s most popular images on morgueFile.) And of course, you can get a nice portfolio.

“The biggest benefit comes from the amateur photographer early in their career who needs to build a portfolio,” Michael says. “After the beginning steps of posting to the morgueFile they can be up and running with a published piece.”

More hopefully, linking free images to similar but higher quality copyrighted images in a portfolio might just turn a free search into a purchase. That’s because Michael doesn’t see the free images available on the site as an alternative to paid photography but as an adjunct to it. Many of the images are not as polished as typical stock photos, and that might be exactly what a designer needs for inspiration, he explains.

A designer working on a project, for example, might begin by downloading images from morgueFile to generate ideas then move on to stock sites, image libraries and even the major stock companies.

“Usually for any project one of the first steps is to download photos from various different sites and then place the folder of images on the project’s server for the rest of the creative team to work from,” Michael says. “I would be surprised if we were the only photo source used on any project but I am sure many times morgueFile is included as one of them.”

That might perhaps be a little naïve though. While the most popular subject submitted by photographers is “flowers,” the most sought images are shots tagged “people,” “business,”
“beach” and “computer,” exactly the sort that buyers are looking for.

Not All Creatives are Creative

The problem is that while Michael might have been inspired by a tool used by creatives, today’s creative workers aren’t just trained graphic designers and professional editors. They’re also bloggers who need images for their websites, mom and pop businesses who want a photo to use in an ad, and even small companies who’d rather keep their money for paid advertising when they can see that it’s possible to pick up photos for newsletters and brochures for free.

Large companies with dedicated creative teams then might well function exactly as Michael describes – using the free images for inspiration and planning before heading to the paid sites to do some shopping – but it’s unlikely that the morgueFile doesn’t also have plenty of small freeloaders who might well have been willing to pay a few bucks for the right photo.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that a photographer should steer clear of morgueFile though. As Michael points out, the kind of images that do well on the site are often those that can’t sell somewhere else. All photographers have a giant stack of images that they know they can’t sell and while they might want to think twice about publicizing their misses, if they can use them as bait to lead a professional creative to their hits then they might pick up a valuable new client.

And perhaps there is something to be said for giving back. Michael Connors’ vision of morgueFile is as a service that creative types provide for each other. They might not want to donate valuable photos that they can license for a fee but they might be willing to help designers with images that have few other uses beyond inspiration especially when it gives them an excuse to shoot the sort of images that they wouldn’t normally take.

“People who delve in and become enamored with the concept at first become overwhelmed,” says Michael. “We’ll get pictures of everything from what is in their backyard to what is in the fridge, most likely their pets, you name it. It’s an understanding that a great image is easy to find because it is everywhere. It really is a great way to fall in love with photography for the first time or all over again.”

That certainly could be more valuable than money and more valuable than a rich portfolio. But go for those first.

Photography: milky.way

Successful photography is as much about what’s in the mind as what’s in the camera. While taking great images will always be essential to making money from photography, there are plenty of talented, skilled photographers with hard drives full of fantastic photos who aren’t making a dime. And as a quick look at any microstock site will tell you there’s also no shortage of photographers with mediocre talent who are making sale after sale.

The difference lies in the way that photographers who make money out of their talent think about their images. They understand that photography is a business – even if it’s not the business that pays their mortgage. The production, sales and customer service all have to be conducted professionally. The images don’t have to be fantastic; they just have to serve a purpose. And the operations have to completed with the recognition that when someone is paying for something, they expect that something to do exactly what they’re paying for.

That begins with the hardest step of all…

Thinking of Photos as Products

For photographers who rely on their cameras to pay their bills, regarding photos as products is a step that happens naturally and out of necessity. But for enthusiasts who shoot primarily for the pleasure of taking a great picture, it is something that requires a different way of thinking.

A beautiful photograph is a work of art. The composition, the subject, the story the image tells and the way it tells it all incorporate an artist’s creativity. The success with which it achieves its goals reflects the photographer’s grasp of his or her craft.

But none of that means a thing commercially if an image is too avant-garde to be displayed in a home or a collection, and too artistic to be used in a commercial or alongside content.

When shooting art, entrepreneurs think “Would anyone buy this?” And when shooting stock, they think “How could someone use this?”

For an entrepreneurial photographer, it’s not just the image that counts but the way the image will be used… and whether it’s capable of being used at all.

Preparation and Marketing are as Important as Shooting

Enthusiastic photographers also assume that the work ends when the shooting is complete. Entrepreneurial photographers recognize, even if they’re not happy about it, that the hard work is about to begin.

They have to refine and sell the image.

Established professionals regard this part of their business as essential but something that they can leave to experts who can do it better than they can. Both stock photographer Ron Chapple and microstock photographer Yuri Arcurs employ people whose job is to prepare the products they’ve created for market and tag them appropriately.

“Our studio is a team effort,” Ron Chapple told us. “There’s two photographers shooting full-time, plus our digital artists also create illustrations… We’ve learned that shooting is only a small part of the overall process — editing, color-correction, retouching and adding keywords is the lion’s share of the workflow.”

Together with placing the images on websites and marketing those sites, the editing and keywording is unlikely to be the most enjoyable part of photography. But it is essential. It’s just fortunate that entrepreneurs also understand the value of delegation.

They outsource the work that others can do better than them, allowing them to focus on the most valuable part of their business.

The Buyer Always Knows Best

Browse the comments  under the images on Flickr, and you might be mistaken for thinking that everyone on the site has the eye of Man Ray and the technique of Ansel Adams. Every shot is a “great capture” and every upload a “beautiful photo.”

There are lots of wonderful pictures on the site, of course, but by definition, there are also very few works of genius. While enthusiastic photographers allow themselves to be affected by praise from other hobbyists, entrepreneurial photographers pay attention only to the voice that really matters: that of the buyer.

The only test that shows if an image is good enough to be sold is whether it sells. And the only criterion that an entrepreneurial photographer has to meet is the requirements of the market.

But that means more than just producing images that editors, designers and collectors want to buy. It also means treating them not as admirers but as customers. Thinking like an entrepreneur involves keeping track of who buys the most images and which kind of photos they want. It means keeping them informed when you release a new subject range, producing discounts and incentives, and handling complaints quickly.

It means seeing a photo that generates a hundred positive comments as less successful than a photo that generates one check.

Sales are to be Expected, Not Celebrated

Perhaps the biggest difference in the way that entrepreneurs and the enthusiasts think though is in their expectations. Professionals and entrepreneurs expect to make sales. They understand that a product that doesn’t sell, however beautiful and well-made it may be, is a failure.

When they produce a photo, they assume that it’s good enough to sell, and that it will sell enough to make a profit.

That’s not just one of the hardest shifts in thinking to make though, it’s also one of the most important because it usually has a strong effect on pricing. For enthusiasts, the thrill of a sale may be reward enough so they’re often willing to lower the price, keen to take the opportunity when it arises. Entrepreneurs though, believe that there’s another sale and another buyer just around the corner so they stick to their guns, demanding the price that they know the market demands – and they also know what the market demands.

Photography is an unusual business. It relies on artistry and creativity as well as the kind of physics-related technical skills that would frighten many free-thinking art school types. To be financially successful at photography though, to produce the kind of pictures that sell and to use talent to build even a small photographic business, requires thinking in a particular way. You can still think like an artist and be a photographer. But to make money, you also need to think like an entrepreneur.

There are lots of different ways to learn photography, from Flickr groups and meet-ups to evening classes and books.

But you can also go to college, study in a classroom and turn your hours with a textbook into credits towards a degree.

It’s a choice that usually requires a huge commitment – both of time and finances – so it pays to choose a photography school that will deliver the knowledge you want and the opportunities you need to turn your education into a career.

One of the leading places to learn photography is The Art Institute.

A collection of private art colleges located across the United States and Canada, The Art Insitute has  41 campuses, 25 of which teach photography to a total of 2,600 bachelors and associates degree students. The number of photography students at each location ranges from 337 at the Art Institute of Colorado to a cozy four at the Art Institute of Vancouver. Graduates have included Carol Guzy and Martha Rial, the only women to have won a Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism.

The Institute’s range of photography courses is broad and may include Large-Format Photography and Location Shooting, as well as business classes such as Advanced Communications, Composition and Language, and Business of Photography. The actual classes offered though will vary from site to site. Each campus has its own website where applicants can review the classes available. Faculty members usually have backgrounds as photographers and real-world experience in photography branches from fine art to event to photojournalism.

Interested in Photography? You’re in!

In general, the courses are open to just about anyone with “a high school diploma and an interest in the subject,” says Suzanne Cibotti, an Art Institute spokesperson. But requirements may be higher depending on whether the student wishes to receive a bachelor’s or associate’s degree. More restrictive perhaps, is the pricing. Total tuition for an associate’s degree in photography at the Colorado campus, for example, is $52,734. While financial aid may be available and the cost can be seen as an investment in a future career, that’s still an eye-watering amount of money – especially when starting salaries for new photographers and photography assistants are so low. These are intended as professional expenses rather than the cost of improving an enthusiast’s knowledge.

That’s reflected though in the courses’ results. According to Suzanne Cibotti, around 84 percent of 2007’s associate degree photography graduates were working in a “a field related to their program of study within six months of graduation.” That number rises to an impressive 90.4 percent for bachelor’s degree graduates.

“Graduates of The Art Institutes’ Photography programs enter the field in a variety of entry-level positions; including photographers, assistants to photographers or digital photographers,” said Cibotti. “Areas of employment can include advertising, photojournalism, digital image manipulation, editorial, fashion, portraiture and wedding.”

It will be interesting to see how those figures hold up as the economy continues to tighten and  would be nice to know too how quickly photographers are able to move up from entry-level positions to winning commissions, opening their own studios and earning enough to pay off their student loans. But the fact that such a large number of new photographers are able to get started in a profession that’s been under such pressure in the last few years is at least encouraging.

Take a Photography Degree Online

Even more encouraging is the flexibility that allows those who already have day jobs to study photography as well. In addition to the traditional evening classes, which can still take a big chunk out of someone’s day and be problematic for students with families, The Art Institute of Pittsburgh also has an online division which allows students to study whenever they want. Students can print out lectures to read at their leisure, upload their work to receive comments from teachers and discuss projects with other students online. The interface is attractive and easy to use so you won’t need to study programming before you can start studying photography. Subjects available include Principles of Digital Photography, Advertising Photography, Portraiture and Portfolio Exploration.

“[The course’s] goal is to provide students with a rigorous study of the elements of image production and manipulation, as well as a wide range of professional camera and lighting equipment,” said Cibotti. “Some things like color management may still be easier to learn in a regular classroom setting.”

The requirements for the online course though are relatively simple. Bachelors students need only be high school graduates with a GPA of 2.0, or hold a General Education Development (GED) Certificate with a score of 225 or higher, or possess an associate’s degree or higher. That might sound like too broad an acceptance criterion. After all, becoming a professional photographer requires more than the ability to listen to (or read) lectures and understand how to handle equipment. It requires creativity and talent, skills that aren’t easily taught in a classroom. The Art Institute didn’t have figures available for drop-out rates so it’s possible that those without a photographic eye end up leaving before graduation.

It’s also possible though that The Art Institute’s courses are capable of turning almost anyone with an eye for composition into the kind of photographer who can earn a living from their camera.

“I would encourage someone interested in becoming a student of our Photography program not to worry about what they have done before, but to leap right in,” said Karen Antonelli, photography faculty member at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. “You need to be the kind of person that spends a lot of time observing the world around you and have the ability to derive meaning from what you see.”

That’s not a bad place for any photographer to start. The question is how much The Art Institute can help a photographer translate that meaning into an image, how far it can take them – and whether it’s worth paying for.

Photography: superk8nyc

It’s one of the toughest challenges a photographer ever has to face. You’ve handled poor light, mad models, bawling brides and portrait subjects who just can’t smile. And you’ve still managed to produce pictures good enough to sell.

So good in fact, that a buyer is now asking how much you’d charge to let him use your image on his website, in his book or on his company’s office wall.

And that’s where the trouble begins.

What’s the most a buyer would be willing to pay? How do you put a price on your art? What should you consider as you tot up the figures…and what should you ignore?

The range of factors seems almost endless. FotoLibra, an open access picture library, starts by looking at “medium, print run, size and territory”…  then considers scores of other options to produce one of the 1,447 different prices that it might charge a buyer.

For professional photographers handling the negotiations themselves, the issues can actually turn out to be simpler than they appear. Expenses are one factor that have to be included in the price, and people who shoot for a living can measure the amount of time involved in creating an image and the costs involved in traveling to the location, hiring the models or buying the props. They might not expect to cover all of those costs in their first license (stock photographer Ron Chapple has talked of images taking a year or two to pay for themselves) but they know that taking bottom dollar to close a sale just isn’t worth it.

When you know how much you’ve spent to create the product — and when experience has shown that there are buyers willing to pay a fair price – there’s little reason to accept amounts that, if repeated, would take decades to make an image profitable.

The Kelly Blue Book of Photography Pricing

The price charged by the competition is vital too. Industry pricing software such as Cradock’s fotoQuote can provide a guide to the amount that other photographers are charging, and – no less importantly – stand as an objective foundation on which to base quotes without pricing yourself out of the market. You can think of it – and use it – as a kind of Kelly Blue Book for photographers.

Even if you choose not to charge exactly the amount that fotoQuote recommends, it can provide a useful starting point for direct usage negotiations. And even enthusiasts who only make the occasional sale – and who don’t generally use the software – can still benefit from it. Photoshelter incorporates fotoQuote into its service, allowing anyone to search the site for images similar to theirs and enter the purchase details to receive a professional quote. The service doesn’t always work quite as smoothly as you might like; many of the images on Photoshelter are only available as JPEGs so you can’t always find quotes for print magazines, for example, or for book covers. But when understanding the competition is so important, it is worth investing the time in searching around to discover exactly how much you could be charging.

It’s when you begin to move away from fotoQuote’s baseline that things can start to get a little more complex. There are factors involved in setting a price that are much harder to quantify than a magazine’s circulation or the difference between a trade magazine and a consumer publication.

The most common is probably pride. For enthusiasts who shoot for pleasure, the idea that someone is prepared to pay for one of their images is a huge endorsement. Receiving a positive comment on Flickr is nice; receiving a request for purchase is proof that you know how to shoot professional-grade pictures.

Those bragging rights may even feel more valuable than the fee itself and are often considered as a factor when setting the price.

They shouldn’t do. You might be willing to allow a blogger or a small website to use your image for nothing in return for credit and a return link (the competition in situations like these will be dollar microstock images or free Creative Commons pictures) but if a commercial user likes your photo enough to use it, he should like it enough to pay for it too.

The Real Value of a Big Portfolio

And he should like it enough to pay the full price. Accept less and in effect, you’re paying for the right to publish your picture in his publication – and the right for him to make money out of it.

The pride that comes from being published might feel like an important reward when considering the price of an image – and the desire to close the deal can often lead enthusiasts to demand less than the image deserves – but the level of admiration you receive from other photographers is actually connected directly to the amount the buyer is willing to pay.

If you’ve agreed to accept a lower price in return for the thrill of publication, how can you be sure that the buyer wants your picture because it’s the best he can find… or because you were the only person willing to supply it at that bargain rate?

Bragging rights might be fun but they aren’t worth enough to be factored into the price of an image. Neither is promotional value. Far too many buyers quote a padded portfolio as the only reward they’re offering.

Being able to show potential buyers that you’ve been published in reputable magazines is useful but unless you know that one job will definitely lead to another, higher value sale, then you’re giving away real money in return for the small chance of making a similar amount in the future.

If one buyer has been impressed enough to make an offer on the basis of your current portfolio, you can expect other buyers to do the same thing without giving your images away for less than the right amount.

It’s that fair price then that’s the most important factor to consider when you’re asked for a quote. If someone is making money out of your picture, you should be making money out of your picture.

And if persuading them of that is a challenge, then you should be waiting for a better buyer.

Photography: Carol Ross

They’re among the biggest users of photographic images and yet they’re rarely the first firms that photographers think of when they start looking for buyers.

Greeting card companies generate around $7.5 billion in retail sales from the 7 billion cards that Americans purchase each year. While not all of those cards will be photographic, a quick browse along the card racks in a stationery outlet or bookstore reveals a generous ratio of cartoon cats and saucy jokes to photographs of cute dogs and muscle-bound hunks… as well as the images of flowers, romantic scenes, cars, sports players and just about every other subject that could appear on the cover of a card.

Even if photographic images make up a fraction of the greeting card industry as a whole then, just a small slice of a pie that large should still be enough to make any photographer happy.

But shooting for greeting card companies isn’t easy. The two giants of the greeting card industry, American Greetings and Hallmark Cards, swallow up 80 percent of the market alone, and they tend to use in-house photographers for their images. Selling cards through firms like these usually means choosing a career, not landing a customer.

Protect your Rights

That still leaves around 3,000 independent publishing firms though, and at least some of them are willing to take on freelance photographers. Fantus Paper Products works with freelancers, for example,  as does Avanti Press, which has been selling photographic greeting cards – largely, although not exclusively, of animals — for almost 30 years, accepting around 200 new photos each year. CardMakers is about as old as Avanti Press and also says that that it’s on the lookout for new talent. Its guidelines state that the company pays around $250 for each design.

But Cardmakers also says that in return for that sum, it expects to receive exclusive greeting card rights and to be able to copyright the published work under the CardMakers banner. In fact, it’s not unusual for a greeting card company to make some fairly stringent demands for the images it purchases. While “greeting card exclusivity” is practically a standard (and for lengths of time that can range from five years to perpetuity), it’s not unheard of for a company to demand full rights to an image.

For professional photographers expecting to continue to make money out of a photo then, licensing it to a greeting card company can look like a very bad deal, depending on the company they turn to.

One alternative is to publish and sell the cards yourself. You won’t have to compete against thousands of other photographers pitching their products to card companies at the same time, you’ll be able to decide what you want to do with those photos and, no less importantly, you’ll get to keep all of the royalties for each sale, rather than relying on a one-off payment for the photo.

You’ll need to find independent stores that have the flexibility, space, style and willingness to take on your cards, and you’ll need to do the math to make sure that the production costs still allow you to sell the printed product at a competitive rate, include a cut for the retailer and generate a profit. But even those tricky bits could be the easy parts. It’s the marketing that makes the real difference.

Proprietary Marketing Methods

Carol Ross, for example, has been a professional photographer for about fifteen years. She shoots events and her images have appeared in books but she’s perhaps best-known for her range of romantic greeting cards which she publishes, sells, markets and distributes herself. She currently offers around 500 images, selling about 100,000 units a year. Some of those sales come through licensing to publishing firms such as Papyrus, and Carol also has an agent, receiving 5 percent of net sales and paying the agent 30 percent of that amount.

Photography: Carol Ross

It’s only because Carol’s images are known though – and known to sell – that she’s able to land those licensing agreements, she says.
Her cards are also easily recognizable, and her pictures of flowers and rural scenes fairly timeless, allowing her to avoid being left behind by changing trends. To keep her line fresh and provide additional choices for loyal customers, she adds new Valentine and holiday cards each season.

When Carol started marketing her cards, she did what any photographer is likely to do: she created a sample box and went from store to store. It was her husband, who has a background in sales and marketing, who added the level of sophistication and professionalism to her business that allowed her to really generate revenue.

“That is the breakthrough,” she recalled. “When I reflect on how all of this came about it was through sales and marketing that opened all of the doors for me.”

In fact, those sales methods make such a difference that Carol regards them as proprietary and while she was happy to talk about her photographic style, she refused to explain in detail how she managed to persuade sellers to take her cards.

One clue though might lie in the approach taken by Northern Cards, a Canadian greeting card company which focuses on small businesses ignored by large suppliers and attempts to make the retail process as simple as possible for sellers. All retailers have to do, the company says, is supply a small amount of space and pass over the profits to the supplier during a regular service visit. That might require a small investment in display material but it could make the marketing easier too.

According to the Greeting Card Association, a trade body, if the rise of e-cards has affected sales of printed cards it’s only been to increase overall card-sending. Senders, the organization argues, tend to use e-cards for informal moments, keeping the printed cards for holidays, anniversaries and birthdays.

That means that $7.5 billion industry is still an opportunity for photographers prepared to shoot the kinds of images that customers want to buy and who can present them to retailers in a way that makes it easy for them to offer. As Carol Ross put it:

“They would be good photographers, they should be good business people as well.”

Photography: linyijen

The toughest challenge for photography enthusiasts isn’t shooting beautiful pictures or improving skills. Those things are always tough, but they’re the reason we reach for our cameras.

It’s finding the buyers. That’s something that requires knowledge and skill, and worst of all, time – time that could be much more enjoyably spent shooting.

And the reason it’s tough is that few photography enthusiasts know any buyers. Photographers tend to hang out with other photographers not photo editors, gallery owners or collectors. And that’s if they hang out with picture types at all. More likely, they’re going to be spending time with old friends and colleagues, people with no connection to photography and little apparent need for your photos.

In fact though, those connections can bring in paid work. Many event photographers begin their careers with an invitation to bring their camera to a friend’s wedding, and recommendations from friends to their friends have been known to launch the businesses of children and pet photographers.

But perhaps the biggest untapped opportunity for photography enthusiasts lies in their colleagues. Microstock, after all, was created to supply the image needs of small firms, the kind of companies that need images for their marketing and publicity material but which don’t have the budgets that make a subscription to Getty worthwhile. According to Oleg Tscheltzoff, founder of Fotolia, each small or medium-sized business needs around 50 images a year for their newsletters, websites, blogs and marketing material.

Decorate the Office Walls with your Photos

If those firms can source their photos from employees with an eye for an image instead of from merchants, they’ll be able to pick up some customized photography while giving the employee a chance to get his photos seen, cement his place in the company and perhaps land himself a nice bonus too.

Andreas Reinhold, for example, is an engineer who shoots car photography in his spare time, selling his photos occasionally to specialist magazines. He has also presented framed prints to his firm which hangs them on the office walls and leaves a copy of his photo book in the reception area so that clients can flick through it while they wait. Although neither of those methods brings him direct revenue, they do promote his photography for little cost, give him a unique role in the company and they put his photographs in front of people.

Some companies though have relatively large and consistent image needs and that presents a whole new opportunity, one that some organizations are meeting in very special ways.

The BBC’s picture editors, for example, have to find images to illustrate 3,000 hours of broadcasting every week. Some of that imagery is sourced by commissioning professional photographers, some photos come from the organization’s archive and photo agencies supply some of the pictures too.

The BBC Asks Employees to be Photographers

Since October 2008 though, the BBC has been using a Flickr group to allow the organization’s employees to submit images to be used on the iPlayer and programme sites. Only about 100 photos have been uploaded by the group’s 86 members in that time but some of them have then been used on the BBC homepage, putting pictures shot by amateurs in front of millions of people.

“The BBC still has an ongoing commitment to commissioning professional photographers to illustrate its output and that will never change,” explained Ashley Stewart-Noble, the BBC’s Senior Content producer who manages the organization’s central team of picture editors and is the group’s administrator.“However, digital cameras and the internet have created a new generation of amateur photographers and the Flickr group is one way for us to enhance our professional offering and give people the chance to engage with the BBC.”

That chance is limited to members of the BBC though, at least as far as the Flickr group is concerned. Ashley runs the group by himself and the number of images submitted would be unmanageable if he opened it to the public, he indicated. More importantly though, the BBC has to be certain that the photos it uses belong to the person who submitted it and do not breach copyright. The group’s members then, have to supply their real names so that they can be reached easily if a copyright issue does crop  up.

Nonetheless, Ashley says he does sometimes use photos sent in by members of the public.

“BBC News has an established history of encouraging users to submit their photos for the site. Everyone who does agrees to their terms (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2780295.stm#yourpics) which cover copyright concerns. I sometimes use these images to illustrate promotions on the bbc.co.uk homepage,” he says.

The attraction of Flickr to a content manager like Ashley is likely to be the ease with which he can issue calls for particular images (such as this one for photos of Clapham, London) and reach contributors he would otherwise have difficulty contacting, and the fact that he is able to review submissions quickly. It’s among the reasons that companies like Ford run photography contests through the site instead of using their own.

But a group like this also presents a model that other companies can follow. A photography enthusiast working at a software firm for example, might suggest that their company’s art director use a Flickr group as one way to source the images that they use, creating a channel through which the employees can supply their own photos. To encourage participation, contributors could be given credit (which the BBC’s group doesn’t supply) and perhaps a bonus for each image used too.

You might not want to administrate the group yourself but suggesting that the company should create one would show that you’re looking to help the company and provide an outlet for your images and impressive content for your portfolio.

Your friends might not be collectors and your colleagues may be teachers or programmers rather than art buyers or editors, but if someone in your workplace needs pictures, then there are ways to put your images in their hands.

There are many different ways of selling your photos. You can hang them in a gallery and hope they sell for thousands of dollars. You can submit them to stock companies and hope that someone buys them.

And you can stick them on t-shirts, mugs and mousepads and see people walking around in them, drinking from them and running their mouse over them.

That might not be quite as prestigious (or as lucrative) as having a one-person show at the Irvine Contemporary Gallery in Washington, D.C. but it can steal be a useful way to turn your images into cash.

Provided you know how to do it.

In theory, it should be easy. The Internet is now stuffed with choices for photographers and designers who want to put their pictures on items. Cafepress might have been the first with its range of t-shirts and clothing, homeware and gifts, cards and stationery, and arts and posters, but Zazzle wasn’t far behind… and neither was Red Bubble and Etsy.

The first thing you need to understand when looking to turn your photos into products and sell them then, is the differences between the store sites.

Etsy is Crafty and Red Bubble is Arty

Zazzle and Cafepress are fairly similar. Both sites allow contributors to create their own stores for free. Photographers can then upload their images and allow buyers to purchase them on a range of different product types. On Zazzle that range can extend as far as skateboards and shoes. The buyers pay the cost of production plus a mark-up set by the contributor.

Although Cafepress has a basic program that costs nothing, serious sellers tend to sign up for the Premium program that costs $59.95 per year and which provides greater visibility and more promotional tools.

Zazzle has also struck deals with the owners of brands as famous as Disney and Star Wars, making it a site for shoppers as much as producers.

Red Bubble and Etsy, on the other hand, tend to be much more artistic. The product range of Red Bubble, for example, is limited to t-shirts, wall art, calendars and cards, and the emphasis is on creativity and artistry more than the products themselves. Stores are free and, once again, contributors can set their own prices above the basic production costs.

Etsy though takes a different approach. The site focuses on handicrafts, although it also sells photographic prints, and charges sellers a small amount for each item they want to sell.

So which store should you use to sell your products?

In practice, it really doesn’t matter a great deal. You can think of Zazzle as being somewhat downmarket, Cafepress a touch swankier, Red Bubble a kind of designer store, and Etsy as a craft fair but because none of the sites has much through traffic of their own, it won’t make a huge difference to sales.

Your sales figure will depend on the buyers that you manage to bring to the site yourself.

Zazzle tries to make that easier with a bunch of basic and advanced promotional strategies while Josh Elman, the company’s Head of Marketing, has talked to us about the need to be outgoing and in-your-face about the fact that you have an online product store. Keywording helps too, he says.

“Don’t be shy about having a link to your store in your email signature, on your website, your profiles, etc.  Most of all, be sure to tag and organize your photographs properly so people can find them!”

Create your Own Photographic Community

That’s all basic stuff and by itself, is unlikely to generate too much traffic. Much more important is targeting communities that are related to your work. Create a store dedicated to biking, for example, and you can talk about your designs in Facebook groups. You can even ask other bikers their opinion in forums (but not for sales – few people like sellers in forum threads so take the feedback and hope the sales come naturally).

That will also mean creating separate stores for each photography subject. Community buyers will want to feel that you’re as much an enthusiast as they are. If they’re right, you’ll certainly find those sales easier to make.

But perhaps even more important than approaching communities related to your topics is to create your own community. The hard way to do that is by being active on the store site’s forums, a place where buyers can chat with sellers. Some photographers have made sales that way, but it can be a lot of work.

A better option is to build a community based around your own blog or website. This is the approach taken Vlad Gerasimov, a photographer and designer who sells wallpapers on a subscription basis from his site and t-shirt designs on Zazzle. Note not just the professional quality of his designs but also the appreciations on his comment wall.

Buyers already familiar with Vlad’s work through his site — which he promotes on a word-of-mouth basis — come to Zazzle to find more. In effect, the site functions not as a store which Vlad has to promote alone, but as an adjunct to a website that he’s already promoting. For Vlad, Zazzle functions as kind of simple technical solution to the challenge of delivering goods that are already popular to an audience that wants to buy them.

One way to make photography product sales then is not to try too hard. Shoot good pictures. Build an audience for them on your website or even on your Flickr stream. Then tell your admirers where they can pick up your pictures in different forms.

Rebekka Gudsleifdottir, for example, an Icelandic art student, has used her icon status on Flickr to promote not just her photographic prints, which she sells through her website, but also her knitted sweaters. They have nothing to do with her photography – except for the fact she wears them in her self-portraits – but once you’ve built a community that loves your work, your brand power can be strong enough to sell anything that you endorse.

The best advice for selling your photography products then isn’t just to get out there, to market actively and tell people where they can find you. It’s to shoot images that you love and tell people who might also love them where they can see them. When that happens, they’ll click through to your product store and make their purchases.

Photography: Ryan Libre

Making the shift from photography enthusiast to professional photographer is never easy. Plenty of people own cameras. Some of them have talent and a good eye. And there are very few buyers.

But the pleasure that comes from spending your days taking pictures, the satisfaction of making a sale and the thrill that comes from seeing your images on walls, in books and inside magazines can make the struggle worthwhile.

That seems to be the case for Ryan Libre, a former US soldier who became disillusioned with life in uniform, left the Forces and picked up a degree in Peace Studies. After spending some time as a peace activist, he took up photography, a medium that, he says, allows him to “be active and have a voice without being attached to dogmatism of any kind.”

Now dividing his time between Hokkaido, Japan and Chiang Mai, Thailand, Ryan is trying to make a living out of his photography. Shooting mainly photojournalistic and travel images, he has photographed Japan’s Daisetsuzan National Park, shot artistic images that portray “enchantment,” and documented the Kachin Independence Army on the border of China and Burma. So far, he has been published in thirteen books, five magazines and a newspaper, and his pictures have been profiled on both the BBC website and National Geographic’s Your Shot page. His photographs have also been displayed at several shows, both group and solo exhibitions, and it’s those shows, he says, that are most important for a photographer’s development.

“I learn so much every time I do one.  It really forces me to think about what is my best work, and how to show a complete and diverse yet unified view of something. No matter how many times I have seen those photos before, when other people are carefully examining a large print of them in a gallery, I find mistakes and strong points I never saw before and may have never noticed otherwise.”

Nor are these benefits attainable by displaying the images online. While a website can provide access to images, Ryan argues, the resolution is low and the viewer’s attention span is short. Few people will spend more than a few minutes browsing images on a website. At a gallery, they’re likely to spend an hour or more, plenty of time to fully absorb the work.

Photography: Ryan Libre

Pictures of Graves are Taboo

Of course, obtaining those shows isn’t easy. We’ve described before how photographers are organizing their own exhibitions or teaming up with restaurants to find wall space. Ryan’s first shows took place when he was a student, and were group exhibitions held at the university and in cafes. His first solo exhibition was held at a local library in Hokkaido where, he said, he made plenty of mistakes. Pictures of graves were taboo in Japan, he discovered, and even flowers can have unique cultural meanings.

“Local knowledge is important to missionaries and businessmen, and important for photographers too,” he notes now. “If you just take photos and go home you can stay blind to many things, but when you show and sell them locally you have to be aware what the locals see in them if you want either to go well.”

Other mistakes were more prosaic. Ryan printed his photos in a size for which he couldn’t find frames, but most importantly, the exhibition had no story. “It was just 20 photos from that year that I liked.”

Those lessons were important when he approached more prestigious venues. Fuji Film Sapporo is an important photo gallery north of Tokyo and is usually booked two years in advance. Ryan was the first non-Japanese photographer to have a show there, and the first photographer under the age of 30. A long preparation time contributed to the show’s success, he says, but even more vital was a connection. The owner of the camera shop where Ryan prints his images knew everyone at the gallery and was able to get him the introduction he needed. In the end, Ryan sold $1,600 worth of prints at the show, allowing him to generate a small profit.

“[B]reaking even at a photo show is considered good,” Ryan explains “[T]he main goal is usually for publishers to see your work and ‘prove’ your merit as a photographer so you stand out a little from the crowd and get commissions and students easier.”

Pitch the Show, First Shoot the Photos Second

For his show at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Sapporo, Ryan took a slightly different approach. Instead of showing the venue his portfolio and asking for a show, he asked if they’d be interested in displaying the images of Cambodia that he planned to shoot the following winter, images that he believed would  suit the gallery’s style. The gallery couldn’t promise to display photos that they couldn’t see, so Ryan agreed to upload his pictures to his website as soon as they were ready. The gallery agreed to save him a space if they liked what they saw. Had he waited until he returned with the images to approach the gallery, Ryan explained, he would have had to wait a year for a space to open up.

In the end, the galley did exhibit his pictures. But here too, Ryan just broke even, a point that emphasizes the difficulty of earning with photography even when your pictures are good enough to win audiences.

In fact, Ryan describes his financial situation as “getting by” and says that he has to accept “being poor sometimes and flat broke others while I wait for [my photography] to grow.” His description of ten days in the life of an aspiring photographer contains plenty of interesting travel, far too much cycling to be healthy… and no billable hours. Although he’d like to be able to afford better gear and more travel options, Ryan tries to live cheaply.

He also tries to do more than turn his photography into cash. His images have been described as “a means of embracing the world” and he’s starting an NGO called Documentary Arts Asia which is intended to form a community and center dedicated to the “education, production and advocacy of the documentary arts in Asia.”

It might not be the way a professional usually measures his success, but it’s certainly a sign of enthusiasm for photography and it’s likely to be at least as rewarding as a profitable show.

Photography: Tim Hill

Every branch of photography has its challenge. Portrait photographers have to capture the subject’s entire personality and character in a single shot. Architectural photographers have to fill shadows, dodge reflections and shoot a picture that portrays the feeling of space. And still life photographers? They get to move lights around so that the object is properly lit, focused and sharp.

Those aren’t always the most exciting jobs in the world but much depends on the type of objects in front of the lens. Photographing shampoo bottles in front of a white background all day could grow quite dull quite quickly. But photographing food usually requires a great deal of creativity. The food has to be prepared and styled, a task often completed by a professional assistant, a composition has to be put together to show off the food at its most appetizing, and each type of dish offers its own challenge.

Most importantly, trends in food photography tend to change quite quickly too. A look through an old magazine or an old recipe book reveals not just how diets and food fashions have changed over the years but how the way we want to see them has altered as well. Food photographers have to shoot what the client tells them but they also have to shoot images that suit the food and match their own style.

“You get asked to shoot whatever people want by editors and art directors, and being a working photographer I do what is asked of me,” explains Tim Hill, a professional food photographer whose clients have included the BBC, Fortnum & Mason’s and Haagen Dazs. “Normally when I shoot like that, at the end — when I have shot what is asked for –  I then go on and shoot what I want.

Maybe it’s a different setting or maybe a lot tighter in on the food or the lighting changes — whatever the reaction I get with the food makes me do… Keeping an eye on current fashion is fine but being true to yourself is very important too.”

Breaking into food photography isn’t always easy. Tim himself started his career as an assistant in a catalogue studio in London in 1973 before becoming a junior photographer two years later. He’d been shooting still life images for seven years when he was asked to photograph some pottery soup bowls for the catalog’s cookware section.

Photos of Soup Sell Bowls

To make the subject more interesting, he hired a food stylist, then called a home economist to bring in food props and make a number of different soups to fill the empty space in the bowls.

“The management was horrified at her bill but the client loved the shot and the increase in sales of the soup bowls,” recalled Tim.

Photography: Tim Hill

Tim soon found himself receiving all of the food photography the company was asked to perform, as well as more equipment and an assistant to help him prepare the shots.

Today, Tim shoots independently, winning commissions through his personal website and selling licenses through his own stock site.

He still works with a food stylist though, usually his wife, Zoë Hill, who trained as an artist and whose role is to prepare the food with the camera in mind. That’s a rare skill and one that differs from the techniques used by a chef.

“A chef prepares a meal to look good from above, relying on smell and taste as well as visual appeal,” explains Tim. “A food stylist only works on the visual from a pre-determined angle of view a lot lower than overhead.”

A typical shoot will involve creating “stand in” food which is used to fix the viewpoint, arranging the lights and the props, setting the plane of focus and choosing the depth of field. When everything is ready, the plate is removed and its place marked with wooden blocks. The stand in food is discarded, the “hero” food added and the blocks removed, and the shots are taken as quickly as possible to ensure that the dish remains fresh.

Food Stock Doesn’t Have to be Food Alone

The resulting images tend to have uses that stretch beyond catalogs and brochures. Food stock is used by advertising agencies, magazines and newspapers, book publishers and designers, and many others. And the definition of food photography can now be fairly broad too. StockFood, a specialist supplier of food images, is now expanding  beyond the ingredients and meals into food-related areas that include flowers, decoration ideas, table settings, and health. The company is also interested in images of food and people that could include shots of diners in restaurants or shoppers in supermarkets. As always, the more versatile the image, the likelier it is to demand high usage fees.

“For example, an image depicting a family in a grocery store could be used for editorial purposes as well as for advertising uses such as point of purchase displays and  supermarket circulars,” Shannon Mahoney, StockFood’s General Manager told us.

The images can then be sold on a rights managed (RM) or royalty free (RF) basis. The RM photos tend to have higher production costs and a more conceptualized look, but StockFood allows the photographer to choose how they want their images sold. Earnings depend on the quality of the images but also on their quantity and on the frequency with which new material is added, advises Shannon. Those changing fashions are important too.

“Successful agency photographers produce a continual stream of new photographic material that takes current trends into account,” she says.

StockFood is accepting submissions, provided that they’re high quality, professionally produced and follow the submission guidelines. Images must include caption information and any necessary model releases need to be included. Accepted photos also have to be exclusive and must remain with the agency throughout the term of the contract. Although it is possible to pull images, StockFood has an international distribution that makes removing submissions expensive and time-consuming. Submit a photo that the company doesn’t sell then, and it will be stuck there until the end of the term.

So what makes a sellable food photo?

According to Tim Hill, it’s the best ingredients prepared by a food stylist with a good visual eye.

“Learn to cook,” advises Tim, “and appreciate what it takes to present food for a camera.”

Photography: Auntie P

Gallery owners might be dedicated, connected and knowledgeable but they’re not known for their open natures. You usually have to book in advance to see one and they’re unlikely to pull the pictures off their walls immediately to make room for yours. Their wall space is limited and valuable. It’s their livelihood, after all, and if they’re not certain that your photographs will sell, they’re going to tell you to come back when you’re more established.

For professional photographers, that’s galling enough. For people who shoot in their spare time though, it can sound like a flat refusal – a polite alternative to laughing.

Rejection shouldn’t be treated that way. Gallery owners have to be as conservative as their collectors and they’re aware that as much of a work’s value is wrapped up in the name on the label as the colors on the canvas. If you’re entirely unknown, even a great picture is going to be a hard sell to a gallery owner.

Which is why it might be worth giving galleries a miss – at least initially – and looking at one of the alternative options that don’t involve trying to impress a professional seller.

Cafes and Restaurants

Perhaps the easiest is to persuade the owner of a café or restaurant to show off your pictures. Unlike gallery owners, they don’t need the images to sell to make money. They just need the pictures to look good enough to act as free decoration, show that they’re committed to the community and bring in a few extra customers.

They’re also a lot more approachable. While a cold pitch could certainly work, you might be better off choosing a venue you like, patronizing it a few times and chatting to the owner. Build up a relationship and you could even receive an offer without having to ask.

And even though the place might not be as prestigious as a swanky gallery, with the right images, you should still be able to make sales. Brandy, a photographer in Spokane,  displayed her photographs in a local coffee house. She told us that she made a sale on the first day of the exhibition and went on to sell more than 80 prints.

Do it Yourself

Cafes and restaurants are open to the public anyway. Once you’ve been accepted, all you’d have to do is choose your images, print and frame them then place them on the walls and wait for the orders to come in. Even if you didn’t do any additional marketing yourself – and you should – the flow of a busy café should be enough to land you some sales.

If you wanted to organize your own exhibition from scratch, you’d have to do a lot more work.

It’s not impossible. Photographers have done it and with impressive results. You’d have to find a venue that’s large enough to accommodate plenty of people and send out masses of invitations, especially to people who matter. Because the exhibition itself is likely to be short and because it won’t have a natural flow of visitors, you can’t count on making as many sales. But invite gallery owners, critics and collectors and you might just give your own career a boost.

Nor do you have to spend huge amounts of money. Jeremy Mason McGraw was able to form a deal with a local framers when he organized an exhibition, while Rei Dishon, an art student, used Moo cards to show his pictures and allowed people to take them away with them when he had an exhibition in Italy. Both of those methods can keep the costs down and the visitors coming in.

Art Fairs

Art fairs can be both as powerful as exhibitions at generating revenue and almost as prestigious. Juried fairs in which prizes are awarded to the best artists look great on a resume and can go a long way towards persuading gallery owners that you really do have art that people are prepared to buy.

There are costs involved here too. Most art fairs have exhibition fees which you’ll need to pay at each show and there are also one-time costs for the display tent and bins.

But art fairs are more open than galleries. Although they can be competitive – there are usually more applicants than space – persistence and talent should be enough to land you your first berth. Art galleries will be much more demanding.

Online Exhibitions

Okay, putting your photos on Flickr or your website isn’t quite in the same league as showing them in a gallery – or anywhere, in fact, that lets people see them in the flesh. But it’s still one form of exhibition. People will still be seeing your images, they can order them and you can organize them by theme instead of simply uploading your images in some random order.

You don’t have to ask for anyone’s approval to put on a show like this, it won’t cost anything except uploading time and while the number of prints you sell could be fairly small, you could make money by linking the images to a book on Blurb or even by offering affiliate products in the image caption. It might not be where you want to end up as a photographer, but it’s not a bad place to start.

Is there a hole at the center of the photography industry? Is the current licensing model sustainable? Or will the open sourcing of microstock continue increasing image supply until there are so many pictures available, photographers can’t give good photos away and can’t earn even from those that sell?

In theory, that nightmare scenario should happen. Shutterstock alone already offers over 5 million royalty-free photos and, according to the company’s CEO Jon Oringer, the number of new submissions each month never drops below six figures. Because old images – sold or otherwise – remain available on stock companies, inventories will continue to grow without limit. As the supply increases faster than demand – the world has always contained more photographers than buyers – prices should keep falling.

In fact, you could argue that this is exactly what microstock has already done. There’s little difference between charging one dollar for a license (and paying the photographer pennies) and giving the images away.

But it’s not just the overall number of images available that photographers have to worry about. After all, it’s hard to see how prices can fall any further. They also need to concern themselves with the growing size of the competition. As supply continues to increase, each photographer’s overall share in that supply decreases, reducing their chances of being the contributor that makes sale. The same amount of money might be flowing through the photography industry but it will be shared among a growing number of photographers, leaving less and less money for each.

That, at least, is the thinking behind NoEquivalent Art, a new photo-selling service launched by Eugene Burtman, a photography enthusiast with a background in economics. The site aims to protect prices — and the income of photographers – by limiting the supply of its commercial and art images to just 200,000 pictures at a time. Only 1,000 photographers will be accepted and they will only be able to offer 200 photos each. You can think of it as OPEC for images.

One Image, One Sale, One Time

By itself, that kind of supply control is not unique. Ecard company, HarmonyWishes, also places strict limits on the number of contributors it accepts and the number of images they can offer. But to make sure that buyers are receiving unique works, NoEquivalent also restricts photographers to just one sale.

Contributors must state that their images have not been sold anywhere, are not available for sale anywhere else and that there are no other copies available. Once a sale has been made, the photo is removed from the site and all other high-resolution copies must be deleted.

“[Photographers] do get to keep low resolution versions of the image, which they may use for administrative purposes such as keep in their portfolio,” Eugene explained. “Photographers do understand that to truly sell a unique image they cannot keep a full resolution copy as that would make the image not unique and devalue it. Removing the full resolution version also protects them from liability in case someone steals the image off their storage media and publishes/resells it.”

The compensation for that single opportunity is the value of the sale. Because each image is unique, its rarity means that the photographer can demand a rare price. NoEquivalent contributors begin in a price band that ranges from $500 to $800, an amount that many stock contributors would be happy to earn over the lifetime of a photo. The photographer receives 40 percent of the sale price.

Good sellers will be free to raise the band but the pricing follows market research with companies and individual stock buyers  which found that customers are willing to pay different amounts depending on the image’s end purpose.

“This price strikes a balance between the premium concept of the product and the need to be affordable enough to not be prohibitive of most business needs,” Eugene told us. “Finally, this band fits well into the artistic wall décor industry.”

Giving Up Your Photo Rights

Image are offered in two categories: art and commercial. But they’re also delivered with all image rights short of authorship. Buyers aren’t just free to use an image repeatedly in any way they wish, they’re also free to resell the images they purchase in whole or as part of a product. Eugene reassured us though that the economics don’t really allow for an as-is resale market developing, presumably because if the images could sell for more money, they’d sell for more money on the site.

The company plans to open for sales in early 2009 but has been recruiting photographers since November and picked up the first twenty of its 1,000 contributors within its first month.

As for the type of images NoEquivalent wants to sell, the emphasis, not surprisingly, is on uniqueness.

“The simplest way to think of it is by asking oneself the following question: ‘Is my image either capturing a unique moment, difficult to replicate, or highly marketable such that someone would want to own it all to themselves?’” says Eugene. ”If the answer to any of these questions is yes then you have a NoEquivalent image regardless of whether you sell it through us or not.”

Photographers can find out by applying for NoEquivalent membership here.

What they won’t find out for a while though is whether a model that allows a photo to be sold only once will provide more income than stock models that allow for repeat sales because there are flaws in the argument that underlies NoEquivalent. Even if real inventories do continue to grow, NoEquivalent’s own research shows that buyers are willing to pay varying amounts depending on the use. They can already choose from almost 100 million free CC-licensed images on Flickr but if they want a commercial image, they turn to microstock and for higher end uses, many are still prepared to pay for traditional stock.

More importantly, stock inventories might grow limitlessly but the patience to search is very limited. Unsold photos are soon buried and old photos soon go out of fashion. Photographers happy with their stock income quickly find their revenues dry up if they stop contributing new photos.

There may be a hole at the center of the photography industry but it’s more likely to be the idea of endless, effort-free photography sales.

It happens every time there’s a major news event. While journalists scrabble around for their passports and photojournalists curse the weight of their equipment, citizens at the scene start telling the world what’s happening.

During the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it was Twitter that came of age as tech-savvy Mumbaikers reported on the gunmen’s progress and the commandos’ response. During the London bombings, it was the photos snapped on mobile phones from inside Underground tunnels as passengers abandoned trains that captured the mood of the moment.

Each time, bloggers rave about the power of citizen journalism and editors point out the importance of checking sources, sorting through the material and having trained professionals on the scene to ask the important questions and gather all of the information necessary to understand what’s happening.

Citizen News Photos are Invaluable

But those same editors then buy citizen images because they understand that while it’s impossible to have photojournalists at every site all the time, everyone now has a camera on their phone. The images might not be as perfectly framed as those shot by professionals, the focus might be off and the quality lower than they’d like but as a first impression, photos captured in the initial minutes of an event are invaluable – and therefore worth buying.

It’s why Getty bought Scoopt, a service that channels camera phone images to the media, and it’s why Turi Munthe, a journalist and author, and Jonathan Tepper, a former finance executive, have launched Demotix. Not for the money, of course, but to promote global communications and fill the information gap left by shrinking foreign news desks.

“Demotix was founded on the basis of promoting freedom of speech and freedom of expression,” Jonathan told us by email. “Demotix is also global in scale. We have photographers and visitors to the website from every corner of the globe. We won’t turn down photos of a drunk Lindsay Lohan, but that isn’t why we’re running Demotix.”

Perhaps not, but it’s the financial value of the images that will most motivate people to submit them and it’s also why photo editors will be buying them. After all, to claim in an age of blogging that the mainstream media has a monopoly on free speech is to miss the point of citizen journalism. Anyone now can get information – and images — to the public. But only the mainstream media can supply a large audience and large payments too.

The site works in the usual way. Anyone can register and upload their photos. The images themselves don’t have to meet any specific quality requirements. Camera phone snaps are as acceptable as 12 megapixel monsters; they just might be harder to sell. And images on any topic are welcome.

“Demotix is looking for every kind of pictures — Politics, Economics, Sports, Arts, etc.,” says Jonathan. “The kind we are most interested in are striking pictures that tell a story. There is always demand and a market for good reportage.”

He seems to be right. Demotix quietly launched a beta in December and has since collected a thousand photographers and “a few thousand pictures.” It’s also racked up a number of sales to major outlets. The UK’s Daily Telegraph, for which Turi writes a blog, bought this image of North Korea, and the BBC used this video footage from Demotix of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg who was killed in Mumbai.

The More Common the Image, the Better it Needs to Be

The differences between those two sales though are telling. The subject of each was rare but while the video footage looked like a home movie, the shot of North Korea – which was less rare – looked as artistic as it was photojournalistic. The more common the subject of the image, the better it needs to be.

The prices for images vary too. Demotix charges media companies the same sorts of prices that they would expect to pay editorial photo agencies and takes 50 percent of the sales price. Basic editorial print usage ranges from $150 to $500 depending on the exact use; exclusive photos are a matter of negotiation.

“[W]here there is a market for it, the sky is the limit,” Jonathan said.

Demotix states explicitly that it’s not just not a microstock service, but is “the opposite of microstock in that we look to get the best deal possible when licensing images.” In addition to making its inventory available for buyers to browse, the company’s sellers also hit the phones to known buyers when a particularly good image comes in. That means images might do more than sit around waiting for buyers, and when they do sell, they’ll go for more than a buck.

But citizen agencies like Demotix are also the opposite of microstock in a couple of other important ways. For one, a smaller percentage of the images submitted are going to sell. (Oleg Tscheltzoff, CEO of Fotolia once told us that microstock has 40 million potential buyers. Editorial images have a much smaller market.)

And for another, images that don’t sell right away are unlikely to sell at all.

“Editorial images are perishable and editors need images when they need them,” explained Jonathan. “[T]hey don’t have time to sift through the Web and find two-penny images with cheap photostock agencies.”

That means a large inventory of old editorial images isn’t going to be worth a great deal. But it also means that the supply of sellable images shrinks as quickly as it grows, avoiding the fall in prices that has hit the stock industry.

Selling a news image is always going to be a hit-and-miss affair. Asked for examples of images that have sold to the mainstream media, of the “few thousand” images in its inventory, Demotix only pointed to two, and one was a video. (Although Jonathan did indicate there were others.) If you happen to be in the right place at the right time, then sending your photo to Demotix – or Scoopt for that matter – might be a good place to start. But if it hasn’t sold quickly, then you should probably be looking at other ways to monetize the image… like placing it on your own ad-supported news blog.