Photography: James Higgins

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

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

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

You Can Sell a Book by Its Cover

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


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

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

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

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

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

Find Work with Friends, Cards and an Online Portfolio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography: Joe Thorn

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

Flickr’s Business Potential

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

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

For more information, read the new Flickr Marketing ebook.

Microstock Gets Moving

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

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

For more information, read the new microstock photography ebook.

Kodak Turns Pets’ Eyes

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

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

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

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

For more information, read the new pet photography ebook.

Photoshop Goes Mobile

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

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

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

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

For more information, read the new photoshop ebook.

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

Photography: Mike Stimpson

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

Kevin Bauman’s 100 Abandoned Houses

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

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

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

Beth Dow Takes a Platinum Idea into the Garden

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Dualib Plays with Her Food

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

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

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

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

Mike Stimpson Builds Sales out of Lego

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

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

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

Vlad Gerasimov’s Siberian Houses

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheap and Simple

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

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

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

Stock is Hard for Photographers – and Hard for Buyers

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

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

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

Flickr’s Free Photography Market

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

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

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

Limited Licensing for Small Niches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matching the Seasons

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

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

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

Create Exclusive Images

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

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

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

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



Photography: illustir

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

FotoLibra

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

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

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

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

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

PhotoResearchers

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

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

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

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

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

FarmBoy Fine Arts

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

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

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

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

CutCaster

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

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

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

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

Your Own Stock Site

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

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

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

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

The Principles of Publicity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link Your Business to Valentine’s Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Seen in Le Monde

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

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

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

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

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

Sold for $100,000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get in Touch with Just One Touch

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking at Someone Else’s Portraits

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography: Vanessa Dualib

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Turned Down Getty

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

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

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

Photography: Vanessa Dualib

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

It Takes Two Years to Test an Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography: Craig Holmes

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

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

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

Get Big or Get Niche

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing Photography with Twitter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography: Philip Brown

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

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

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

Anything Can Happen in Sports Photography

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

“During a test match there may be over 300 deliveries bowled and you have to be ready to capture the batsmen hitting out or being bowled, the bowler celebrating, someone taking a catch, a collision, etc.” Philip explains. “Literally anything can happen at any time so you just have to be ready with hopefully the right lens, the right background, etc.”

The rise of digital photography has helped. Over five days, Philip says he’ll take thousands of images, many of which he doesn’t even look at. A second camera helps too. Philip usually has a remote camera bolted somewhere else on the boundary, giving him wider shots of the play. And cricket’s own quirks can lend a hand as well. Play stops for lunch and afternoon tea, providing time for editing and uploading. It also stops if the weather gets too cloudy for batsmen to see the ball clearly, and the players come off when it rains. There are no dangers then that expensive camera gear will get soaked.

That wasn’t always the case for Philip though. He began his sports photography career in high school, shooting rugby matches with an Olympus Trip. A big fan of the sport, he wrote to Rugby League Week, a specialist rugby magazine, to ask if he could cover matches for them. They agreed, and Philip agreed to buy a proper camera. Soon, he was supplying sports images for local newspapers.

“I remember I would drive to the free newspaper office on a Monday with my best prints from the weekend and they would normally appear in that week’s paper,” he recalled.

It wasn’t long before the editor was buying him film and paying him “substantial” amounts to cover more matches for him. At the same time, Philip was also supplying a local basketball club with photos for use in their programs for a small fee.

Sports Photography Isn’t as Glamorous as It Looks

It’s not a bad way to begin, honing your skills and building your portfolio through local media outlets and small clubs, and it might just be possible for other photographers to follow a similar route. Philip advises budding sports photographers to get a strong collection of photos together, then approach agencies and publications once you have something impressive to show.

But it’s advice that comes with a strong note of caution. Much of sports photography, he says, is about marketing yourself as well as your images. And it’s not as glamorous as it looks, Philip told us from his South African hotel after shooting a day’s play in a southern hemisphere summer. More importantly, the pay is going down.

“The amount received for photographs published in books and newspapers has decreased significantly over the past five years,” says Philip. “There are so many more images available that publishers are able to put the ’squeeze’ on photographers.”

That’s a process that new photographers — and photopreneurs — are only going to continue. Perhaps the most important advice Philip was able to offer then was to shoots sports because you enjoy it. And that’s another reason to choose your niche carefully. Specializing can be the best way forward if you have a strong interest in one particular area, Philip says, but it does need to be a sport you like. If you’re going to be sitting from eleven in the morning until six in the evening for stretches of five days at a time and for several months, it helps to enjoy it.

“I don’t think anyone should take up sports photography thinking that they can make a fortune doing it because that is very, very unlikely,” he warns. “If you love taking pictures then that should be the motivation to get involved.”

That’s a depressing thought, even if it is a realistic one. But knowing that you’re going to be taking pictures that will make you proud and which will appear in the world’s newspapers is a pretty good consolation, as is the ability to attend lots of sports events. You also get to call yourself an expert on shooting in your chosen niche, with all that implies for pitching book ideas and photographing covers. Tight nicheing in sports photography might not be a path to athlete-style earnings, but it’s not a bad branch for someone who likes sport and loves photography.

Photography: Daniel Y. Go

Landing an assignment to shoot the cover of Vogue or fill the pages of the New York Times Magazine isn’t likely to happen to everyone. You’ll need a resume filled with publications, years of professional experience, and a contact list that contains the names of some top editors. But the giant publications aren’t the only magazines that take pictures. There are more than 20,000 magazines available in the US and many of them have significant readerships, are willing to look at the pictures, not the photographer, and pay for the photos they use – even when they come from people who usually shoot for fun.

Best of all, because magazines cover such a broad range of topics, it’s possible for just about anyone with interests that stretch beyond capturing images to find a market for his or her photos. One of the most obvious is your local surroundings. States, regions, cities and even towns can have their own publications and are dependent on local photographers who know the area, and know where to find the best views at the right times. While some will employ staff photographers, there’s often plenty of room for freelancers, especially when they can match a great shot with local knowledge.

Vermont Life, for example, is a quarterly magazine published by the State of Vermont. It’s a publication that likes landscape photography and uses them, from freelancers, in a huge range of formats, including calendars, subscription gift cards and engagement books, as well as the magazine itself. Fees range from $50 to $500 for the front cover.

Oklahoma Today provides information about the state’s people, places, food, culture and anything else to do with the area. Again, rates for the photographs start at $50 and rise to $600 for a major feature.

And New Mexicans can cash in too, although not as much. New Mexico Magazine’s prices for stock images start at $60 but peak at $300 for the cover. The photos must also contain detailed captions.

Clearly those aren’t the only states that have local magazines that take images from freelancers. But they do represent a good example of the kind of opportunities you can find in your area.

Specialist Magazines Offer Unique Opportunities

Everyone has a location that they can photograph, but what happens in those locations can make for sellable images too. Most magazines make their money by focusing on a niche activity rather than showing off a specific site. Those kinds of publications need photographers who understand that activity, whether it’s driving fast cars, playing guitars or breeding cats.

Rock and Ice, for example, is a climbing magazine packed with dramatic images of vertical cliff faces and dangling climbers. For photographers who climb (or climbers who know what to do with their cameras) the magazine offers an opportunity to get their shots in a large format publication and for a fee.

Trail Runner, which comes from the same publishing stable as Rock and Ice, provides a similar chance for people who prefer to keep their feet on the ground, even if they’re not on the road. Low-resolution sample images can be emailed to photos@bigstonepub.com.

And Sail Magazine calls itself “the world’s largest circulation sailing magazine.” According to the publication’s website, the magazine uses images to illustrate points made in the text but also just because they like beautiful pictures. The submission guidelines don’t indicate prices but according to The Photographer’s Market, they can reach as high as $1,000 for a cover.

Again, there are opportunities here for photographers interested in just about any activity. But it is noticeable that Sail Magazine encourages its writers to be photographers. As we’ve suggested before, one useful way to get your foot in the photo editor’s door is to go through the commissioning editor. Pitch a story with illustrations rather than pretty pictures alone and you’ll be solving two problems for the magazine with just one purchase.

Pretty Pictures Do Have Their Place

Whether you’re pitching local landscapes for a magazine focused on your area or recording an activity for a publication covering your favorite activity, you’ll want those images to tell a story. They’ll have to fit the subject of the publication. But what if you’ve just created a beautiful image and want it shown as widely as possible — and ideally in magazine form?

Magazines aren’t art galleries, so your best bet will still be to find a publication that matches the subject of the photo. Alternatively, if the technical skill involved in capturing the photo is at least as important as the image itself, you can always shoot for a photography magazine but you’ll be competing with hundreds of other photographers, all at least as skilled and all brandishing equally impressive images. There are a few places though, where you might be able to place an artistic image.

Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, wants photographs related to Buddhism, which might just be vague enough to cover a wide range of relaxing and creative photos.

Harper’s, a cultural magazine with a large following, also likes fine art photos and accepts as many as ten a year, paying up to $800 – although, usually less.

And if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can always try to get your photos in National Geographic. You might not get sent to shoot the shifting sands of the Kalahari but submitting it to the magazine’s Your Shot section might just win you the kind of bragging rights money can’t buy.

There is plenty of opportunity then for photographers hoping to put their photos in magazines, but winning the sale isn’t going to be easy. Competition will be fierce, magazines only take a handful of unsolicited images in each publication, and you have to get the shot exactly right. For a photo editor, saying no is always easier than saying yes. But you can improve your chances by reading and being familiar with the publication you’re pitching to so that you’re only sending relevant images. It also helps to have a Flash-free website that’s easy to browse and which offers a relevant portfolio. And it’s vital to understand that editors aren’t going to buy a photo just because it’s pretty. It has to meet their needs too.

Get it all right though and those editors might just see you not just as a freelancer but as a regular source for their images.

For photographers, it’s all about the image. When a picture can speak a thousand words and a good photo can tell a complete story, what can be added by giving it a hundred-word description? It’s not like anyone will actually read it, and besides, photographers take the pictures. It’s the writers who do the writing, right? There are times though when a way with words can not only enhance the power of your image but also win you sales and attention.

For some outlets, a detailed description is actually a requirement. PhotoResearchers, for example, a stock site specializing in scientific images, accepts photographs of animals for its natural science collection to go with its inventory of bacteria and chromosomes. But the captions that must accompany those images, and which are embedded in the high res scan the client receives, are likely to tax all but the most knowledgeable of photographers. According to the company’s submission requirements:

“natural history images… should include the common and scientific names of any organisms pictured, as well as location information, and additional information about what is going on in the image. Other useful information may be included as well if it is relevant.”

For a company which sells primarily to textbook publishers and around a fifth of whose contributors are doctors and scientists, that’s not an unreasonable demand. Buyers want to know that they’re not just looking at a picture of a bird on a zebra’s back but a “Red-Belled Oxpecker (Buphagus erythrorhynchus) on Grant’s Zebra” and that the image was shot in Tanzania, Ngorongoro Conservation area.

Telling the Photographer’s Story

But while these kinds of descriptions are rich in scientific detail, they’re short of color. They tell a buyer what he’s looking at but not what the photographer felt when he was looking at the scene. As a viewer though, you can’t help wondering what the photographer was doing in the Ngorongoro Conservation area, whether he found what he was looking for there and what he thought of the experience. There’s a story there and it’s one which enhances the power of the picture itself.

Telling that story with a good caption could land you a spot on Pictory, a site created by JPG Magazine’s former editor Laura Brunow Miner. The site invites photographers to submit a single image related to a theme and to send it accompanied by a caption that explains the story behind the picture.

“I think virtually any photo is made stronger with a good caption,” Laura explained. “The words answer the questions you don’t know to ask.”

Offering “just another pretty photo” won’t cut it but contributors who are better at creating images than producing written descriptions will find that their words are professionally edited. They may even be asked follow-up questions to fill in some of the gaps. The work will then appear, together with their bio, alongside other attractive images and placed in a professional-looking design. The result, judging by the images already on offer on a site that has only been up since the beginning of December, can be very moving. Photos and stories submitted to the “My Most Meaningful Image” theme include photos of a sick baby, a dying grandfather and a road leading home. The images themselves have some power of their own but it’s the story of what they mean to the photographer, described in the caption, that adds an entirely new meaning to the composition.

Not a Copy of Flickr

What contributors won’t receive at the moment though, is pay. While JPG Magazine rewarded photographers with $100 for every image used, Pictory is “currently” only offering kudos, bragging rights and the chance to “be part of something larger than themselves.” That might not impress professionals but Laura points out that pros have submitted images, usually sending in personal work or pet projects. Asked whether Pictory will pay photographers in the future, Laura didn’t rule it out, but she also didn’t want to reveal her plans until she’s seen how photographers and viewers actually use the site. There is also likely to be some form of community collaboration, but the site won’t be a carbon-copy of JPG Magazine or Flickr.

One place where captions can both add to the image and increase the chance of actually making a sale is Flickr. Travel writer Rory Maclean, for example, included this image in his Flickr stream showing Maureen Wheeler leaving a hashish store in Kathmandu in 1972. The description accompanying the image explains that the store might also have been an illegal moneychanger, giving the story a surprising twist, and points out that after that trip, Maureen Wheeler and her husband Tony founded Lonely Planet, creating the guides that have changed the way backpackers have traveled ever since.

All of that makes for an interesting story that reveals more than the picture could alone… and directly beneath that story are the contact details for anyone who wants to license the image. It’s direct and without smart keywording and some additional marketing to let people know the image is there, it’s unlikely to churn up too many sales, but it is still a smart way to make use of the text space that Flickr provides. Rick Waggoner does something similar with his set of images from the Vatai Village in Phongsali Province of Laos, using the set description to describe the context and individual picture captions to tell readers what they’re looking at. He also makes clear that the images are not available for use without his permission – or payment. A link takes potential buyers to his portfolio at Photoshelter.

It’s tempting when following this model to write captions – like Rick Waggoner’s – that could have appeared on a stock site. But if Pictory is anything to go by, it’s clear that captions that include the photographer’s story and add new meaning to the picture also make it more attractive, more interesting – and perhaps even more likely to sell.

Photography: Carrie Sandoval

Becoming a successful photographer means learning how to handle a camera, understanding how to work with light, and figuring out how to edit and produce an image. You also have to learn business skills, marketing and promotions. And you have to know how to work with people. That can be the biggest challenge of all. While professional models are paid to deliver the poses photographers need, portrait clients have to be coaxed into relaxing and looking at ease for the shot. That’s particularly difficult when you’re shooting a subject so young that he or she can’t understand what you’re saying, and spends most of the shoot asleep. Baby photography poses a bunch of unique challenges but it can also be rewarding and enjoyable, and sometimes involves some interesting marketing strategies.

The biggest problem that baby photographers face is that newborns aren’t just incapable of following instruction, they’re also unpredictable. A photographer can never know whether the baby will arrive at the shoot frisky and full of energy, ready to gurgle, smile and coo, or tired, hungry and irritable, prepared only to cry, eat and curl up. While that can make planning difficult, the odds tend eventually to tilt in the photographer’s favor. Newborns, after all, spend most of the day dozing.

“Some will quietly snooze through an entire session and others are a little bit more feisty,” says Carrie Sandoval, a baby photographer who has been shooting for almost five years. “Almost always, baby will at one point settle down and sleep peacefully. It takes a great amount of patience (and back pats and rocking…) to wait them out.”

Usually, a sleeping subject would be a problem for a photographer but babies continue making expressions even while they’re dreaming. Carrie says that she can capture at least one grimace and one smile from every baby even before they’ve opened their eyes – and while she likes to extend the shoot into a waking session, those open eyes can cause their own problems. Babies cross their eyes a lot, and boss-eyed subjects don’t make the best portraits.

Let the Baby Lead the Shoot

Letting the baby take the lead is always one good strategy for a relaxed shoot. There’s little point in trying to stop a hungry baby from doing anything but eating. Soft light is important, and heat and white noise are essential for masking the sudden noise of the shutter release, Carrie says. And creativity counts too. While it’s possible for portrait photographers to earn a living sitting subjects on stools and photographing them holding diplomas or smiling at the lens, baby photographers have to find ways to accentuate their subjects’ softness, vulnerability and cuteness. When babies can appear relatively similar, it’s often how the shoot is planned — as much as the facial expressions of the subject him- or herself — that make the image. Babies are often photographed swaddled in blankets or cheesecloth, held in naked arms or lying comfortably on soft cushions. Figuring out what works and how to land the shot does take practice so if you don’t have a baby of your own to hand, borrowing a friend’s child for a couple of hours is useful. Model calls can also generate opportunities to try out new poses and composition ideas. Of course, photographing your own baby will give you limitless time to experiment and an even greater satisfaction when you get the picture right. It was a shot of Carrie’s own baby wrapped in cheesecloth that first inspired her to specialize in newborns.

If finding babies to practice on and creating the shots that bring out their personalities, even when they’re sleeping, can be difficult, the marketing at least is a little easier. For Carrie, most clients come through word-of-mouth. She started shooting the children of local friends and they started telling their own friends about her work. Birth announcements that include her own logo on the back also bring in clients, and her site turns up well in search results, bringing her a steady flow of new business.

Creating the Packages

Most interesting though are the packages and deals that Carrie creates to make more money from each booking and turn single bookings into multiple jobs. Her rates begin at $300 for a local session and rise to $3900 for a collection that includes a DVD, a coffee table book and a number of prints. That top-priced package is also the only one that allows the client to keep the digital negatives.

The other extras are also available separately, allowing Carrie to sell prints for up to $1080 for a 30 x 36 wall canvas, and offer “Keepsake Coffee Table Books” that make use of her degree in graphic design. That gives her a unique and attractive product that makes it easy for clients to show off their photos.

One of her packages though also combines two shoots in one job. For $500, clients can order a maternity session that delivers 12-15 images presented in an online gallery and a later newborn session made up of another 35-45 images. It’s a useful way to lock clients in and turn them into repeat customers. And having returned once, it’s likely that the client will come back again in the future as the family grows.

“I have repeat clients, but it is usually whenever there is a new baby added to the family,” says Carrie.

That’s a strategy that might work in other photography fields too. Photographers hired to shoot engagement photos can also offer wedding packages, for example. Whenever one event is likely to be followed quickly by a second, there’s always the possibility of offering two shoots at a slightly cheaper rate.

Baby photography does offer some unique challenges. It’s not for everyone and it does require specialized knowledge in handling babies, understanding their moods and keeping them calm. But the techniques used by baby photographers to win clients and increase sales can be used by any photographer, even those whose subjects don’t fall asleep during the shoot.

Photography: katiew

Clients never see the work that goes into creating the pictures they’re buying. They don’t think about the factors that photographers have to consider as they choose between different lenses, decide where to point the lights or plan the composition. They don’t have to figure out how keep a model, fed, watered and happy during a long shoot or remember to pack  a spare battery in case the one they’re using dies sooner than expected.

And neither do many photographers. Whether a photographer is shooting for fun or planning a paid set-up, the focus is always on the picture: how it will look, the style of the image, the story it will tell. The details — where to stick the tape, how to get the stain off the floor and how to stop passers-by from walking into the shot – all tend to be ignored. Until you start setting up and realize that you have to troubleshoot a thousand little problems before you can even get the camera on the tripod. It’s often those things that an assistant can push out of the way, allowing the photographer to focus on the real value he brings to the job: his vision of the picture and the skills that allow  him to create it.

According to David Bean, a professional photographer and admin of Flickr’s Assistants Wanted group,

“A good assistant is one who is dedicated to doing their part to make the shoot go as smoothly as possible. This means paying attention to little details like marking the photographer’s water bottle so it won’t get confused with others. They also should try to anticipate the photographer’s needs ahead of time so they are ready for things even before they’re asked.”

Assistants Do Gorilla Work

That makes an assistant sound a little like a nurse to a photographer who acts a bit like a doctor. (Although the photographer’s take-home pay won’t look like the doctor’s, and the doctor is unlikely to get his water bottle labeled.) Toss in the gorilla work — lugging heavy lighting equipment and boxes of gear from place to place – and it’s pretty clear that most of what an assistant will be doing for the photographer is the small stuff that takes a lot of time and energy, but not a great deal of skill, and contributes little directly to the final set of images.

That doesn’t always have to be the case though. Personality is also important, says David. While photographers will demand different things from their assistants, some will want their helpers to talk to the client, keeping him out of their hair while they get on with the shoot. Large studios might even have a team of assistants with different levels of experience. Contact with the client could be reserved for the number one assistant while the number four, in his first year at photography school, gets to sweep the floor and coil up the cables. Those conversations are a more responsible duty; they demand decent social skills, a certain amount of confidence and perhaps the ability to talk cameras and deal with any concerns the client might have about the way the shoot is progressing.

But when photographers demand that assistants have at least some photographic knowledge, it seems a shame to use them only to move boxes and keep buyers entertained. Many photographic assistants will have pretty sharp image editing skills, a benefit that not only enables the photographer to avoid having to remove noise and whiten eyes himself. It also lets the assistant charge more money. Assistants who are as handy with the mouse as they are with the gaffer tape and can double as digital tech help can as much as double the — admittedly meager — pay they’re charging.

Who Is the Best Assistant?

Even that though might miss the most valuable contribution that an assistant can bring to a photographer. When someone chooses to make themselves available to a studio it’s usually because they’re looking to learn photography. The education they receive at the elbow of an established professional is part of the pay. It’s certainly the reason that the cash payments are so small, and over a lifetime of earnings should actually be worth a large amount of money. But those assistants will already know something about photography. They’ll have ideas of their own and approaches to a shoot that might be at least as good as that of the photographer – even if they don’t always have the technical skills to pull it off. When Popular Photography asked six photography experts to name the best photo assistants in an unscientific survey, the results brought out helpers whose images were every bit as good as those produced by seasoned pros. The assistants might not have as broad a range of ideas as do the photographers they’re helping. They might not yet have all of the technical skills they’ll need to build a photography business. But they’re also not going to be stuck in their ways, will be willing to try new ideas and have the energy needed to push through a challenging shoot.

The main idea behind assistantships is that they allow rising photographers to gain hands-on experience, work alongside a professional and see how the images are actually created. They also allow the photographers to skip the boring, sweaty work and concentrate on the interesting, creative, technical stuff. But letting the education flow in only one direction can mean getting less from an assistant that you should.

“A photographer really needs to have a teacher’s heart even with an experienced assistant,” says David Bean. If they give me 100 percent, no I have problem giving them back anything I can as far as knowledge. And sometimes, often an assistant will teach you a thing or two.”

Of course, there is a one more that an assistant can do for you, especially if you’re doing everything you should be doing as a mentor: he can give you competition.

85111840. Photograph © Eke Miedaner/Flickr/Getty Images

Back in July 2008, Getty Images threw open its doors. Or at least, it pushed them open a crack. The exclusive stock agency wasn’t adopting microstock’s open source policy but it had forged a partnership with Flickr, adding selected images from the  photo-sharing site to its commercial inventory. Things went a little quiet for a while but in March 2009, Getty debuted its Flickr Collection, a selection of photos sourced from Flickr’s contributors and available for licensing both on a royalty-free and rights-managed basis. Getty hasn’t released precise statistics to describe how many images have sold, but the company has told us that Flickr images licensed to customers already number in the “thousands” and have been used in creative campaigns in more than 65 countries.

According to Claudia Micare,  Manager, Contributor Relations for Getty Images, the collection now includes more than 60,000 images provided by more than 6,000 photographers in more than 100 countries. To Getty’s own customers, those images show up in search results in the same way as other photos in the inventory. Editors browsing Flickr can also buy the images they see by clicking a licensing button above an available photo. They’ll then be taken to the image on Getty’s website where they can make their purchase.

Rates vary, of course, but even royalty-free images start at $5 for a 170 x 113 image suitable for Web use and rise to $300 for 3008 x 2000 pixels.

“Several photographers have had multiple sales on their imagery, some generating five-figure licenses or hundreds of dollars in royalties for the photographer,” said Claudia.

Joining those 6,000 contributors has become a little easier recently too. In September 2009, Getty created its Call for Artists group, inviting anyone on Flickr to submit a portfolio of ten images for review by Getty’s editors. Almost 11,000 Flickr members have joined, offering more than 50,000 photos to the group. In addition, the editors will continue to browse the site, offering licensing contracts for images that catch their eye.

Sell Your Flickr Cat Photo

The subjects that Getty is choosing vary tremendously too. Claudia Micare noted that Getty is interested in “all subject areas,” including conceptual pictures in all categories, as well as hobbies, travel, nature and pets. Even Flickr members’ famous love of cats has been respected. Getty offers 940 of them.

Some of those pictures appear to be typically stocky but the real draw for Getty, says Claudia, is the “authenticity” of the images on Flickr. That’s certainly how the stock agency is selling the collection to buyers, placing the images in contrast to the “posed,” “model-y” and “fake” images that turn up again and again in stock collections.

“When we launched the Flickr Collection, it was our goal to choose photos that created a commercially viable collection, while preserving the inspiration and unexpected nature of the images that are so prevalent on Flickr,” she told  us. “The images that have been selected offer unique, fresh, high quality, individualistic perspective and vision that our global customers value and desire for their communications.”

The choice of image may affect how the image is sold. In general, photos with “simple and clear” messages tend to be offered on a royalty-free basis while more “complex or subtle” photos often end up with rights-managed prices. It’s Getty’s editors, however, that choose the pricing model, not the photographer.

The emphasis on authenticity recalls Photoshelter’s attempts in 2008 to create a stock inventory of natural images to supply a demand identified in the company’s survey of buyers. Their attempt failed, leading some to comment that what buyers say they want and what they actually buy are two different things. Others though pointed out that as long as buyers have subscriptions at major stock agencies like Getty, it will always be hard for smaller agencies to make sales. With thousands of Flickr images already sold, it does appear that Photoshelter’s problem wasn’t the commercial weakness of the photos, but the strength of the competition.

Exclusivity is Strict but Not an Issue for Enthusiasts

And Getty has also been reactive. The company’s willingness to accept images from the enthusiasts on Flickr only came after it noticed that the site was offering products that it couldn’t supply itself.

“As Flickr members created more images, our customers were looking to sites like Flickr for inspiration and fresh images, and would often try to license images,” says Claudia.

While being on Getty allows photographers to reach large buyers and receive the full value for their work, there are challenges. Few the images containing people that are uploaded to Flickr come with model releases, making sales challenging, and Getty’s exclusivity terms are strict. Images are placed exclusively with the company for two years and can’t be removed without terminating the agreement. The contract continues to renew annually.

That might be an issue for professionals who have already placed their images elsewhere or who are uncertain that Getty’s Flickr collection would be the best place for them. For enthusiasts though, who don’t expect to sell the images elsewhere anyway and who are still allowed to use the photos for self-promotion, limited edition fine prints and Blurb, the exclusivity isn’t really an obstacle. Spanish enthusiast Manuel Navarro, for example, is happy with both the exclusivity arrangements and the service he’s receiving from Getty.

“I’m not a professional photographer, so I never thought to make commercial use of my photos,” he said. “I know that these requirements may be restrictive, but I think this might be a good opportunity to show my photos out of my Flickr page, and get some small profit.”

The seven urban and landscape scenes that Manuel offers through Getty are fairly traditional but many of the images in the collection are as quirky and unusual as you might expect from Flickr. The company has only accepted a tiny proportion of the images submitted through its Call for Artists group (it wouldn’t reveal the exact proportion, but in a group discussion, Tom W. at Getty Images, likened the process to sifting for gold) but it’s just possible that Flickr’s contributors are bringing a valuable, fresh addition to stock photography and Getty is providing a useful, if small, channel to bring them to buyers.

Photography: olivetti

Nature has to be among the most popular of subjects for photography enthusiasts. Unlike a model, a tree on a hill doesn’t complain about the cold, a sunset will arrive exactly when you expect it to and you often need to do little more than point and shoot to capture all the beauty you can see. You don’t even have to go looking for it. A photogenic scene can strike you on the way home on the daily commute or during a stroll on a Sunday afternoon. That’s why the keenest photographers carry a camera with them wherever they go. It takes something special to create pictures as exceptional as Ansel Adams’s but a personal gallery of breathtaking nature photographs is something available to any photography enthusiast even as they’re still learning the ropes. The troubles begin when you want to sell them.

Because nature is such a popular topic and one relatively easy to do reasonably well, the supply of images is always huge while the demand is always minimal. Microstock companies, for example, consistently state that the subjects most required by buyers are business images. A search for “nature” on iStockPhoto however, turns up over 870,000 results; a search for “business” produces fewer than 330,000 photos.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no demand at all. Photographs that offer something unique will always find it easier to attract buyers. Even posting an exceptional image on Flickr can attract the attention of photo editors as Steve Jurvetson famously discovered when he uploaded a picture of an eagle chomping on a mouse’s head. The photo was printed in Maxim.

Café Owners Love Art

A more reliable sales channel for nature photographers is the art market—which also happens to be one of the toughest markets to crack. Gallery owners who rely on regular sales to pay the bills will be particularly choosy but there are other ways in. Cafes and restaurants are increasingly willing to display photos on their walls, are frequently undersubscribed and often pass the entire sales price to the photographer without taking a commission. Gallery owners will take half. One owner of a café franchise which was displaying images of underwater photography told us that his business provides wall space “because we love art.” Requests come from the photographers themselves—the café doesn’t seek exhibitors—but they only come occasionally and usually from young photographers. Although not as prestigious as a gallery opening, the exhibitions are usually interesting enough to pick up some local media attention—and sales with no expenses other than the cost of printing and framing.

Art fairs are another good outlet, attended by buyers on the lookout for attractive images to hang on their walls. Places are usually limited and expenses can be high though. You’ll need an exhibition tent to display your photos and a broad enough selection in a range of different prices to suit customers with different budgets. Results vary but it’s not unusual to walk away with four-figure profits and, if the fair is juried and your images good enough, a line on your resume interesting enough to attract the attention of a gallery owner in the future. Many gallery owners consider exhibiting at a juried art fair a sign that the photographer is ready for a more formal exhibition space.

Pick a Natural Niche

One way to generate lots of sales at an art fair is to make sure that your images match the theme of the fair. The Napa Wine and Crafts Fair, for example, is mainly attended by locals, and uses the local wine industry as its theme. According to Craig Smith, a spokesman for the event, “all things wine and wine-related do well.” Artists who exhibit at the juried show make an average of $1,500 to $2,000 in sales, he says.

That niching works well outside exhibition spaces too, whether those spaces are in cafes or at fairs. One of the most satisfying sales outlets for nature photographers is books but these tend to sell best when you’re pitching not just the quality of the photographers but the subjects they portray. John Fielder self-published a calendar showing Colorado landscapes in 1981, a venture that led him to create his own small publishing company. Altogether, he produced 39 books in 28 years, all but six them about his state. He also focused on environmental themes, relying on the publicity he would receive from conservation groups to help him promote the books. With environmentalism now a fashionable topic, it shouldn’t be too hard for a nature photographer to pick a theme that supports a position and wins press coverage.

Other photographers find that focusing on one animal—such as horses—that they know best allows them to specialize in a particular way of shooting, become known within their market, build up the connections that enable them to find subjects and win commissions… and indulge their love of photography with their passion for their subject.

Taking portraits for stable owners might not be quite as romantic as standing in a meadow shooting wild stallions, but in practice, equine photographers may well find themselves doing both. As Rachel Waller, a professional equine photographer, told us:

“I have been knee deep in mud, asleep with hay in my hair, made peace and now embrace the dust, 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.”

For nature photographers, those amazing moments are always the best reason to pull out their cameras. If it’s hard to make a living out of photographer with even popular subjects such as weddings and portraits, it’s a real struggle to turn a love of the wild into work that can pay the mortgage. If you’re looking to supplement your income by doing something you love though, then what you see can bring you a little extra cash.

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 C, an underwater photographer based in 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.

UPDATE:
We’ve removed the photographer’s full name and link from this post at his request after he received angry emails from stock photographers blaming microstock for their loss of earnings. That is not acceptable. Microstock is here, it’s growing and stock photographers need to adjust to the new marketplace if they’re going to remain successful. Blaming individual photographers for making use of that marketplace is discourteous, disrespectful and it’s not going to help bring that success.

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.