Photography: Grant Kessler

Apple has used pop up outlets to sell iPads to conference goers. Chefs have used them to serve diners at temporary restaurants. But can one-off studio shoots, open to anyone who wants to drop by, work for photographers? The answer depends on how you plan them, what you offer — and what you hope to get out of them.

The idea comes mainly from the catering industry. Chefs travel from location to location, sometimes using food trucks to prepare the meals, allowing them to experiment with new dishes and meet diners who otherwise wouldn’t be able to taste their cuisine. In photography, where pop up studios are still relatively new, the aim is similar. Instead of meeting clients in their studio or shooting one client in one location, photographers pick a spot, announce where they’ll be photographing and invite anyone who wants to come along to make a booking and pick up some professional pictures. They get to reach new markets, take new orders and spread their name further than their fixed studio usually allows.

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Image courtesy: WinWatermark

“If a photographer fails to protect their work via a copyright symbol or Trade Dress Registration, it is considered open source on the web,” says a spokesman for WinWatermark, specialized software that helps photographers to protect their photos. “If you publish your images and do not watermark them, they become free for anyone to take and use in any way they like.”

That’s not true, of course. Even without a watermark, an image remains the property of the photographer who created it, and while registering a photo with the Copyright Office might increase the damages in the event of abuse, it doesn’t confer any extra rights the photographer doesn’t already own.

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Photography: Billy Quach

Landing your first photography job will take time — as well as lots of preparation, practice and networking.

Selling your first photo is relatively easy. Image sales, especially stock licenses, depend more on the quality of the photograph than the name of the photographer. Get the subject right and shoot at the right quality, place it on a microstock site or a well-connected Flickr page, and you should find that you’re making a sale even though the closest you’ve ever come to professional photography is walking through a gallery and wishing those were your images on the wall.

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For print-on-demand art site, Fine Art America, the challenge lies in creating the demand, not making the prints.

If you’re looking to sell your photographic art online, there’s no shortage of options. From Zazzle and Cafepress to RedBubble and even Etsy and Ebay, artists, including photographers, are spoilt for choice. All of those choices though share the same problems. Stuffed with other artists all selling similar items, marketing your own work on the site means delivering potential customers directly to your competitors. And because the difficulty of standing out on a platform as large as Zazzle makes the marketing even harder while the size of the site attracts plenty of visitors, many users do no more than create a store and hope that enough buyers flow through to generate some income. It rarely happens.

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Since Getty bought iStock in 2006 for $50 million, we’ve been used to seeing stock giants snapping up their smaller rivals. At least one of those smaller rivals, though, is also expanding through acquisition. Fotolia, one of the leading microstock sites, has now paid an undisclosed sum for Wilogo, a crowdsourced design firm.

Fotolia isn’t short of money. In 2009, private equity firm TA Associates injected $75 million into the company. The firm also generates more than $100 million in revenue each year from its 3 million users and 16 million files, giving Fotolia a solid foundation on which to expand. Nor is Wilogo the site’s first acquisition. Fotolia also owns stock site Photoxpress.com and Flixtime.com, a site that lets users create videos from their photos.

For Fotolia, Wilogo makes a natural addition to its stable. Like microstock sites, the design market is open to anyone who wishes to sell, not just professionals who design for a living, and it serves a similar client base: publishers and developers who need images and branding for their websites and companies. It was those two complementary aspects that most attracted Fotolia to the company: Read the rest …

Photography: Gripnerd

Assistantships can pave the way to a career in photography but do you need to complete a boot camp just to help a photographer?

Photographers looking to take their first steps as professionals often use assistantships to build experience. Helping working professionals by carrying equipment, setting up lights or even taking shots as a second shooter puts them in the studio and at events, lets them see how a photography business works and gives them the kind of familiarity with rigs, lenses and people that no photography class can ever teach. According to James Sullivan, a 22-year photography veteran, photographers who have been assistants: Read the rest …

Photography: Kanaka Menehune

Brides aren’t the only people who hire wedding photographers. Wedding planners choose them too — and they need them more often than couples.

Business owners are always told that it’s easier to hold onto a client than to try land a new one, but that’s not much help for wedding photographers. Clients will always hope they only need a wedding photographer once in their lives and few will return to the same company if they do find themselves working down the aisle twice. Baby photos and family portraits can help to turn a wedding couple into a lifetime client but years can pass between bookings, providing plenty of time for both sides to lose touch. Wedding planners, however, can be repeat customers. They put together dozens of weddings every year and while they might not need to hire a photographer for all of those events, having found someone they trust and like working with, that photographer can look forward to a steady stream of work.

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When corporations want to grow, they hire business consultants to show them the way forward. When photography businesses want to grow, they hire creative consultants to show off their images.

When photography businesses run into trouble, their owners often feel that there’s nowhere to turn. They know they can produce great pictures. They know that their clients are always happy with their work. And they know that there’s a  market for their style, their approach and their talent.

They just don’t know how to reach it.

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Photography courses are meant to improve technique, encourage creativity, and often to increase earnings. These courses might not broaden your professional services but they’re fun, challenging — and you haven’t thought of them.

Wedding photographers might take classes on posing brides and shooting details. Portrait photographers will learn about expression and lighting, and there’s no shortage of courses for landscape photographers hoping to get more out of their foreign trips. But what do you do when you’ve studied the essentials and learned the basics? Here are four unusual photography courses that can take your shooting in all sorts of unexpected directions.

iPhoneography

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Photographers have good reason to despise social media’s new golden platform but Pinterest is visual, viral and too big to ignore.

In December 2011, Pinterest achieved a landmark. The site drove more traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube or Google Plus. With two of those services supported by the Internet’s biggest company, that was some achievement for the two-year-old Palo Alto start-up that had struggled to raise cash to get off the ground. The new social media site is now said to have about 1.36 million daily users, an average monthly growth rate of 63.7 percent and an estimated value in excess of $200 million. More than two-thirds of its users are women. Half have children. And more than a quarter have household incomes above $100,000.

For photographers though, the most interesting aspect of Pinterest is that it’s visual. While Facebook and Twitter rely on texted updates to build interest, Pinterest is all about the pictures. Users create boards on which they can pin (or upload) images that relate to a subject — fashion, for example, or electronic gadgets. They can repin images that they spot on other users’ boards, giving the best pictures the chance to go viral. They can also add comments and they can follow boards and pins to make sure that they don’t miss out on an interesting post.

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Photography: Zach Cordner

Zach Cordner decided that he needed to look like a wooly mammoth. A large beard wasn’t a requirement of the job but flying up to Wasilla to photograph Levi Johnston, the father of Sarah Palin’s grandchild, was going to mean spending a couple of days trekking through cold Alaskan woods shooting the outdoorsman doing what he loved best — if not killing animals then at least looking the part. Cordner’s image of Bristol Palin’s former fiancé wearing a camouflage jacket and peering out from behind pine trees was later used on the cover of Johnston’s book Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs. It was the fifteenth book cover that Cordner had been commissioned to shoot.

Although book covers are little different to any other photography commission, the special use to which the images are put does give them an extra appeal. A book cover won’t just sell a product in the way that the result of an advertising shoot will do. It will appear in stores across the country, on bookshelves around the world and it will help to summarize a cultural product. We might be told not to judge books by their covers but we do anyway, and we certainly buy them and recognize them by their covers. A photographer whose image appears on the cover of a bestselling book can know that his image has been printed thousands, if not millions, of times, has helped to create success — and will act as a calling card for future work.

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It’s not the camera, it’s the photographer that makes the picture. That’s what photographers are always told — and what the successful ones always say — and it’s particularly true for anyone trying to take pictures on an iPhone. Although the latest model, with its new optics and 8 megapixel lens is a big improvement on older versions, it’s still far from a professional tool capable of shooting the sorts of images that buyers need. And yet, iPhone photos are selling. While there are no figures that reveal the number of iPhone images that have been bought and sold, some iPhone-wielding photography enthusiasts have earned several thousand dollars from their pictures and the total value is now likely to have exceeded seven figures. Here are five ways that iPhone pictures have sold for real money:

News Images

The iPhone camera’s biggest advantage for photographer is its mobility. When something happens, you’re more likely be carrying your mobile phone than your Nikon DSLR. It’s no surprise then that one of the hottest-selling types of iPhone images are news shots.

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Photography: Renata Ramsini

Renata Ramsini’s website describes her in four different ways. She’s an “efficiency-lover,” a “photographer,” a “policy wonk” and a “law student.” That’s not the order in which her life has played out however. Like many photography enthusiasts, when it came time to pick a profession it never occurred to Ramsini to pick up her camera and push for a career in picture-taking. Although she says she’s always loved photography, she didn’t think it was something that could give her a living. For that she turned to a night class at law school and a full-time job in the Ohio Governor’s office. Today, with the administration over but still at school and still active in politics, Ramsini receives a regular stream of commissions from people keen to make use of her photographic talent — and provides an example of the difficulty of maintaining a passion for photography while also building a career outside the world of creative arts.

Photography became a serious hobby for Ramsini about seven years ago, and a “very serious passion” about two years ago. She specializes in street photography and says that she’s always looking to capture intimate moments on the street when no one is looking. Her portfolio shows a broad collection of travel shots and portraits, children and maternity pictures.

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As top microstock figures complain about growing competition, rising saturation and declining returns per image, microstock companies are starting to push back. Warnings from figures as big as Yuri Arcurs, even as he rolls out a three-year study program, are leading sites to think about how they can best serve both their contributors, whom they need to continue supplying content, and their buyers who always want to pay less for that content and already have plenty of other places and pictures to choose from. Dreamstime, one of the biggest microstock firms, is both typical of the problem and an example of the measures that sites are taking to overcome it.

Dreamstime now has over 13 million images in its inventory and accepts around 300,000 new submissions each month from about 130,000 contributors. The company’s policy over the last few years has been to cover not just a wide range of categories but the entire range of prices. The site claims to have the largest collection of free royalty-free images (a growing inventory of 350,000 photos) but also offers a unique “SR-EL” license that grants full rights and exclusivity for $5,000. According to Serban Enache, the site’s CEO, though, the average price for an image still stands at “a few dollars.” That’s hardly the sort of rate that’s going to make it easy for photographers to justify the expenses involved in creating it, especially when the number of other photos available mean that each image will now sell fewer copies than it might have done in the past.

No More Photos from You

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Is it really possible to earn $1,000 an hour as a photographer? A regular photographer. Not the kind of high-end fashion photographer or Vogue cover-shooter that requires a lifetime of career achievement and first-name terms with media moguls. The kind of photography for which there’s constant demand, whose buyers are average Joes and which can still deliver the kinds of rates that even lawyers would be frightened to demand.

When we first asked this question back in 2007, the post became one of our most controversial. But what surprised us most about the dozens of comments we’ve received since publishing the article was the number of people who came out in support. “Yes,” they said. “It is possible to make $1,000 an hour as a photographer — and more. I’ve done it.”

The original claim had come from Chris Wunder, a photographer with more than 30 years’ experience who now sells workshops with the claim that it’s possible to make $8,000 a day doing school photography. The key, he says, is the number of portrait jobs available in schools and the speed with which photographers can get through them. Read the rest …

Image: Demotix

Demotix might just have created a new revenue model for editorial photographers and aspiring photojournalists. The crowd-sourced news agency, which has licensed images to publications and outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and the BBC, is to begin paying contributors a share of its advertising revenue.

The company has partnered with Guardian Select, MessageSpace and Google to place ads on all the site’s story pages and news hubs. Demotix will work with the advertising agencies to make sure that the ads are relevant and ethical, and the photographers will receive an 80 percent share of the revenue generated by the ads on their pages.

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Photography: Joao Pina

Documentary photographers are struggling to pitch their stories. Newspapers and magazines are now rarely willing to cover the expenses that photographers run up when they travel to distant parts of the world, and few outlets want to provide space for a photo documentary on Southeast Asian villagers when a thirteen-page spread of a celebrity on the beach would sell so much better. Some dedicated photographers though have managed to find a solution. They’re not just selling the image; they’re selling the photojournalist experience. And they’re selling it directly to the public.

Emphas.is is like Kickstarter for photography. Photographers describe projects, submit a budget and appeal for funding. Supporters can then submit pledges, allowing the project to go ahead if it’s fully funded. In return, those supporters receive a set of rewards that depend on the size of their support. The largest sums, often around $2,000 to $3,000, allow a company to display its logo on the books and material the project produces. For amounts as low as $10 though, supporters receive access to the “making-of zone,” an area on the site on which the photographer posts updates and answers questions from supporters.

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Photography: artbyheather

With photographers already battling against lower fees and increased competition, the last thing they need is another platform offering photography services at cutthroat prices. And yet, Fiverr, a service on which users pitch a range of different jobs for a flat five dollar fee, does now include a number of photographers selling their skills for little more than the price of a latte and a pastry at Starbucks.

The jobs aren’t pushed hard. Fiverr’s categories include gifts and graphics, programming, music and audio, as well as business and technology. Photography isn’t listed. But search for “photography” on the site and you’ll find around 537 people willing to do something image-related for just five bucks.

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As 2011 comes to an end, it’s time to start planning for the year ahead. For professionals, that means looking at the most successful marketing channels of the last twelve months, understanding which demographics were most likely to hire them and increasing efforts to bring in more work and at higher prices in the coming year. For enthusiasts, it means trying to figure out how they can increase  — or at least hold onto — their current rate of sales. In 2012, that’s likely to mean a more independent approach to marketing, a move towards relying on their own efforts to reach buyers instead of hoping for stock agencies to do it for them.

The problem is most clearly seen in microstock where saturation has spread revenues among contributors and lowered returns per image. It is still possible to make sales on microstock, and enthusiasts looking for a little extra boost to their incomes with some low-cost imagery can still send in their photos and hope for a small second revenue stream from commercial photography’s biggest open gate. But even though less than two percent of market leader iStock’s photographers are said to be responsible for half the site’s sales, the trend on returns is clearly downwards. More photographers are earning, but they’re taking home smaller amounts each, making the costs of shoots harder to justify economically.

The easiest alternative isn’t great either. Getty’s deal with Flickr, which lets the stock giant negotiate and administer sales of images on behalf of Flickr members who opt into its program, moved thousands of images within months of its launch. But with royalties as low as 20 percent for the photographer, it’s little wonder that 500px chose not to follow the Yahoo-owned photo site into Getty’s arms.

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Image: Duncan Harris, from Tera

Photographers attempt to freeze a moment. They capture the beauty of a scene, the character in a portrait, the drama in an event. But would it still be photography if the images were made without a camera, only a monitor, if the landscapes were virtual and the portraits were of people who really are two-dimensional? The technical process might be completely different, demanding coding and hacking skills rather than a knowledge of f-stops and lenses, but the artistic skills are the same: the “photographer” still has to think about framing and focus, lighting and effect. And the results can be no less dramatic, moving and eye-catching. ­

Duncan Harris likes to think of himself as a “videogame tourist” but compares the work he does in finding and capturing photogenic moments in computer gameworlds to that of a Unit Stills Photographer creating shots for a movie’s publicity material. Like the photographer, his goal too, he argues, is to reflect the flavor of a scene and its movement in a single frame. Harris has created thousands of landscape images, portraits and dramatic shots captured while exploring the giant worlds created by computer game designers and populated with animated characters.

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