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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Success on Flickr can bring rich rewards. Buyers use the site to source photographers with rare images and strong talent for commercial projects, magazines and even commissions. But that success isn’t easy to achieve. It’s not enough to upload great pictures and hope that someone notices. Contributors have to upload their very best images, then network to build views, comments and attention. Even the Explore page, a daily selection of the site’s best images, uses an algorithm that identifies photos that are already popular then gives them even greater attention. 500px was created to make it easier for photographers to win exposure for their images by taking on much of that promotional work for them.

The site was launched in 2004, the same year that Flickr went live, but has only a fraction of the more than 50 million members registered at the Yahoo-owned subsidiary. According to Evgeny Tchebotarev, one of 500px’s founders, it has “hundreds of thousands” of photographers and far fewer photos than Flickr. In fact, he notes, the total number of images submitted to 500px over the last two years equals the number of photos that are uploaded to Facebook in just a few hours.

Hundreds More Views Than Flickr

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Start thinking about selling your photos and your first thoughts are likely to be of prints and licenses. A myriad of options from Buy Now buttons on websites and photo-sharing platforms to garage sales and galleries let photographers offer framed versions of their art. Microstock’s open policy means that anyone can now upload and hope for a royalty. But offering prints means selling in a hugely competitive market while microstock is both saturated and low-paying. Fortunately, there are plenty of very creative ways to get paid for your art.

1. Publish a Photography Magazine

Blurb and Lulu, among others, have long made it possible for photographers to create their own photo books — an option often generally taken up by event photographers looking for an easy way to create a photo album — but it’s also possible to publish a regular photo magazine.

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Browse the images on the website of photographer Patrick Pfister and you might be in for a bit of a shock. Past the commercial photos of executives and tower blocks, and beyond the aerial shots of Louisville and Kentucky, you reach a black and white picture of a surgeon holding a heart. Next to it is a color shot of a hand attached to an arm by little more than a strip of bone. For more than twenty years, Pfister’s list of professional services has included medical photography, the shooting of images of doctors, hospitals and medical scenes.

Some of those scenes have been pretty momentous. Pfister was in the operating room to photograph Kentucky’s first heart transplant. He was standing next to the anesthesiologist during the world’s third installment of an artificial heart, and he was present throughout America’s first hand transplant, performed at Louisville’s Jewish Hospital. It’s a difficult job that combines photographic skill with medical knowledge and, to some extent, a high threshold for squeamishness.

The limited field of view can be helpful in tackling the sight of blood. The only part of the operating table that’s undraped and visible is the field on which the surgeon is operating. Pfister can’t tell the patient’s age, gender or identity as he shoots, and he knows that he’s not photographing an operation that’s being performed on anyone he knows. That helps to deliver the necessary distance for most jobs, although not all. Read the rest …

Photography: Nancy Falso

If you’re wondering what to do with the artistic shots of landmarks you shot on your last foreign vacation, then you might want to think about selling them on Etsy. The craft site might be best known for its handmade items and vintage products but buyers on the site are also willing to snap up shots of cities, landmarks and famous sites — provided they’re artistic enough.

“Photos of places like Paris, London and NYC… tend to sell well,” says Nancy Falso, who has been shopping on Etsy for a year and opened her own store on the site three months ago. “But since there are so many they need really to have something special about them in order to stand out among the rest.”

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Photography: WarmSleepy

David Hobby spent twenty years as a newspaper photographer. He studied photojournalism at the University of Florida, shot for the Leesburg Commercial, the Orlando Sentinel, UPI, and freelanced for many others. He was a staff photographer at Patuxent Publishing for eleven years and spent another nine years at The Baltimore Sun. When he left the Sun in 2008, he was one of 100 staffers who had agreed to accept a buyout as part of a staff reduction program. He’s now best known not for the images he shot over that twenty-year period but for the education he’s given to thousands of other photographers through his Strobist blog.

Hobby’s career could be seen as encapsulating the decline of editorial photography. A job that should have been rewarding, enjoyable and challenging is now under so much pressure from declining news readership that the best way to make money out of it is to teach its skills online rather than use them.

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Yuri Arcurs, probably the world’s most successful microstock photographer, is preparing to launch a training program in stock photography. Arcurs is looking for between ten and fifteen “interns” who want to learn how to shoot professional stock images. The interns, or “students,” will receive free accommodation, food, and access to equipment, including Canons, Nikons, Hasselblad SLR cameras and RED epic video cameras. Students will spend six months at Arcur’s studios in Cape Town, three months in Denmark and three months shooting in other parts of the world with all travel expenses covered by Yuri Arcurs Productions. The course will last three years, focus on stock photography but cover other photography areas too.

According to Kelly Pollock, a junior recruiter for the program, Yuri Arcurs Productions is working on an agreement to film the course for a reality television series but any agreement would only be a bonus to the program. The real incentive is to help talented photographers acquire the knowledge they need to break into stock photography.

“Yuri wants to sow back into the industry,” said Ms Pollock. “He recognises that there are many talented people who are passionate about photography and could be fantastic photographers if just given a chance. He has the capital to fund this and give those people the opportunity to break into the industry.”

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Photography: Scott Leggo

Some photography jobs are better than others. Few photography jobs though are better than those won by Scott Leggo. A former officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, Leggo’s work is now divided between aviation photography and landscape photography — and sometimes a combination of the two. His prints are bought by both businesses and individuals, and his commercial assignments take him to some of the most beautiful places on earth often for clients patient enough to understand that it might take a few sunsets to capture the right image. Usually, he can be found in the wilderness, with his camera, waiting for the weather to give him a perfect shot. It’s the ideal photographic life, and it took Leggo just five years to build with no formal training and a background in aviation, not artistry.

That background though may have contributed in at least one important way to Leggo’s success. His military experience, Leggo says, gave him a strong belief in preparation and planning, a discipline that he extends to his photography. Read the rest …

Photo copyright: James R Salomon for Sabrina Inc. Interior design: Andie Day, LLC.

Wouldn’t it be great if you never had to look for photography work yourself? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had someone looking out for your interests, someone with contacts in the industry, knowledge of the business and an understanding of your photography and what it takes to negotiate the best possible rates both for stock and for interesting commissions? For years, that’s always been the role of photographic agencies, companies that clients can turn to when they need a photographer and who then parcel out the work to the appropriate talent. Agencies though tend to represent top-end photographers, the kind of people who are sent to shoot magazine covers or photograph oil rigs for annual reports. A few agencies though are relatively small. Focusing on a particular niche, they represent a handful of photographers and are able serve clients smaller than BP by being flexible, fast and specialized.

Sabrina Inc. was set up in 2008 by Sabrina Velandry, a former studio manager for a Boston-based interiors photographer. After her first child was born, Velandry chose to take the photography business knowledge that she’d picked up working for one photographer and apply it to a group of photographers whose stock images and assignment photography her firm would represent.

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When Yuri Arcurs, probably the world’s most successful microstock photographer, told macrostock photographer John Lund at the beginning of the year that his return per image had fallen from a peak of $9.10 in 2009 to $7.10 in 2010, and that he expected it to reach $5.60 in 2011, it seemed like a seminal moment for microstock photographers. It was a situation, Arcurs pointed out, that wasn’t sustainable and he hinted that without some movement from the agencies he might one day choose to sell directly from his own site, skipping the middle men and their predetermined prices altogether. If even Yuri Arcurs is worrying about the sustainability of microstock photography, has the industry had its day?

In fact, the situation may be more complex than that: more hopeful for part-time photographers and less rosy for professionals. The problem is the size and growth of the supply. As more photographers have signed up and submitted their images, they’ve forced a larger number of photographs to compete for the same search terms. Sales overall may be growing but they’re being spread among more images, and it’s not just Yuri Arcurs’s pictures that are feeling the pinch.

 “There is a pretty consistent drop in RPI for everyone,” says Bob Davies of PicNiche and a close follower of microstock statistics. “The saturated market is causing downward price-pressures (not accounting for premium collections).”

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Facebook isn’t the best place for photographers to show off their images. Flickr is better known for serendipitous sales (and its tie-in with Getty) and searching Facebook for pictures, let alone shooters, isn’t straightforward. But the site’s size and its constant growth have made it a popular destination for photographers. Some use it just to share their work. Others use it to exchange ideas and a significant number have found that the site can be an extremely effective way of generating extra income.

Here are five of inspiring photographers we found on Facebook and the inspiration you can draw from them. Be sure though to add your own favorite photographers on the site at the bottom of the list.

Kate Holt

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Even with its (weak) rear lens and dozens of image editing apps, the iPad isn’t the best work tool for a photographer. The device itself makes poor photos, even the biggest version will quickly fill up with high res images and a workflow that doesn’t include a decent filing system is always going to be a bit poor. But the device, with its big screen and bold colors, is great for looking at photos. It’s great for looking at your own select images and its great, too, for looking at the images of some of the best photographers in the world. It’s no wonder then that the App Store’s Photo and Video category contains apps that allow users to browse the archives of Life Magazine or gawp at the images created by National Geographic photographers.  There’s no reason though that you can’t join those top image-makers and put your photos on other people’s iPads.

That wouldn’t just be very cool. It could also bring real benefits. Put your work in front of photography lovers who might include buyers, and you could find that you’re picking up some new commissions and additional photo sales. There are a number of ways you can spread your photos across Apple’s tablets.

Create a Photo Book with Book Creator

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Photographers need two websites. They need a portfolio site that shows off their images, offers tear sheets, introduces their portfolio and reveals their taste through their personal projects. Those sites win jobs — and they need to do it fast. Buyers consistently report that when it comes to looking at photographers’ online portfolios, they prefer sites that are simple, fast and Flash-free. But photographers also need blogs. The content might not appear as important as the portfolio itself but a photographer’s blog is still a vital part of a marketing effort. It has a different purpose to the main part of the site, needs to work in a different way, contain a different type of content  — and despite its apparent simplicity, often fails to achieve its goals.

The first problem is usually the goal itself. When you’re creating a website to win work, it’s pretty clear who the site is aimed at. Wedding photographers will wonder how a bride will feel when she reaches the site. Editorial photographers will be familiar enough with art editors to predict how they’ll react as they browse their portfolios. Pet photographers will know what impresses their clients as they look at the pictures of dogs, cats and prized birds. But a blog may be read by a fellow photographer, a bride looking for ideas, friends interested in what you’re up to now, as well as casual visitors who stumbled upon your pages through a search engine.

Blogs, Like Portfolios, are for Leads

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Photography: Shannon Karczewski

For moms with an interest in photography, charging for their talent looks like a natural next step. They’re shooting anyway. The hours are flexible. The portraits they make of their own children — and those of their friends — make for an easy portfolio. It’s an opportunity to build a rewarding career without making too many of the sacrifices that come from working 9-to-5 plus in an office that doesn’t get pre-school hours or give time off for children’s colds. And it seems to work.

There are no figures that show the number of stay-at-home moms who are also dabbling in semi-professional photography, but Flickr has several groups for “mommy photographers” some with hundreds of members. Mom*tog, a blog “for moms who love photography,” has been running since February 2009 and already claims more than 40,000 unique hits each month. Run by a new mom and professional photographer, the site’s Facebook page has over 3,000 likes.

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Linda Johannessen, CEO of microstock site YAY Micro, believes that microstock photographers are getting a rough deal — and should do something about it. As long as photographers are willing to accept low commissions, she argues, the large players in the microstock market will be free to increase their earnings at the expense of their contributors. The solution, she told us, is for photographers around the world to club together and fight for a fairer share of the profits.

“The marketing channel in microstock leaves the photographers powerless, except for the largest contributors. It’s an unfortunate situation, and I think the only way to combat this is for microstock photographers to join together in a global union.”

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