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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. Read the rest …

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.

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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.”

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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. Read the rest …

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. Read the rest …

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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