Photography: Lizzy Oppenheimer

Gerd Ludwig is now in the exclusion zone around the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the accident that spread radiation across Europe, the National Geographic photographer and author of Broken Empire: After the Fall of the USSR is documenting the safety work that continues at the plant, the residents who have been trickling back into the zone, and the contaminated environment it contains. This time though, he’s not working on a commission from a mainstream publication. He’s backed directly by the public. Using Kickstarter to win funding pledges, the professional photojournalist has raised more than $23,000, double his goal for the site and just shy of the $25,000 he believes he’ll need for the two-week shoot. It’s an approach that many photographers, both professional and amateur, are now using to fund their personal projects.

Kickstarter allows businesses and artists to pitch an idea to the public. In return for pledges that can range from a few dollars to a few thousand, contributors are promised set rewards. For a business with a creative product idea, like a watch strap for an iPod Nano, those rewards usually take the form of discounted early orders or limited editions. For Gerd Ludwig, the benefits include a name on a donor list, signed images and books, and even an hour-long portfolio review at his Los Angeles studio or via Skype.

Creators describe their project, upload a video pitch and set a financial goal and deadline. That’s where things start to get tricky. Kickstarter only collects the pledges if the entire goal is met. While that ensures that companies and artists aren’t left struggling to satisfy contributors with funds that are too small to allow them to succeed, it also means that if they set a goal that’s too high, they’ll end up with no funding at all. The site does, however, allow projects to be overfunded, encouraging project creators to ask only for the bare minimum they’ll need while still hoping to raise more.

Setting the Rewards

Calculating that budget is one of the first challenges that photographers will have to overcome to be successful with Kickstarter. A bigger challenge though is figuring out rewards that are tempting, affordable and valuable enough to contribute towards the goal.

“This might have been the hardest part of the process and the part that went through the most revisions,” says Lex Machina, whose Graphoscope project, a kind of steampunk portrait book, has exceeded its $2,000 goal with two weeks to spare. “I tried to imagine as a backer what would sound like a good deal for my dollar and still be within the limits of what I as a creator could realistically deliver.”

Lex’s project received backing from 64 people, two of whom donated at least $200 and one gave at least $275. Half of those backers though were people that Lex already knew or had worked with professionally. Only between 10 and 25 percent were unfamiliar with her work, suggesting that marketing through established networks is one important way of raising pledges. All of Lex Machina’s marketing was done online through a “sizable” network of well-connected friends and colleagues.

Photography: Lex Machina

Lizzy Oppenheimer, who has so far raised just over half of the $10,000 she needs to produce a photobook documenting America’s disappearing roadside stops, also began by emailing her friends and family, and linking to Facebook, a step that she believes necessary to give a project an initial funding boost.

Much of her marketing though has came from the interested generated in the media. Her project has been highlighted on National Public Radio, in the Santa Fe Pulse, and in a number of other magazines and blogs. In contrast to Lex Machins, she knows very few of her backers, many of whom are encountering her work for the first time, have contacted her to support her work and have shared their memories of roadside stops during their own childhood trips.

“The most wonderful thing about creating this Kickstarter Campaign for me has not been the pledges but rather the votes of confidence in my work,” she says. “It seems that I am not crazy for believing that rest stops are a vital part of our cultural history, a vital aspect of Americana. Knowing that so many people believe this work is valid and important is the greatest gift.”

Kickstarter Tests Photography Ideas

That’s one of the biggest benefits of Kickstarter. The service, which takes 5 percent of a project’s funds as a fee, doesn’t just raise money. It also tests the viability of a creative idea. Gerd Ludwig’s project has won pledges because the subject of the shoot struck a chord with people concerned about nuclear power and the environmental damage it can cause. Lex Machina’s work is popular with people interested in steampunk, a small niche with a big following. Lizzy Oppenheimer’s love of a disappearing American cultural experience is shared by enough other people who took road trips with their families to push her project towards meeting its goal.

Kickstarter then can work for projects that already have potential audiences who empathize with the idea. Photographers looking to raise funds for ideas that are meaningful to them but to few others though are more likely to struggle, and the site’s all-or-nothing policy means that project creators can find themselves with no funds at all for their work.

Lex Machina indicated that if Kickstarter hadn’t come through she would have been “pretty discouraged,” probably wouldn’t have produced a book but would definitely have tried again later with a refined campaign. Lizzy Oppenheimer too mentioned that even if she doesn’t receive the funds she needs, she’ll look for another way to continue the project — as long as the rest stops are still there for her to photograph.

And Gerd Ludwig, despite not quite meeting his complete budget, is already in Chernobyl, taking pictures, commemorating the accident and documenting the disaster on behalf of a public that cares enough about it to send him there.

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: Matthew Field

At this moment, thousands of people in Brooklyn and beyond are curating a photography exhibition. They’re not pulling on white gloves and checking prints for blemishes. Nor are they placing photos at the foot of walls and trying to figure out where they should go. They’re logging in to the Brooklyn Museum’s website and judging entries submitted in response to an open call for photos that show “the changing faces of Brooklyn.”

The idea of the exhibition is to explore not just the way one part of New York has changed but whether the art choices made by groups are better than those made by art professionals. According to the website, the exhibition was inspired by James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds” which argues that a diverse crowd tends to make smarter choices than individuals, even when those individuals are experts.

Crowdsourcing in photography isn’t new, of course. We discussed it a little here and pointed out some of the benefits that multiple pairs of eyes can have over just one opinion.

A Crowd of Teachers
Advice offered by the large numbers of people who look at images on Flickr, for example, has been known to help photographers improve their picture-taking. Taylor Christian Jones, a commercial photographer in Birmingham, Alabama, told us that he has never taken a photography lesson in his life, learning all the skills he needed to turn his passion into a job by listening to the suggestions made by other photographers on the photo-sharing site.

Flickr members though, aren’t comparing images to decide which is the best in the same way that the Brooklyn Museum wants its crowds to do. They’re simply looking at one picture and explaining how it can be improved. Group judging is something more familiar to the readers of JPG Magazine, a printed photography publication that invites its readers to vote online for the photos that they think deserve to be included in the next issue.

But even if Flickr crowds can raise photographers’ knowledge, are they the best way to select art for magazines and exhibitions?

Perhaps not. It’s noticeable that even JPG Magazine, while promoting itself as a “magazine made by you” stacks the cards. Images submitted to the site are not given equal treatment but are presented to users according to a formula that the publication refuses to reveal. And the votes themselves are only suggestions. It is still left to the editors to make the final decision about which images make the magazine.

That might not be very democratic, but it’s easy to see that it is good business sense.

Crowds are Conservative
That’s because while crowds might be wise, they aren’t necessarily adventurous. Or knowledgeable. It’s quite possible that public curators of the Brooklyn exhibition will skip images that are the most challenging or the most interesting photographically and choose instead those photos that reflect their feelings about Brooklyn. Or which were shot in styles with which they’re most familiar.

Similarly, only a few of the comments on Flickr are actually valuable. Most say little more than “good capture” and are intended to bring other members back to their own images as much as help other photographers improve their skills.

Crowds can have an interest, after all, whether that’s loyalty to a location or a desire for exposure.

For photographers hoping to make use of the knowledge of crowds then, it pays to know who your crowds are and how they’re partial. It also pays to decide which parts of the crowd you listen to. Ask a thousand people for an opinion and you’ll get a thousand points of view. Try to incorporate all of them and you’ll end up with a photography style designed by a committee. Developing your own style — and knowing what it is — is likely to take you a great deal further.

There is one crowd however that every serious-minded photographer does need to listen to. It’s a group that goes some way towards defining whether a photographer gets to call him- or herself a success. It’s one with a clear agenda and one whose opinion really does influence the development of art and photography.

When photography-lovers become buyers — when they’re willing to back their opinions with money rather than with a click on a website — you can be sure you’re getting an honest opinion from one important crowd… and a reward for getting it right.

Crowdsourcing then can improve your photography. It can help you to shoot better pictures, broaden your skills and give you an objective opinion. But nothing tells you a picture has failed more than no one willing to buy it — and nothing screams success louder than a crowd of people waving fistfuls of cash.