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.

Photography: Renata Ramsini

For some time though, there was no photography at all, a situation Ramsini now regrets. Once she had made her decision to take a day job in politics and to study for her career in law at night, Ramsini found that she had no time to indulge in photography. While she was in the Governor’s office, she barely took a picture.

“Working full time and going to law school in the evenings resulted in my not picking up my camera for about two years,” she says. “Once I left the administration, I rediscovered my passion and won’t let that happen again. It brings me too much joy. Once you find something like that, you have to make time for it in your life, just like anything else.”

Politics and Photography Do Mix

If not creating time to shoot was a mistake, it was, at least, an understandable one. Many enthusiasts struggle to find the time to hone their photography skills even without the extra pressure of weekends spent poring over law school textbooks and cramming for exams. While professionals are able to practice, improve and sharpen their skills by shooting every day, enthusiasts have to make do with stolen moments, special trips and occasional shots of the kids doing interesting things.

The solution though, other than to add a few more hours to the day, is to look for places where profession and passion overlap. Automobile engineer Andreas Reinhold was able to do that by taking artistic pictures of cars at the shows he attended. After a magazine editor he’d met at one auto show saw some of his photos, he began receiving commissions to take shots for the publication. His engineering background even made him a useful representative for the magazine at car-related events where he didn’t just photograph the models but could also chat knowledgeably with the manufacturers.

Renata Ramsini didn’t shoot the work she was doing at the heart of her state’s politics, but she does believe that she might have missed a trick. Looking back, she now feels that her joint passions for photography and politics weren’t as incompatible as she once thought.

“At the beginning of the Obama Administration, I read an article in the Washington Post about a new staffer who was documenting her time in the White House by taking photographs of everything (and everyone) around her. I was super jealous!” she says.

“Photographs can tell powerful stories. They can share things with the public that no political speech or slogan ever could.  There isn’t any American who can’t think of a powerful photograph of a political figure (or a situation surrounding one) that evokes some sort of emotion within them,”

Clearly, not every work space is as photogenic as the White House or a Governor’s office and not all professions offer the same opportunities to mix with magazine editors (or shoot pretty objects) as the car industry. But even if you miss your workplace photography opportunities, there are still plenty of chances to combine a passion for photography with a career in a completely different field.

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Tips to Mix Work with Pleasure

1. Shoot Workplace Images

You might not work at the White House, but you can still take pictures of office scenes, shoppers in the mall, and the factory floor. Think of the scenes you see every day as stories and you’ll have something to document. You might need to ask permission but many companies will appreciate the PR.

2. Carry Your Camera

To take pictures all the time, you’ll need to have your camera with you all the time. That’s easier now than it used to be. British photographer David Bailey famously told the world that he used to carry an instamatic with him wherever he went. Today, even the camera on an iPhone takes good enough shots.

3. Tell the World

If you want to be asked to shoot more images, tell the world about the stories you’re documenting at work. Build a website, and promote it through social media and photo

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Winning Commissions

Renata Ramsini’s more recent development as a photographer has happened through channels that anyone can use — provided they’re willing to put in the time to build them. Over the last year, Ramsini has had a steady stream of clients seek her out to capture special moments in their lives or to take pictures of loved ones. They see her images on 500px then click through to her website.

They might not be buying her prints — a format that’s always a hard sale online — but by showing what she can do in a field for which there’s a demand, she’s able to get paid to continue to do photography even as she prepares for a career in the law and in politics.

Mixing work with an enthusiasm for photography isn’t straightforward. Time is tight but if you can find something photogenic to document at your workplace — and promote yourself as a photographer — you’ll be able to shoot without giving up the day job.

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.

MagCloud, a service provided by HP, allows publishers to create print-on-demand subscription-based publications. It currently offers around 5,350 self-published magazines related to photography. Some, like Maree Slaven’s magazine, function as portfolios. Others, like DCist Exposed, are annual catalogs containing shots taken by competition winners. A few though, such as Visions, act as real magazines with articles and contributors.

How many of those magazines make money is questionable. The print version of Visions costs $17. That price includes access to the digital version which usually costs $3.25 but is unlikely to ensure high numbers of sales. Delivering a profit of $4.80 over the cost of printing alone, it’s also unlikely to deliver high revenues.

But producing the magazine could be fun. You’d get to put your images in print, work with other photographers in your field, and explore photography issues that you find interesting. The selling would be hard and the profits small, but MagCloud makes the publishing easy and enjoyable.

2. Art Cards

Selling art is never easy but one genre that’s recently been enjoying some sudden popularity is ACEO — Art Cards, Editions and Originals. The movement started in Switzerland and requires artists to create works that can fit onto a card measuring just 2.5 by 3.5 inches. The size is the only rule; artists can use any materials they want to create their works, including photography.

Although ACEO are traditionally exchanged, like collectors’ cards, some are also sold, often on eBay or Etsy. A typical price is usually around $5 for a card, an amount small enough for quick buys and a good price for bargain purchases at art fairs and garage sales.

The big advantage of ACEO, other than the opportunity for impulse buying and the absence of a need for an empty wall to display the print, is the creativity. ACEO are meant to be collectible. The more artistic and creative you can make your ACEO, the more desirable you can make it too. Niver Daduryan combines photography with colored pencil, watercolor, ink, marker and even sparkle to produce his cards. Felicia Kramer adds a poem to her montage. With art cards, you can really let your artistic juices flow.

3. Wall Decals

Photography can go on walls, but they don’t have to go in frames. The estimated $8 billion spent on wall décor in the US every year includes money spent on decals — giant peelable stickers.

Usually, wall decals are produced by designers who use graphics of trees or animals to decorate children’s rooms and offices. A few decals though make use of photography rather than drawing. Designer Dan Witz has a series of decals called “What the %$#@…” that show a photo of a goat, a person and a Tasmanian devil poking through a ventilation grate. The decals are sold through Blik for $30.

Dan Witz’s decals are fairly small. Photographers who want to make the decals of their own images can go further by using Shutterfly which lets anyone turn photos into stickable wall art. It’s not cheap though, with prices starting at $59.99 for a sticker of 36 inches by 27 inches. That doesn’t leave much room for profit while still being affordable but photographers of college sports teams or even nature scenes might be able to win some sales — or land a better offer from a local printer.

4. Duvet Covers

Art cards and decals might go on a wall but that’s not the only location you can place a picture. You can also take it to bed. Like decals, duvet covers are usually made up of graphic images but a few smart designers have been playing around with printing photographs on the bed covers.

Target sells a simple cover made up of a photo of a marigold, with matching pillows. The range also includes gardenias and orchids and sell for between $69 and $89. Lazybone, a UK gift shop, sells “cheeky nude” duvet covers for £33.99, while BagsofLove, another British store will print your image on bedding for £99.

You don’t have to be as cheeky as Lazybone or as expensive as BagsofLove to put your photos on people’s beds though. Find a designer who’s willing to work with you (Etsy forums could be one place to look) suggest a joint venture and split the revenues. While you’re unlikely to hit giant sums unless you manage to find distributors as big as Target, you should be able to land a few helpful sales.

5. Web Comics

Decorating bed covers might be fun but not as much fun as turning your images into comic strips. Photonovels are a small genre within the small, nichey world of comics but it does have a market. Some, like Alien Loves Predator, use models to create compositions while others, like A Softer World, transpose haiku-like prose over meaningful imagery. The creators of that strip, Canadians Joey Comeau and  Emily Horne have been able to make a living from their comic.

Few other comic creators are that lucky but with a large enough audience and a good line in accessories and merchandise, you can still have some fun telling stories, using images and earning a few dollars.

Selling images should be easy. Stock agencies now look at the photographs, not the photographers. Buyers have multiplied as millions of Web pages have spread across the Internet. The gap between collectors and creators has broken down as sellers can use their own marketing skills to create their brands, build a reputation and promote their art. But it isn’t easy. Moving from talented enthusiast with hard drive full of pictures to a semi-professional shooter with a portfolio of sales and a steady revenue stream can take time, hard work and plenty of frustration. This is what you need to do get started.

1. Sort Your Images

You might take thousands of images before you start thinking about making sales. Some of them you’ll delete but many you’ll just transfer to your hard drive, categorize and leave. When storage space costs so little, there’s no reason to be selective about the photographs you keep.

But you will need to be selective about the images you offer for sale. Buyers don’t want to wade through a dozen mediocre shots to find the one excellent image that they might want to buy. They only want to look at the very best photographs you’ve managed to create. Professional sports photographer Philip Brown says that he’ll take “thousands of images” over the course of a five-day cricket match, many of which he won’t even look at and only a handful of which he’ll sell. You too have to assume that you’ll only be able to offer a tiny fraction of the images you create.

2. Join Flickr

Choosing that small fraction of your best images though won’t be easy – and you’re not the best judge. Your choice of favorite images might be influenced by the experience involved in winning the shot or some other personal factor that’s not visible in the composition alone. You need an objective opinion.

Start then by choosing your best images, upload them to a Flickr account then network to win views, favorites and comments. Remove the images that are ignored or which receive criticism and look for the features that characterize your most popular shots. The result might be a collection that’s smaller than you’d like and which contains images you might not have expected but trust the objective opinion of other photographers.

Once you’ve built a very select portfolio on Twitter, add a sentence to each image description pointing out that your images are available for licensing and inviting buyers to contact you.

3. Upload Images to Microstock Sites

Although some microstock photographers have managed to turn the low-cost, high-volume platform into a high-paying, full-time job, most contributors haven’t been so successful. In part, that’s often because they’re not prepared to put in the same kind of effort that top photographers like Yuri Arcurs and Andres Rodriguez are prepared to commit.

But when you’re starting out. microstock doesn’t have to be a serious revenue stream. It doesn’t even have to be a mediocre revenue stream and it might not be the best place to offer particularly rare images that could fetch more from a conventional rights managed license. But it does provide open access to commercial photography. It can show enthusiasts what stock buyers are looking for (which is not the kind of pretty images that enthusiasts most like to shoot) and, most importantly of all, it can give them their first sale. The money might be tiny and. once the cost of shooting the picture is taken into consideration, it might not even be profitable but it should be encouraging — and that’s invaluable.

4. Build Your Own Site

While you’re sorting your images, putting together your Flickr portfolio and uploading microstock images, you should also be building your own website. There’s no shortage now of portfolio sites that make it easy to show off your work, provide contact information and even manage your own stock sales, allowing you to charge commercial prices without giving up commissions. Bringing traffic into that site might require a lot more work but you only need a few regular buyers checking into your latest additions to keep the revenue flowing.

And the best way to generate those regular sales is to give your site its own niche. When buyers know that they can come to you not just for great images but for a particular kind of image – whether it’s shots of your city or photographs of bands – you’ll be able to conquer one small part of the market.

5. Browse Galleries, Apply to Art Fairs, Pitch for Commissions and Make Submissions

The process of careful selection, online portfolios and winning your first license sales are just the very first steps towards selling your photography. They’re the foundations that underlie the main structure of your career as a semi-pro photography. Once you’ve understood that buyers only want the best images and you’ve created a way to deliver them, you can start branching out into the fields of photography you most want to conquer.

If you want to sell art, that means making appointments at local galleries with a portfolio of images that match the gallery’s buyers. If you want to win commissions it means showing your work to editors and buyers – and getting to know who they are and what they want. If you’re want to sell to magazines, it means reading submission requirements and drawing up pitches. None of those things will be simple and all will involve handling rejection. Some, such as showing at art fairs might even involve some some initial expenses, the kind of thing you can expect to happen in any growing business. But the more you do it, the more sales you’ll make, the more confident you’ll feel about your photography, the more you’ll understand the market, the easier it will become and the further you’ll be able to push your photography.

The road from first camera to first commission from National Geographic is long, difficult and unlikely to be travelled by any but the most talented and dedicated of photographers. But the path from photography passion to photography profit, even if it’s just a little extra income to help subsidize an expensive hobby, is much shorter and much easier to walk. You can complete it in just three steps:

Open a Flickr Account

Sharing your images for free might not sound like the most obvious way to start making money from photography but the site’s giant collection of creative images has made it a rich shopping ground for photo editors looking for the kinds of unusual pictures they just can’t find on stock sites.

There are no figures that track the number of direct sales made between Flickr members and photo editors but the exchanges have been frequent enough for Getty to team up with the Yahoo property to handle the sales. Within months of launching its partnership, the stock company had made “thousands” of sales on behalf of Flickr members.

For buyers, Getty’s Flickr Collection provides a useful source of original photography and a familiar, trusted sales method. It ensures a fast response from a company that understands copyright restrictions and model releases. For sellers though, it’s an expensive way of delivering their images. Getty takes a 70 percent cut of rights managed images and 80 percent of royalty free photos. Sell the pictures yourself directly, and you could grab 100 percent of the sales price.

To make those sales though, you’ll need to make sure that your Flickr account only hosts your best images, carefully chosen and tagged, and arranged in collections that are easy to browse. Flickr might have a free option but it shouldn’t be used as a dumping ground. You’ll need to indicate in the description that your photos are available for sale, declare whether you have a model release for any recognizable people that appear in the picture, and promise to respond promptly. (One frequent complaint among buyers is that purchasing from enthusiasts can be slow, difficult and unreliable; you want to look like a professional.)

You’ll also need to generate traffic. That comes from networking on Flickr, linking from a blog, joining groups and leaving useful comments on other people’s images. Not only will that give you return views and — if your pictures are good enough — create a buzz about your photography, it will also give you something much more valuable: feedback that will make you a better photographer.

Sell Microstock

Microstock isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The low prices and high volumes have led to accusations that sites like iStock are lowering the value of photography (although not everyone agrees). But it does offer a couple of benefits to enthusiasts hoping to earn a little cash: it’s open to anyone who wants to submit; and it can deliver sales instantly.

The second of those advantages is particularly important. Even if a sale only brings in a few bucks for an image that’s going to be used as the background for a website, the feeling that someone is willing to pay for one of your photos can deliver a huge boost in confidence. It tells you that you’re on the right track and that with more practice, better market awareness and more creative photography, you can continue to sell images and for higher prices.

Microstock is unlikely to make you rich. The highest-earning microstock photographers like Andres Rodriguez and Yuri Arcurs treat their shoots as a full-time job. They look for images that sell, analyze the markets and keep their portfolios fresh with hundreds of weekly uploads. Shoot occasionally, and you’ll struggle to build the critical mass needed to produce regular, high-volume sales.

There are alternatives though. FotoLibra is also open source but charges for storage. It also hands over 50–60 percent of the sales fee to the photographer, and allows anyone to sell rights managed images. PhotographersDirect gives as much as 80 percent but doesn’t accept microstock sellers.

You can regard microstock as a useful confidence boost and an easy way to earn occasional income — or at least have the opportunity to earn occasional income. You can treat it as a full-time job if you have the time and the dedication. Or you can just skip it altogether and focus on one of the stock alternatives.

Win Commissions

Selling usage rights for images is a good place to start because the buyer knows exactly what he’s getting. It doesn’t matter how little experience you might have or how many mistakes you’ve made in the past as long as that one picture turned out right; image buyers are less interested in consistency than composition. That isn’t true when it comes to commissioning photographers. It’s rare, although not impossible, for a magazine to commission to  a non-professional photographer so editorial photography shouldn’t be a prime focus. It’s a field that was always competitive and now even more so. Instead, you can look at winning commission for events and portraits.

Portraits should be the easier of the two. You can build a portfolio with the help of friends, family and even actors and models looking for free headshots. Have them sign model releases and you could even use the shoot to build your stock portfolio. More importantly, you’ll have a collection of photos that show hesitant leads how their images will turn out.

The usual route for professional event photographers begins with an assistantship, something that may be harder to win for an enthusiast with a full-time job. Alternatives that photographers have used include shooting friends’ weddings as a gift, and even pitching for low-budget gigs on Craigslist.

Although some event photographers are willing to outsource their work talented part-timers, they’re relatively rare. And because event photography means shooting when the client needs the pictures taken rather than when you have the time and inclination to pull out your camera, it may not be the best move for many non-professionals.

Photography: Larry Shaefer

Larry Shaefer’s last professional project was in July of last year for the television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. He’d donated his time to build a staircase for a needy family. The work done, he put away his tools, took his family on a vacation to Oregon, and on the day he returned was informed that the carpentry workshop that had employed him for the last thirteen years was shutting its doors. There were no new projects lined up, his employer couldn’t pay him and he — and the firm’s three other employees — was being laid off.

Over the last couple of years, as the recession has continued to bite and unemployment has stuck at just below 10 percent, it’s a story that’s been repeated more than 8.4 million times. Days that used to be filled with work and career-building are now consumed by job-searching, interviews and daytime television.

Photography enthusiasts at least have somewhere to turn. They now have weekday hours to practice their photography, learn new skills and even earn a little extra money from something they’d previously only considered a weekend hobby. Microstock firm Shutterstock reports that its site really took off towards the end of 2008, about the time that the downturn began. A number of publications had suggested photography as a way of supplementing income, and submissions grew from a public concerned about the stability of their salaries.

Magazine Covers and Getty Portfolios

It’s something that Larry Shaefer has begun to benefit from too. A keen photographer, Larry had long been putting his life on film, shooting nature, pictures of his son or still life images, and uploading the results to his Flickr account. One picture entered in a local fair — the first he’d entered in a contest — picked up a blue ribbon and was featured on the cover of Ozark Mountaineering Magazine, a request that earned him twenty bucks.

“I thought that was cheap, but I didn’t care,” he recalled. “I thought it was great that they even asked me.”

Subsequent offers have been more serious. Getty approached him after seeing his pictures on the site, and although he has yet to make a sale, the stock company does represent several of Larry’s photographs.

After the initial shock of thirteen years of work without missing a day, Larry says he’s now relieved. He’s back at college, retraining as a middle school teacher and hoping to find work in some of Missouri’s underprivileged schools, and he has discovered that he has the time to improve his image editing, something he’d overlooked in the past. He’s learning Photoshop and while he says he may take the same number of pictures that he used to, he now puts more time into producing quality photos rather than shooting large numbers of them.

From English Teacher to Editorial Photographer

A focus on post-production is something August Kelm has been concentrating on too. A former student with plans to teach English in Japan, August was forced to drop out of college when the bank supplying her student loan failed. She took a job to save enough money to re-enroll, but was laid off in January this year. Her days are now spent improving her photography. She’s also teaching herself Photoshop and is learning about the Zone System as a way of adding some extra flare to her black and white photos. She’s now hoping to become an editorial photographer and plans on enrolling in some photography classes at her local state college. In the meantime, she’s been sending her resumé to magazines and publications that she believes publishes the kinds of images she likes to create.

August’s unemployment then may end up opening a whole new career path, one that she might not have considered if she hadn’t been hit by the recession, and an activity that she would not have had as much time to practice. But the real benefit, at least in the short term, is photography’s ability to take some of the pain out of being unemployed.

“It’s made those days in between rejection letters and firing resumes out a bit more bearable,” says August. “I can just grab one (or all) of my cameras and just take a walk down the road and I usually end up with a couple of good shots.”

Larry Shaefer too has found that the prospect of making sales through Getty or figuring out how to improve his layering skills are little compared to the way in which photography is helping him through a difficult transition. He describes the creativity involved in taking pictures as a kind of therapy and enjoys the fact that he can still get to wield a tool that’s more demanding than a mouse or a board marker.

“The camera has filled that void, and I appreciate it more now actually that my hands have grown a bit softer,” he says. “I think over the months photography has helped me move on and grow into a better person.”

Recessions though do end. People who have lost their jobs go on to find new ones, sometimes better ones, and sometimes even in entirely new fields. Losing a job might be painful but photography can make it seem a little easier, perhaps by bringing in a little income, always by helping to fill days that can otherwise feel interminable. Both Larry and August say they’ll continue shooting pictures even after the economy has improved and their job prospects have brightened.

“I don’t think I’d stop just because of a job,” says Larry. “I may have less time to edit, matt and frame, but with today’s technology I’ll throw them on a hard drive for my son’s kids and their kids to look at.

“There is nothing more inspiring, than losing your job,” he continues. “If you keep your sense of humor about it, and take advantage of the extra time, a person can easily transform a loss into an added bonus.”

Photography: Nebojsa Mladjenovic

Vanessa Dualib’s photography career took off when illness restricted her to her house. Forced to make her own amusement, she played with food and cameras, uploaded the results to Flickr and ended up with an offer from Getty. Emin Kuliyev too spent a year in bed after a car accident broke his leg in five places. He used the time to play with his new digital camera. In 2008, he was named Photographer of the Year by the Artistic Guild of the Wedding Photojournalist Association. While there’s always plenty to shoot if you’re willing to get in the car and drive to picturesque locations, there are also plenty of opportunities not just to practice your photography without leaving the house but to shoot the kinds of pictures that can raise dollars too.

Stock is the most obvious place to put those images, and inventories offer all sorts of photos that contributors could have shot in a garage studio or just with a camera on a tripod. Food photography, for example, often requires some special skills to prepare the items so that they look good under the lights but when even a fairly straightforward shot of an apple in front of a white background can generate over 6,000 downloads, home-based photographers don’t need to look further than the fruit bowl to come up with ideas for highly valuable compositions. And there’s no reason to stop at fruit. There’s a market for vegetables, cookies, bread and all of the items filling up your kitchen shelves. (If you’re also going to use packaged goods though, remember to take off the brand names in post-production. Logos and brands are one of the most common reasons stock companies reject images.)

Shoot the Family

Of course, you don’t have to restrict yourself to shooting edibles. If you’re a better photographer than a cook, then furniture can make for sellable images, as can toys and books. And that’s before you’ve stepped outside to shoot the garden or take architectural images of the house itself.

If the rest of the family is bored, you can also gather them together to lend a hand. You’ll need to supply model releases but once you start to think in terms of playing, working, resting or any other form of action, a solitary afternoon with the camera can become a valuable activity in which everyone takes part.

Stock images are always the most obvious to shoot because they’re the most versatile but they do require a particular kind of image, one capable of being used in a number of different ways, that has a clear message and which leaves room for copy. More fun to shoot are the kinds of pictures that can be put in a book. One of the reasons that Vanessa Dualib refused to contribute more than a handful of her images to Getty was that the company’s exclusivity restrictions would have prevented her from doing almost anything else with them for two years. She’s used her freedom to create a Blurb book, the response to which, she says, has been “an amazing surprise.”

Create your own book and the only limit to what you can shoot around the house is your ability to produce the kinds of images that other people would want to see and buy. You can create a book based on your collection of netsuke or old cameras, the flowers in your garden or the clothes in your closet. Or you can think of a feeling you want the book to portray, such as calmness, vibrancy or quiet, look for aspects of the house that reflect that feeling and create images that reproduce it. As long as you can find enough material to create a varied book, Blurb’s “Home and Garden” category will provide a suitable home for it.

You Can Sell from Home Too

The real challenge though will be selling it. Fortunately, even this can be done without leaving the house as well. Vanessa Dualib was smart enough to do what many print-on-demand bookmakers don’t bother to do and launched a website to promote her book. She says she didn’t do any hard marketing but her following on Flickr has helped to drive traffic to the site where people are able to see more of her work and invited to place their order. It’s not a huge effort, and it’s one that can be done from the home office in a matter of minutes and as a normal part of online photo-sharing. But it is an easy way to turn the images you shoot for fun around the house — including amusingly arranged vegetables — into sellable works of art.

The most important factor in selling books of the photos you shoot at home though, will be the quality and the nature of your photographs. No one outside your family is going to be interested in buying pictures of your children playing soccer in the garden unless the pictures have some other quality that makes them worth looking at. That quality can be a sense of loyalty created by a long-running series of images. David Morgan-Mar’s photographic Web comics are shot in half a day every Saturday using Lego characters, a bright desk lamp and a bit of computer-based post-production. David even does the writing and development on the train on the way to work in the morning. The comics, which are shot at home, have generated a large following. If they haven’t generated any cash though, that comes largely down to David’s initial decision to use a low print resolution and his unwillingness to take on Lego’s legal department. Emily Horne of A Softer World has managed to turn the images that she shoots, and for which Joey Comeau provides the text, into a full-time job.

It is possible then to pick up a camera and shoot pictures that can sell through stock inventories, as books, and even as comics, without leaving the house. That’s something to think about the next time a rainy weekend ruins your shooting plans.

Image: Twitpic

When a picture sells, it’s traditionally the result of plenty of planning, lots of practice and years of professional training. The low cost of professional quality digital cameras, the ability to show the results on the Internet, and the rise of microstock have now made it more common for buyers to license pictures from talented enthusiasts. But sometimes, those sales are more than an occasional purchase by a Web designer with a small budget. Occasionally, an amateur will break through and create the kind of pictures that land a big client, a ton of attention, a pile of cash — or all three.

Kevin Bauman’s Houses

Kevin Bauman used to be a professional photographer. For five years, he had been shooting architectural images, product photography and lifestyle jobs for businesses in the Michigan area. As the economy sank though, work began to dry up and Kevin turned to Web development as an alternative line of business.

But he didn’t give up photography entirely. As he traveled around Detroit, he would take pictures of the empty homes abandoned by former residents trying their luck elsewhere. The houses were shot front-on without adornment or any attempt to make them look better than they appeared to someone driving by.

Kevin built a collection of the photos then placed them online, offering the prints for $35 with a portion of the fee going to charity.

The pictures were noticed by The New York Times who ran a story about them, delivering around 8,000 visitors to Kevin’s website in a single day. He sold almost 70 pictures that week alone.

“It has generated quite a bit of interest, and because of it I’ll be donating a lot more money to a few Detroit charities than I ever would have without the project, but I don’t think it’s actually done much of anything to change people,” Kevin told us. “Maybe it could serve as a warning. Maybe that warning would be, ‘prepare for the future.’ Detroit didn’t.”

Vanessa Dualib’s Fruit and Veg

When illness forced Vanessa Dualib to remain indoors, the outgoing Brazilian Fine Arts graduate chose to bring together three things that interested her the most: food, photography and humor. She pulled fruit and vegetables out of her fridge, photographed them in the form of animals and placed the images on Flickr.

That’s where the story should have ended: with a collection of amusing pictures enjoyed by other members of the photo-sharing site. But Getty was looking for creative new pictures to add to its growing Flickr collection, and invited Vanessa to contribute some 60 percent of her “Playing with Food” photography. Worried about the two year exclusivity, she agreed to provide just four of them which, she says, “sold a few times already” in the first four months they were on the site.

Unlike much stock photography, these are images that weren’t shot by a professional and weren’t created with any particular use in mind. They were created solely to entertain a bored photographer — and yet they were picked up by one of the world’s biggest stock companies, proving that you don’t need to be a pro to succeed, just creative and good.

Citizenside’s $100,000 Headless Movie

When it comes to news images, the line between photography and videography isn’t as neat as used to be. While the press will prefer the clarity of a still shot, when the story is hot enough and when there’s no competition, they’ll also pay through the nose for the right images. At that point, the kind of device you’re holding doesn’t matter any more than the professional status of the photographer — or whether the images are still or moving. If you’re in the right place at the right time with a tool capable of capturing light you can still produce successful images.

“Jerker08,” for example, a contributor to citizen news site Citizenside, got lucky in January 2008 when he found himself in an office opposite the Brigade Financière building where Jerôme Kerviel was being questioned about the trades that cost French bank Société Générale around 4.9 billion Euros.

With the lights on in the building and the blinds up, he had a grandstand view of the interrogation. He pulled out a camera, shot three minutes of footage and sent it off to Citizenside. The video was sold for around $100,000.

And yet it’s a terrible clip. In some of the video, Kerviel’s head is blocked by part of the window; in the remainder of the clip, it’s entirely hidden behind a light. But it was topical enough to land a six-figure sum, demonstrating that you don’t need to be a professional to get lucky with location.

Astro Soichi’s Space Shots

Soichi Noguchi’s profession certainly has made him lucky with location. Since December 20, 2009, the Japanese astronaut has been a crew member on the International Space Station. It’s a position that gives him a grandstand view of the Earth, of space and of other astronauts flying around in spacesuits.

As Astro_Soichi, Noguchi has also been providing updates on Twitter. Shooting through the space station’s windows, he links his tweets to his collection of photos on Twitpic. The images have been stunning and have included shots of the space shuttle Atlantis hovering in space, a storm over the Atlantic, and plenty of satellite-style photos and close-ups of the world below.

There’s no question of Noguchi making money out of his amateur photography, but his tweets, and his images in particular, have given him a following that’s almost a quarter of a million strong – an impressive audience for a professional engineer with a minimum of photography equipment.

It’s always going to be easier for a professional photographer to make sales than it will be for an enthusiast. They have the time and the resources to go out and create the photos that sell. But if you have the right idea, the right technique, a decent amount of talent –  and sometimes a reasonable amount of luck – you too can produce images that other people will want to see.

Photography: Mr. T in DC

On March 26 and 27, Profiles in History, a California dealership, will auction a collection of photographs and memorabilia that is said to include “every iconic image of ‘30s and ‘40s glamour photography by every major photographer.” Among the images to be sold are a negative and custom print of Jean Harlow lying on a bearskin rug, shot by George Hurrell in 1934, which is expected to reach $30,000, as well as photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray and Helmut Newton. The auction is expected to raise between $3 million and $5 million, a large portion of which will be donated to the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center and to the Trevor Project, a non-profit.

For photographers, sales like these generate two kinds of envy. On the one hand, most lovers of beautiful photography would like nothing more than to own a collection of fantastic, artistic photographs, the kind of works they can admire and enjoy for years.

On the other hand though, as artists themselves, photographers would also like to see their own images in collections like these, being auctioned for giant sums of money and fought over by keen collectors.

Neither has to be impossible.

The Value of a Photograph

According to Janet Borden, owner of Janet Borden Inc., a New York photography gallery, photographs do make good investments. Although less liquid than stocks, the value of photographic art has risen faster than the stock market, she says.

While the price of a stock is linked to the company’s profitability however, the value of a picture depends on a number of different factors. Writing in the Huffington Post, art expert Daniel Grant explains that for old images, value is largely determined by the closeness of the photographer to the image. “Original” images — those whose negatives and prints were made by the photographer — are generally the most valuable. “Vintage” prints, those printed up to five years after the creation of the negative, also fetch higher prices. Images created later, in large numbers or by people other than the photographer him- or herself can be relatively cheap. Those photos won’t rise much in value, but they can be good places to start a collection of art from great photographers without spending giant sums of cash. Even some Ansel Adams prints, for example, can be affordable because he printed so many of them.

Darkroom skills and the way the print is made then do influence the price of an old photograph.

For contemporary photographers, of course, the ability to mix chemicals in the dark is no longer important, leaving just the quality of the work itself — and who it’s associated with.

“The art is always of primary importance, but the amount is dependent on other factors,” explains Janet Borden. “The name of the photographer is very important, as is the reputation of the seller, whether it be a dealer, a gallery, an auction house, or a private person.”

To begin building a collection then, Janet advises buying photographs that don’t cost more than a year’s rent and that are being sold by a reputable seller. Artists whose works have been collected and exhibited in museums tend to have potential as good investments, Janet says.

Those images though are also the type most likely to cost more than a year’s rent but a cheaper approach for photographers is to trade photographs with friends. Even if those images aren’t worth a great deal now, if your friend is as talented as you hope he or she is, you might find that that friendship is also a good financial investment. So it pays to make friends with good photographers, and not only for the advice and inspiration they can supply.

Being knowledgeable about photography helps too, and that includes understanding the range of photographic art available.

“I think when someone sees a photograph that they fall in love with, they should buy it.  Then they should just look and look and look at photographs, in books, in museums, in galleries,” says Janet Borden. “We always tell people that buying photographs is what makes you a collector.”

Become a Collectible Photographer

Becoming a collector and creating a photographic collection that can grow in value then is simple enough — at least in theory. If you’ve got lots of money, you can buy old images printed by the photographer and wait for them to rise in  value. If you want to buy contemporary photographic art, then buy from galleries or auction houses, or pick up works that have been exhibited in places with impressive names as they’re the type most likely to prove the best investments. And if you’re cash-poor but rich in friends, then try swapping your photos among yourselves and hope that at least one of you will go on to great things, making you all a little wealthier.

Becoming that great photographer though is clearly a little harder. Asked what a photographer can do to increase the value of their own work, Janet Borden recommended working with reputable people, whether that is a dealer or a gallery, or friends or schools.  That’s sound advice, but it might mean that only marketing your images yourself could restrict their potential as investments. And galleries, such as Janet Borden’s, are notoriously choosy, looking to recruit their photographers through photography schools or by choosing people who already have impressive photographic resumés.

When Michael H. Epstein, whose collection will be autographed this month by Profile in History, began buying images as a teenager he wasn’t thinking about selling them. He just wanted to own some beautiful pictures produced by great photographers. Perhaps that’s the best way to create a valuable photographic collection then: buy the images you want to own and assume that other people will want to own them too. And if you can then use those images to inspire your own pictures — and put them in galleries — you might just find that they form parts of other people’s collections too.

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.

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.

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: laffy4k

The ability to display images on the Web has made it very easy for photographers to put their work in front of buyers. Unfortunately, it’s had another effect too. It’s also made it very easy for buyers to pick up images for free. When a buyer sees a photo he likes, whether it’s in someone’s Flickr stream, on their blog or sliding across their website, the first step is often to praise the image… and ask if they can use it for nothing. Flattery — and the thrill of publication – are often enough to persuade the photographer to agree, winning the photo editor a great image without touching his budget, and no doubt giving him a smile from the boss too.

This Creative Commons-licensed nature shot, for example, was spotted on Flickr and featured in Maxim magazine, a publication that’s certainly used to paying for its photos. The photographer received nothing more valuable than bragging rights.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Many publications, including Maxim, have a budget for buying images. They’d just prefer to get them for nothing if they can. It may well be possible to negotiate a payment with an image user that wants to skip the fee, winning both the kudos that comes with publication and a check too.

Low Res Images are Free, High Res Images Require a Fee

That begins with knowing who you’re dealing with. Different users always have different budgets which is why stock companies offer a bewildering range of rates for different types of usage. Software like fotoQuote can provide an idea of what exactly those rates should be (and it’s possible to pick up ball park figures by looking for similar uses on PhotoShelter, which incorporates the program) but even before you start negotiating, you have to decide if the request comes from someone who has the money to pay at all.

In general, you can assume that a print publication has a budget and the willingness to stump up the cash, while a blogger with a small site is more likely to keep looking than dip into limited funds.

Win a request from a large company then and you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for a fee, start negotiating at the market rate, and walk away if the buyer balks. Publication is nice but being paid for publication is even nicer. And being taken for a ride is certainly nothing to boast about.

One way to lower the risk of losing the opportunity to see your image in print while still asking for payment is to place only a low-resolution of the image on the Internet with a Creative Commons license. When the request comes in, tell the buyer that he’s welcome to use that version for nothing but point out that a higher resolution version is available at a fair price. Bloggers will be happy with the small picture; serious publishers will want the big image.

It’s likely though that most requests will come from websites and Internet publishers without budgets to buy images – there are more of them. But it is possible to earn even from these image users. They might not be willing to pay a fee but small online image users are always willing to supply credit and a link, a demand that’s usually a requirement of the CC license.

It Pays to Advertise

Make sure that the page the image links to provides plenty of information about the photo to build interest in the subject. Then try to monetize the image by offering prints of the photo for sale to the public, and by indicating to buyers that higher-resolution versions are available for licensing. You might not earn directly from that image user, but you can turn the request into a chance to advertise your photos to editors who do have budgets.

There is a good chance that buyers of those sorts of images will see your photo and click through to see what else you have available.

The biggest opportunity though isn’t using a publisher as a billboard for your photos, and it isn’t even turning a request into a one-time payment. It’s the chance to turn that image user into a regular buyer. That’s always going to be difficult and clearly, it will depend on who’s doing the asking. But it can happen. After Diego Lema sold a self-portrait to a publisher for use on a book cover, for example, the authors asked him to supply more images for their next three books.

The hardest part of selling to an image buyer is always making the first sale. Once the deal has been done, trust  has been established, a rate has been set and the buyer understands the type and quality of the images the photographer can supply. Repeat sales should then be easier. Add the buyer to your mailing list and when you produce a new series of similar images, let him know.

And finally, every time an image is picked up by a buyer – even if it’s for nothing – cash in on those bragging rights. The fact that you’ve been published lets other photo editors see what your images look like on the page and tells them that other image users think your photographer is professional quality too. That reassures them about making an approach.

It has become almost a tradition now for photo buyers to begin their negotiations at zero. Too often though, that’s also where the negotiations end. But whether a photo is used by the buyer for free and by you for advertising, or whether you’re able to receive a fee for a higher resolution image, you should get something out of every request.

Photography: Auntie P

Gallery owners might be dedicated, connected and knowledgeable but they’re not known for their open natures. You usually have to book in advance to see one and they’re unlikely to pull the pictures off their walls immediately to make room for yours. Their wall space is limited and valuable. It’s their livelihood, after all, and if they’re not certain that your photographs will sell, they’re going to tell you to come back when you’re more established.

For professional photographers, that’s galling enough. For people who shoot in their spare time though, it can sound like a flat refusal – a polite alternative to laughing.

Rejection shouldn’t be treated that way. Gallery owners have to be as conservative as their collectors and they’re aware that as much of a work’s value is wrapped up in the name on the label as the colors on the canvas. If you’re entirely unknown, even a great picture is going to be a hard sell to a gallery owner.

Which is why it might be worth giving galleries a miss – at least initially – and looking at one of the alternative options that don’t involve trying to impress a professional seller.

Cafes and Restaurants

Perhaps the easiest is to persuade the owner of a café or restaurant to show off your pictures. Unlike gallery owners, they don’t need the images to sell to make money. They just need the pictures to look good enough to act as free decoration, show that they’re committed to the community and bring in a few extra customers.

They’re also a lot more approachable. While a cold pitch could certainly work, you might be better off choosing a venue you like, patronizing it a few times and chatting to the owner. Build up a relationship and you could even receive an offer without having to ask.

And even though the place might not be as prestigious as a swanky gallery, with the right images, you should still be able to make sales. Brandy, a photographer in Spokane,  displayed her photographs in a local coffee house. She told us that she made a sale on the first day of the exhibition and went on to sell more than 80 prints.

Do it Yourself

Cafes and restaurants are open to the public anyway. Once you’ve been accepted, all you’d have to do is choose your images, print and frame them then place them on the walls and wait for the orders to come in. Even if you didn’t do any additional marketing yourself – and you should – the flow of a busy café should be enough to land you some sales.

If you wanted to organize your own exhibition from scratch, you’d have to do a lot more work.

It’s not impossible. Photographers have done it and with impressive results. You’d have to find a venue that’s large enough to accommodate plenty of people and send out masses of invitations, especially to people who matter. Because the exhibition itself is likely to be short and because it won’t have a natural flow of visitors, you can’t count on making as many sales. But invite gallery owners, critics and collectors and you might just give your own career a boost.

Nor do you have to spend huge amounts of money. Jeremy Mason McGraw was able to form a deal with a local framers when he organized an exhibition, while Rei Dishon, an art student, used Moo cards to show his pictures and allowed people to take them away with them when he had an exhibition in Italy. Both of those methods can keep the costs down and the visitors coming in.

Art Fairs

Art fairs can be both as powerful as exhibitions at generating revenue and almost as prestigious. Juried fairs in which prizes are awarded to the best artists look great on a resume and can go a long way towards persuading gallery owners that you really do have art that people are prepared to buy.

There are costs involved here too. Most art fairs have exhibition fees which you’ll need to pay at each show and there are also one-time costs for the display tent and bins.

But art fairs are more open than galleries. Although they can be competitive – there are usually more applicants than space – persistence and talent should be enough to land you your first berth. Art galleries will be much more demanding.

Online Exhibitions

Okay, putting your photos on Flickr or your website isn’t quite in the same league as showing them in a gallery – or anywhere, in fact, that lets people see them in the flesh. But it’s still one form of exhibition. People will still be seeing your images, they can order them and you can organize them by theme instead of simply uploading your images in some random order.

You don’t have to ask for anyone’s approval to put on a show like this, it won’t cost anything except uploading time and while the number of prints you sell could be fairly small, you could make money by linking the images to a book on Blurb or even by offering affiliate products in the image caption. It might not be where you want to end up as a photographer, but it’s not a bad place to start.

There must be something wrong with Zazzle. It’s easy to use. It’s free to open a store. And its products look like the sort of things you can find in every shopping mall across the country.

But while you don’t have to look far to find a mall store owner making a living — if not a great one — out of printed mugs, t-shirts and mousepads, how many people are paying the bills with their Zazzle products?

When you add in the fact that unlike a mall store, buyers can order their Zazzle products from anywhere, we really should be able to list a bunch of Zazzle zillionaires: talented designers and photographers who create unique products and make a packet selling them through the website.

After all, there are people who make a good living shooting for microstock. So why does it seem so much harder for Zazzle?

Who Needs Zazzle Products?
One reason is the nature of the buyers. Microstock buyers are businesses. They might be large design companies or simple bloggers, but they’re not buying products they want. They’re buying products they need.

Businesses need images and microstock is just one way of delivering a particular type of image at low cost.

That means that while marketing a stock portfolio can increase revenues, it can be enough to post an image on iStock and trust the site’s own marketing to bring in buyers. If the photo is good, it will sell… and keep selling.

The same isn’t true of Zazzle. No one needs a mug with a picture on it, however attractive, or a calendar showing twelve of your most beautiful landscape images. They might want those products if they see them, but relatively few are going to come looking for them.

Zazzle is a Place to Create, Not Sell
Zazzle then might best be seen as a place to create photography-based products, not a place to sell them. Although products do need to be tagged and organized well so that any browsers passing through the site can find them, the selling has to be done away from Zazzle, on your blog, your website and through offline marketing channels too.

“Marketing your product makes a difference,” Josh Elman, Zazzle’s Head of Marketing told us. “Photographers should connect with different communities that they are involved in around their interests and promote the fact they have photos for sale on their Zazzle store. Don’t be shy about having a link to your store in your email signature, on your website, your profiles, etc.”

Of course, it also helps to create the sort of products that sell well. According to Josh, the most popular products for photos are posters, cards, stamps, prints and calendars, but mousepads, mugs, buttons, magnets and photo sculptures can do well too. Clothes with photographs “modified with special graphics and design effects” can also sell well.

If marketing to communities — whether Democrats, Republicans or vegetarians — is a good strategy, then clearly focusing on a niche could be one good idea. The images might be limited but finding the market should be fairly easy. Among the more general photography subjects sold through Zazzle though, nature images, travel, architecture and historical photos are particularly popular.

“For instance, with nature, many contributors take flower photographs and see interest,” says Josh. “Anything will sell, it comes down to whatever you like and that will help you find your audience.”

It’s the finding the audience that’s really the point on Zazzle. Successful contributors don’t rely on their Zazzle incomes to pay the mortgage. Nor do they rely on the site to bring in all of their Zazzle customers.

But they also don’t depend on the site to provide their only source of photography product income. Just as microstock photographers put the same images on different sites, so product creators can spread their goods across other sites like CafePress and RedBubble.

No less importantly, they can also sell them offline at fairs, shows, markets and even retail stores.

The best strategy for Zazzle then isn’t to put an image on a product and wait for the money to roll in. It’s to put an image on a product and send people to buy it. And once those people start buying and you can see the product sells, to start rolling it out to as many outlets as you can find.

Have you used Zazzle? Tell us what you think.

[tags] zazzle, photo products [/tags]

Photography: Zuan

In this blog, we like to look at some of the new and less conventional methods of earning money through photography. But that doesn’t mean we have anything against the traditional photography business.

It might be harder to get into — and most importantly, it might not suit everyone, especially part-timers — but the old-fashioned model of running a studio and pitching services to clients and buyers is still valid.

And the best way to get into that business is still to pay your dues and build up experience as an assistant. While college courses can teach you the theory, the techniques and even the marketing side of photography, nothing beats the familiarity that comes with being on a shoot, watching a professional and seeing how he or she takes the pictures and liaises with the client.

The good news is that while a resume and some photography experience might be useful when applying for a job as an assistant, neither is essential for all photographers. David Bean, a professional photographer and founder of both the Pro Corner and Assistants Wanted groups on Flickr, told us that he receives emails almost daily from people wanting to assist him, “even people out of state who will drive in to help out.” He tries to meet as many of them as possible before taking them on and is willing to work with people who are looking for their first job… with conditions.

“If they have little to no experience, I’ll have them work for free for awhile until they learn what they need to. I don’t feel bad doing this, as I’m giving them an education that is very valuable.”

Of course, some assistants might not agree with that. At least one contributor to a helpful thread on the APAnet forum (and reproduced on the American Society of Media Photographers’ website) wasn’t too pleased at the thought of lugging heavy equipment all day for no pay. But in practice, much of what makes a good assistant — the type that’s willing to learn and gets glowing references — isn’t the ability to carry lighting rigs but forward thinking and careful support.

“A good assistant is one who is dedicated to doing their part to make the shoot go as smoothly as possible,” says David. “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.”

The amount of income an assistant can reasonably expect to earn for these services (at least an experienced one) varies from location to location. According to David, an assistant in New York or Los Angeles can earn $250-$350 for a ten-hour day. In Nashville, where David shoots, that might drop to $150-$250. Interestingly though, David added that:

“[i]f the person also has skills as [a] digital tech, they can make $500 in some cases.”

That sounds like a good thing to learn before sending out the resumes and hitting the phones then. Because Photoshop skills can be picked up and practiced by yourself, spending time with a good manual or even a short course before an assistantship could be a sound investment and a useful way to make some extra money while you learn.

And if you know that photographers are paying extra for tech skills, it’s important to make sure that they’re highlighted in your resume and that you mention them in the follow-up phone call.

One of the most important assets that an assistant can bring to a photographer though can’t be learnt. According to David, personality is a vital part of whether a photographer and an assistant can work well together.

“Every photographer has different rules, but I like my assistants to communicate and engage the clients… Either way, a good assistant has proper social skills and won’t be loud, obnoxious or talk way too much.”

Of course, before you can enjoy the benefits of an assistantship, you first have to get the job. While sending resumes and emails, and cold-calling are all possible (provided you make clear that you know the photographer’s work and really want to work with them), Flickr has become a good place to scour for likely prospects. David found Ben Hancock, one of his best assistants on the site, and even if you can’t find an assistant wanted ad, you can gain a good understanding of the sort of photography you’ll be helping to create.

That’s important because while you will (usually) be earning as an assistant, the idea is to gain enough knowledge to be able to strike out on your own. The photographer will have demands for you but you should make sure your needs are met too.

“A photographer really needs to have a teacher’s heart even with an experienced assistant,” says David. “I try to make sure my assistants are learning and not just working. If they give me 100 percent, I have mp problem giving them back anything I can as far as knowledge [is concerned]. And sometimes, often an assistant will teach you a thing or two.”

When that happens, maybe you should charge the photographer.

Tell us about your experience as an assistant.

[tags] make money as a photo assistant, photo assistant, photography assistants [/tags]

Photography: futurowoman

It’s nice when someone asks to license one of your images. It’s nicer still when someone asks to buy a print to hang on their wall. But nothing beats the satisfaction that comes from seeing your photos printed to museum quality, hanging in a gallery… and sold for a large sack of cash.

For most photographers though, that’s always going to be something of a dream. The supply of attractive photographic artworks for sale always seems to outstrip demand for them so even though the best art works can go for large amounts, getting started is difficult and the marketing has to be furious.

Or at least it used to be.

If once potential photographic artists would have to carry a portfolio to gallery owners in the hope of getting a show, today anyone can print their images at high quality, skip the big name galleries and sell them to buyers themselves.

One company offering such a service is Photogonia.com which specializes in printing photographs on canvas. Managing Director, Doron Franco, told us:

The advantage of printing on canvas is [that] the final result looks like an artist’s painting. The size of the image is determined by the quality of the digital image and its dpi. The bigger the image, the larger we can print and the crisper the picture.

Doron recommends that photographs intended to be printed on canvas should be at least 500kb and points out that most customers choose sizes of between 20 x 30 inches and 40 x 60 inches.

He also says though that most of his customers:

are asking for family pictures, babies and scenic views from vacation spots that they visited.

That suggests that many of the people choosing to print their photos on canvas, at least through his service, are doing it for their own use rather than to sell. That’s understandable. While you’re not reliant on a gallery to arrange the printing, you’ll still have to do the selling. That’s the difficult bit.

Imagekind.com however, allows photographers — and artists too — to print their images at the highest quality but also lets them sell their works through the site.

Imagekind lets photographers create artistic prints… and sell them too.

The model is a little like Blurb’s but with a greater emphasis on the personality of the artist. Photographers can upload images and set a rate higher than the printing cost to create a profit. They don’t have to create inventory in advance and they can build profiles that describe their work and even link back to their own websites.

Free membership gives photographers a gallery of up to 24 images; a pro membership costing $7.99 a month gives photographers unlimited galleries of 50 images each but a limited bandwidth of 400mb a month; and platinum membership costing $11.99 a month provides unlimited space and uploading.

Images do not have to be exclusive to Imagekind so there’s nothing to stop photographers from offering the same image from a number of different outlets.

Best of all perhaps, Imagekind also provides unique URLs in the format http://yourscreenname.imagekind.com allowing members to market their products themselves.

And that’s where things can start to get interesting. Although anyone can put creative photos on Imagekind, it will take at least as much creativity to bring people in to buy them.

One method might be to make use of Flickr. Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, for example, was prompted by her large fan base on Flickr to offer prints through her website. There’s no reason why other talented photographers couldn’t also network like crazy on Flickr, point out that canvas prints are available for sale and link back to their URL on Imagekind. You’d need the sort of images that Flickr members will want to see — and buyers will want to own — and you’ll have to be active enough on Flickr to build interest.

eBay too could provide another source of potential customers. Sandra Russell, a photographic artist who sells her work through eBay points out that while the site can be tough for beginners,

once you get your customers, they are true blue and will come back to your site again and again to see what you have.

You could either use eBay’s Buy Now feature to sell your works at a fixed price then use Imagekind to produce and deliver them, or you could allow buyers to bid openly then order your print at cost price and pocket the difference.

And finally, although Imagekind doesn’t let photographers create affiliate links leading directly to their portfolio, you could still create your own crude affiliate system by letting friendly bloggers show your images, take orders and pass them on to you for a commission.

Of course, none of this is as satisfying as seeing your photo in a gallery with a little red dot in the corner of the frame. But it’s a lot easier and it could just give you art sales.

[tags] photogonia, imagekind, sell framed art photos [/tags]

Photography: Julie Kertesz

Photography might be a popular pastime and a crowded profession but each photographer brings something unique to the camera. That could be something as simple as an exotic location and as rare as specialized knowledge of an esoteric topic.

But it could also be a lifetime of experience that affects the way the photographer sees the world — and how they express what they see too.

That’s particularly true for people who take up photography late in life. They might not have decades of playing with light and handling equipment to draw on, but old-new photographers do have maturity, confidence, and perhaps most important of all, the time and patience to learn.

“When it comes to appreciation, critique or interpretation of a photo, the seniors can be expected to have a balanced point of view,” says Kamala Lakshminarayanan, a retired school principal in India, and a member of Flickr’s Senior Moments, a group for photographers aged over 50.

“Also they can be expected to bring out good photographs because of their experience and practical observation of the world around.”

For Kamala, an interest in photography began in 2002 when her daughter gave her an Olympus digital camera. She joined Flickr, learned the basics, discovered how to appreciate good photography and found that her new knowledge increased her passion for the subject.

Photography: Kamala Lakshminarayanan

Like many photographers, she says that she shoots anything that appeals to her, particularly sunrises and sunsets, flowers and animals. But being in India also gives her access to colorful festivals and ornate temples to practice her new skills.

And by using a digital camera, the penalty for the mistakes made during that practice is now low while the rewards for a good image cost little too. Both of those can be important considerations for retiree photographers:

We can afford to experiment with digital photography as not much cost is involved and we can edit or print photos by ourselves using a computer and printer.

It’s that freedom to practice freely during the days after retirement without worrying about the expenses that can really make a difference to a photographer’s development. Says Julie Kertesz, a 73-year-old photographer now living in France:

I love the change from film to digital: I was taking too many pictures even before and [it] cost me too much… [W]hen I bought tentatively my first Sony 3-megapixel cybershot [in 2002], my life was transformed.

Julie took 10,000 pictures in her first year with a digital camera, has been active on Flickr since it was in Beta and has been blogging about her experiences in photography for almost three years. She also runs the !Afterclass! group on Flickr which over the last nineteen months has collected over 2,100 members who take it in turns to set new challenges, lead masterclasses and explore monthly themes.

“The group is my main work now,” Julie says, “other than blogging and being a grandmother.”

Julie’s blog is fittingly called “Il y a de la vie après 70 ans” (“There is Life after 70”) and in addition to writing, shooting and playing with the grandkids, she still travels extensively. Last year, Julie visited Morocco, Ireland and her native Romania, creating plenty more chances to try out new photographic techniques.

Interestingly, many of the images in Julie’s photo stream are of other senior citizens, including one short series of a 90-year old. It’s possible that being closer in age to the subject creates a better rapport, helps the subject to open up and leads to a better image. It’s equally possible that it’s hard for younger people to refuse a camera-wielding grandmother. It’s no surprise then that Julie says that portraiture is her favorite genre and runs another group called “Never too old to enjoy life” which she describes as being “all about people.”

Of course, the relationship between photography and senior citizens flows both ways. While seniors are able to bring time, a novel view and a willingness to experiment to photography, practicing the art can affect them too — and perhaps create a new opportunity:

“I look differently at the world now after taking up photography and learning from different teachers and pictures on flickr (and books too),” says Julie. “Today my 7-year old grandson told me, ‘Mamie, you should become a professional photographer.’”

Did you take up photography late in life? Tell us about your experiences here.

[tags] senior photographers [/tags]

Photography: radiann

It sounds like something from the Wild West: Wanted Dead or Alive… a picture of a telephone. Or a house in Wisconsin. Or someone actually reading a book with a Kindle.

Reward offered.

But bounty hunting isn’t just for bail bondsmen and Wyatt Earp wannabes. It’s also becoming an opportunity for photographers who want to earn a few bucks.

GoSee4me Joins The Posse
First on the scene was SpyMedia, a citizen reporter site that arrived close on the heels of Scoopt and which later let buyers offer “Spy Bounties” for images they wanted. Those might range from shots of products to stock-type images — presumably photos that were too specific for an agency and which hadn’t turned up on Flickr.

Recently launched though is GoSee4Me.com, a site that focuses exclusively on photo bounties. Unlike SpyMedia though, buyers don’t set a fixed price. Instead, photographers in the vicinity of the object are sent an email inviting them to bid on the job.

The founder of the service, Josh Rothman, told us that the inspiration came not from looking at the prices on SpyMedia (which tend to fall around the $20 mark, although they can sometimes make it into the triple figures necessary to justify a morning spent hunting down a shot) but from his own experience:

The idea came from my own desire to look at an antique chair that was being offered for sale across the country. The seller had some photos posted on his website, but I was concerned that there might be some flaws in the chair that the seller was not revealing in either the written description or the photos he chose to provide. I thought to myself, “I wish I knew someone who lived there that could go look at that chair for me.”

It’s unlikely that Josh’s need was unique. In theory, there should be a similar demand felt by many people, especially among those buying expensive items on eBay. Cars, for example, are one of the most popular items sold at online auctions but buyers have to rely on the sellers’ images. It might be useful for the buyer to send his or her own photographer to make sure the photo isn’t hiding any damaged bodywork or that there really is an engine under the hood.

Bringing Some Reality to the Marketplace
Allowing photographers to bid on prices rather than hoping that photographers either have the images available or are prepared to get them for $20 might bring a bit of reality into the marketplace.

The question is whether these sorts of images are valuable enough to buyers to pay a price that makes them worthwhile for bounty-hunting photographers to collect. (The fact that the rights to the image are passed on to the buyer would have to be factored into the price too.)

At the moment, it’s too early to say whether those opportunities will turn up on GoSee4Me. The site only went live at the beginning of November and much of the time since has been spent signing up photographers. Over 500 joined in one week. The focus has now moved on to buyers though and recently, the site picked up its first job.

Josh told us:

One of our members in France is considering doing business with a bank in the US, but he would like to see a photo of the outside of the bank before he goes through with the deal. Presumably, he wants to confirm that the bank has an established presence and possibly he wants to know the size of the building and whether it appears well maintained.

This is a great use for GoSee4Me. A small investment that provides peace of mind before committing to a business deal.

It sounds like an interesting idea and something worth watching. Sign-up is free and there’s no commitment.

Of course, there’s also nothing to stop you from launching your own website and marketing your bounty services to buyers and collectors who need goods in your area. All you’d have to do is find people ready to pay the reward.

We aren’t affiliated in any way with GoSee4Me or SpyMedia but take a look at them, and tell us what you think of the idea.

[tags] scoopt, gosee4me, spymedia, citizen journalism, citizen photography [/tags]

Photography: Waponi

When we suggested in our 52 Ways to Monetize your Photos that any photographer can join the paparazzi, we took a bit of flak. Some people thought that it wasn’t possible to get paid for snapping celebrities.They’re wrong.Not only can you get paid for photographing celebrities, people are being paid for photographing celebrities. They’re doing it all the time. And they’re getting good money for it too.

Take a Shot, Win $16,500
According to Candi Kays of MrPaparazzi.com, a spin-off from paparazzi photo agency Big Pictures, prices usually range from over $165 for a celebrity shot to more than $16,500 — and they change hands constantly. She told us:

We sell the public’s images on a daily basis and we couldn’t even count how many we’ve sold in total. Tons!!

A number of factors will determine the price a picture will reach on the market, including the popularity of the star, but the quality of the image is not one of the most important. As long as it’s possible to see who the celebrity is and what they’re doing, the media could be interested. Even a photo from a high resolution camera phone would be good enough to print, says Candi.

What is important is that the picture is exclusive. If you can catch a celebrity doing something that no other photographer has captured and which the public doesn’t usually get to see, you’ll be in with a greater chance of landing a sale and the picture will fetch a higher price.

For example a member of the public that lives down on the coast spotted Gwyenth Paltrow surfing and got some pictures of it. Because these are exclusive, they will sell for loads more than something at an event where the stars have hundreds of cameras on them anyway.

The Worse They Look, The More You Make
In fact, it’s when you can capture stars doing the very mundane stuff, such as buying groceries or walking down the street — or even better, eating food, scratching their nose or looking they’ve just had a bad night — that the prices are at their highest:

People like to see celebs in normal settings. They like to see that they are just like us, so looking bad is what sells. People see the celebs looking great all the time so something different is better…

As a rule of thumb if you think the celeb wouldn’t be happy about the picture being printed in papers, the more money it would be worth.

Photography: Mirka23

So if you do spot a celebrity in the street, snapping a picture would be a good start, but you might be able to pick up extra cash if you wait, continue photographing and catch them putting something in their mouth or in mid-sneeze.

That might sound a little exploitative, and MrPaparazzi has a section on its site urging people to “respect [the] celebrity’s privacy” and use “common sense when getting a photo.” In practice though, that’s more likely to mean that you can’t hold your camera up to their front room window than that you should stop and ask if the star wouldn’t mind posing while you shoot a quick snap. As far as celebrity photo agencies are concerned, if a celebrity is in a public place, they’re fair game whatever they’re doing.

That probably means that selling paparazzi photos isn’t for everyone. You have to be somewhere celebrities are likely to hang out, like London or LA. You have to be able to spot a celebrity when you see one. You have to not mind that you’ll be doing something that they really wouldn’t want you to do.

And it’s certainly not art or photojournalism.

But those aren’t particularly high hurdles, and the fact that the $16,500 you might make is a fraction of what the star is worth would help most people clear them. Candi, for one, expects to be looking at a lot more photos of stars submitted by the public.

[T]he more technology progresses the easier it is for the public to be paps. Most people carry a camera around with them all the time, be it on their phone or a little digital camera in their pocket, so once they start to realize they can make money from snapping a celeb, I’m sure there will be no stopping them.

Check out these miniature paparazzi, take a look at Scoopt, which also sells amateur paparazzi images, and find out who’s hot now at TMZ and PerezHilton.com.

[tags] scoopt, paparazzi photography, paparazzi photos, paparazzi photo [/tags]