Image: Demotix

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

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

Demotix was launched in 2008 by CEO Turi Munthe, a journalist who had worked for The Economist, Slate and the Financial Times among others, and his fellow Oxford University alumnus Jonathan Tepper whose background was in finance. The aim was to promote citizen journalism around the world as a replacement for the decline in foreign news desks. The company received praise for its ability to distribute images during the 2008-2009 Gaza conflict, when accredited journalists were excluded from the region, and in July 2009 Demotix received the only image of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates as he was arrested for disorderly conduct. Prices for licenses are set at rights managed  rates rather than royalty free microstock fees. An exclusive can sell for over $6,000, of which Demotix takes half as its commission. In March 2011, the company signed a deal with Corbis which now helps distributes Demotix’s images to its clients.

The new plan is intended to supplement image sales and to provide a way to monetize non-buying users who visit the site in search of news content.

“Many of what we consider our very best stories are not picked up by mainstream media,” explains Tom Barfield, Demotix’s community manager. “As traffic to Demotix grew, we began to realise we were becoming a news outlet in our own right, and that we could monetise this through advertising. That, finally, gives us the possibility of rewarding those extraordinary stories that nobody has bought but that make Demotix as varied and wonderful as it is.”

Top Photographers Only

The ad revenue won’t be paid to all contributors however. Demotix currently has 25,000 registered users of which 5,000 are active. Demotix will only share advertising revenue with the 100 photographers who have brought in the most unique visitors.

“We want to be paying out a usable amount of money,” says Tom Barfield “We have a very long tail which means that any other revenue-sharing model would result in thousands of payouts of fractions of pennies.”

The list of eligible contributors will be assessed on a monthly basis, so it’s likely that at least those at the bottom will change frequently. The number of eligible contributors may change too as the site grows, provided that the paid amounts are always meaningful. Demotix currently receives 400,000 unique visitors a month who generate some 1.3 million page views. That represents a growth rate of 120 percent over 2010.

Demotix wouldn’t reveal the number of page views currently received by the 100^th most popular contributor on its site nor would it state the costs paid per mille by advertisers for the kinds of subjects covered by its photographers. If all page views were spread equally among the 5,000 active contributors though then each would receive a paltry 260 views a month. On iStock however, just 1.6 percent of contributors are responsible for half the company’s sales. If that rate of activity were replicated on Demotix then the top 100 contributors – 2 percent of active users – would be sharing around 650,000 page views a month. If news content receives about $6 for every thousand impressions then those top 100 photographers would be earning an average of about $312 per month.

Those are back of the envelope figures, of course. The gap between the amounts earned by the most popular Demotix contributors and those who just squeaked onto the list is likely to be substantial. CPMs of $6 may be optimistic too and Demotix’s long tail may be longer than that of iStock. But the top photographers on the site may well find themselves pocketing sums that provide more than a useful secondary income.

Gaming the System

The danger though is how that will affect contributions. Most of Demotix’s traffic comes from search engines so the company will be advising photographers on the use of good text, titles, captions and keywords to increase page ranking and improve views. They’ll also encourage them to use social media to alert their networks about uploaded images. But contributors now have a reason to do more than just optimize their contributions and spread the word.

Replying to comments on the company’s press release, Tom Barfield noted that Demotix chose to rank contributors by unique visitors rather than page views because it understood that people might try to game the system by clicking multiple times on their own page. Once photographers realize that certain subjects are more popular than others, produce more visitors and generate higher CPMs, there’s a good chance that some will start targeting their photography towards those topics. The under-reported stories about distant events, ignored by the mainstream press – and which Demotix was created to report – may now receive less attention from its photographers than in the past, affecting Demotix’s balance as a news site.

More worrying though is the admission that Demotix has so many popular and interesting stories that aren’t selling. The site might have been created to replace the falling numbers of foreign news desks but it hasn’t been able to create a demand from mainstream outlsets willing to pay for all of the images that people want to see. For photojournalists, licensing usage through companies like Demotix might be one way to sell their photos and crowdsourcing sponsors may be another. But giving away a view of the photos and earning from the advertising looks like an important and unavoidable additional approach.

Photography: Joao Pina

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

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

For the site’s founders, photo editor Tina Ahrens and photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, that access to the photographers as they work in the field creates a closer and more active involvement in the production process. For the photographers too, it provides an outside perspective, a chance to understand what the audience wants to learn about the stories and locations they’re documenting, and to produce the images they want to see. Tomas van Houtryve, a photographer whose trip to Laos was one of the first to be fully funded on Emphas.is, told the site’s blog that his interaction with his supporters led him to shoot more pictures of daily life that enabled them to understand the country better.

“When you only show the extreme points of a story, it’s a little intimidating; it doesn’t always give people a bridge into the topic,” he said. “I’ve been working on this topic for a long time, so it was good to be reminded what pieces of context they needed to understand the story.”

Submit Your Project, Collect the Funds

It’s an  approach that’s been remarkably successful. Emphas.is launched in March 2011. By the end of April, projects posted on the site had already raised more than $60,000 from more than 750 supporters. Tomas van Houtryve’s project on 21^st Century Communism in Laos raised $10,115 from 143 backers, more than the $8,800 he had asked for. He is now in North Korea shooting a second project, even as he’s collecting the funds.

Getting a project accepted to the site though isn’t easy. The submission guidelines demand short and long pitches, a profile and bio, a selection of images and a video pitch of up to two minutes. Three reviewers then assess each project, judging it on twelve criteria, including the applicant’s experience, knowledge and ability to build a crowd, as well as the significance of the story and the photographer’s body of work.

Photographers then have to collect the funds, an even tougher challenge that relies in part on social media marketing.

Joao Pina, whose two projects on the effects of Operation Condor in Latin America have both been fully funded, first used email to tell people about his idea. Some of those contacts then forwarded his message to their own friends. He also began posting project information on Facebook, asking people on the site to help spread the word. Many of the supporters of his first project also backed its continuation, often with larger pledges. Sergio Ramazzotti a veteran photojournalist who recently started using the site to fund a photo documentary about homosexuality in Afghanistan — a country he’s been visiting for the last eleven years — prefers to use a phone call than a Facebook message. But he too has been drawing on his personal contacts and social networks to bring in donations.

“I’m really not the salesperson kind, so I just tell plain and simple what I plan to do and why I think they should be supporting me, which is tantamount to supporting photojournalism,” he told us by email. “I ask them to imagine what a newsmagazine with 125 completely empty, white pages would look like.”

Photography: Sergio Ramazzotti

Supporters Want Rewards

The rewards offered are also important. Pledges on Emphas.is begin at $10 but most fall between $25 and $50, enough to receive an image. The average pledge is about $90. Although the rewards alone won’t determine whether someone will support a project, they can help to determine the amount someone will spend and the extent to which they’re willing to help it. Steven Duke, the editor of BBC World Service’s One World program, and a supporter of three Emphas.is projects, explains that he wants to be able to point at the photograph he’s using as a screensaver or a photobook on his shelf, and say “I helped fund that project.”

But it’s the project itself that’s key. For Steven Duke it was Tomas van Houtryve’s admission that some of his images of North Korea will be tainted with the “triumphalist propaganda” that pervades the country, a confession of the limits for any journalist, that impressed him. For Neil Osborne’s Return of the Black Turtle project, it was the positive spin on a story about an endangered animal that won his support. And for Nicolas Mingasson’s portrayal of the Arctic, it was the fact that he was taking ethnologists with him as well as his camera. The relationship between the environment and the people who live in it was vital.

“I like that Nicolas’ pictures are of people battling with the weather in harsh landscapes. I like that Thomas’ photos show us landscapes rarely glimpsed. And I like that Neil’s pictures come from the sea,” Duke explained. “That doesn’t mean they have to be exotic environments, but I want to see projects built on an environment and its people – rather than people in an environment.”

There’s no doubt that Emphas.is is fulfilling a need and enabling important stories to be told through photography. Joao Pina notes that he has been unable to win any support from publications or NGOs for his work on Operation Condor, and after six years of investing his own resources and time, his funds are now exhausted. He’s now spending the next couple of months in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, finishing the work that he started in those countries.

But perhaps the biggest benefit isn’t just that photographers are able to complete the projects they want but that photography lovers are able to see photostories and images that would otherwise have remained untold.

“There’s no point shouting at the demise of photojournalism from the sides,” says Steven Duke. “Crowdfunding allows us to get involved – for relatively small amounts – and support photo assignments we believe in. Plus we get to stick two fingers up at those editors who seem keen to swap photojournalism for Brangalina snaps.”

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

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

Hundreds More Views Than Flickr

That doesn’t make for a weaker selection though; a quick browse through the site turns up one high quality image after another. Photographers, most of them enthusiasts rather than professionals, are encouraged to upload only their very best images — the first step in the upload instructions is “Choose only your very best photos”  — leaving the more general images for either social media sites or to Flickr’s large sets and collections.

“We are here to show and exhibit the best photos, so majority of Flickr’s market will actually never become our users,” says Tchebotarev. “I think of 500px as a funnel — we are standing between viewers’ eyeballs and photographers, helping photographers get noticed, be faved and loved, and helping viewers get inspired and discover amazing photos.”

The smaller selection might give viewers less to look at but it may deliver more results to photographers. An image on 500px can expect to receive a hundred times the number of views a similar image might receive on Flickr, says Tchebotarev. (That may not be true for all images though. This editors’ choice image, which won Digital Camera World’s Portrait of the Year 2011, picked up just under 5,000 views on 500px; on Flickr, the same image, shown smaller, has won over 13,000 views.)

Nonetheless, a site that has only a fraction of the members of other photography services does manage to give photographers a great deal of coverage. That’s helped by the site’s more human approach to image promotion. While Flickr counts views, comments and faves to decide which images make the Explore page, 500px relies on a handful of editors around the world and with different tastes to identify the pictures that they believe are worth more attention.

“Their goal is to try to choose the photos that might push photography beyond, move it forward and show something that is very unique or very hard to achieve,” says Tchebotarev. “That helps other photographers become better artists.”

The site also has more featured options. In addition to the editors’ choice, viewers can look at “popular” images, “upcoming” images, “favorites” and “fresh” images. A Stumble option throws up random photos that are surprising both in content and quality.

Free Blogging Included

500px also provides photographers with a great deal of dynamism — if they want to use it. In addition to creating a profile, describing images and adding comments to other photographers’ work, members can also write blog posts and place status updates on a Facebook-style wall. For an annual fee of $50, members can buy unlimited uploads and bandwidth, portfolio designs that are iPad and iPhone-friendly, access to Google Analytics and the ability to connect their 500px portfolio to their own domain.

The portfolios, says Tchebotarev, help photographers “by taking away pain from updating or managing their personal site. It is a set of tools to create beautiful custom websites, and we take care of everything. It is something me and Oleg (co-founder) were missing in the space, so we made it the way we ourselves would use.”

500px then has managed to attract photographers with beautiful works to offer, and it excels at highlighting the best of that work and bringing it to the attention of people who might enjoy it. Financially though, the site currently offers less to those talented photographers than Flickr provides. While it’s possible to add creative commons licenses to images, there’s no link that leads directly to all of the photos that publishers might want to use for free — one way to show those same publishers better images that they might want to buy. In fact, a search for creative commons images turned up just 114 photos. Flickr offers more than 200 million images with one creative commons license or another.

Some photographers are explicitly making their images available for licensing and sale, but 500px doesn’t have the same kind of agreement that Flickr has with the stock industry — a decision that appears to have come from the site which didn’t think it would have been in the interest of its members.

“We actually talked to Getty,” Tchebotarev said, “and while I cannot share the details, very few Flickr users benefit from that.”

That combination of broad exposure of great images but limited opportunity to sell them may change soon though. The site is working on a new sales platform which Tchebotarev promises will be an “absolutely different experience.”

And as Flickr struggles to compete against Facebook as a place for people to share images, 500px’s more selective approach appears to be a winning formula. The site is expected to achieve a remarkable twenty-fold growth rate this year, says Tchebotarev.

For photographers,  500px does have plenty to offer. Its portfolios are attractive and its ability to push the best pictures forward — and from a smaller crowd — make it an easier place than Flickr to win attention for great images. How easy it is to sell those images on the site will depend on what 500px rolls out next.

Photography: Nancy Falso

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

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

Saturation is certainly a problem. The site offers more than 305,000 items in the photography section of its art category in forms that range from abstract to TTV, a format in which pictures are taken with one camera shooting through the viewfinder of another. Shoppers on the site are said to buy according to the seasons, with winter-themed photos selling as the temperatures drop and beach photos moving best in the summer. In October, for example, Falso sold this autumnal image of a squirrel in a pine tree. The self-taught photographer has also found that her desk calendars are currently selling well as customers start to look for extensions to their 2011 calendars.

Whimsy is What Sells

It’s the travel images though that are among the most surprising year-round choices. Georgia Fowler has been shooting seriously since 2007 and travels extensively. She’s lived in five countries and is currently based in France. Fowler was able to sell this image of a French menu board within hours of listing it on the site.

But that was unusual and Fowler has only sold a few images on the site since she started selling photography there in May 2011. Most of her store offers landscape images of France, she points out, shots that are attractive and artistic but which have little connection to a particular place let alone one as well known as the French capital.

“[P]hotos of Paris, blurry, layered, textured and heavily photoshopped is what sells best,” she says. “You could describe them as dreamy and whimsical styles. It has been mentioned in discussions on the Etsy forums that this could be because being a handmade site, a good photo isn’t enough. You have to show that you have done more than just take a stunning photo!”

The challenges of selling on Etsy don’t end with the need to convert your pictures of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and the Empire State Building into vintage shots that look like they were captured in the 1930s. They also have to be priced properly.

Nancy Falso begins by checking the cost of printing in various sizes and adds the profit margin she wants to make (and says she needs to earn in order to make selling them worthwhile). She then looks at shipping prices and, finally, compares her rates with those of other sellers. (Lowballing might be tempting to win some initial sales but rarely works, she warns. “Buyers will only value your work if you value it yourself.”)

The result is usually a price of $25 for an unframed 8 x 10 inch print and around $15 for unframed 5 x 7 inch print. With the cost of printing included in that price, but not Etsy’s 3.5 percent transaction fee, that doesn’t leave a huge profit margin to cover either the expenses involved in creating the image or time spent selling it.

Don’t Charge for the Time

And that selling time will be an important factor. The biggest surprise Falso found when she began selling on Etsy was the amount of effort she needed to set up lists, organize her shop, update her treasuries, and stay involved in “teams,” Etsy’s version of Flickr’s groups.

“[I]t’s all quite time consuming, but all quite necessary if you want to sell,” she says.
“You definitely can’t just open a shop, upload your photos and sit back waiting for sales to happen.”

That’s particularly true when it comes to search engine optimization. Etsy allows sellers to include tags to make sure that their images turn up in searches but it’s also important to include keywords in titles, even if that does make those descriptions clumsy to read. Falso’s squirrel image, which was sold to a woman in Australia, had the less-than-catchy moniker “Stealthy the Squirrel photo print – 8×10 nougat brown forest green fall colors pine tree furry autumn fall whimsical camouflage.”

Even with the right images at the right prices, tagged and keyworded carefully, and promoted through teams and social media, sales might still be relatively rare. Nancy Falso says that she sells, on average, one picture “every few weeks,” a rate that’s she’s been told is rather good for a new seller. Many people, she remarks, wait weeks or even months before they make their first sale.

There are alternatives, of course. Georgia Fowler also sells through her own site and through Fine Art America. Ebay, she says, can bring a large audience to marketable images, but the prices are too low and everyone is looking for a “super bargain.” Nancy Falso has made sales on Society6 but says that she prefers Etsy because it’s more personal and she can check the quality of the images before she sends them out.

Etsy, then, is capable of delivering some sales for photographers. If the image is seasonal or travel-related and whimsical, well-tagged and promoted, it might generate the occasional order. But it’s unlikely that your presence on the site will do more than deliver the odd welcome check. Think of it as a fun place to mingle online with other creative types and to offer images that you had a good time creating. And think of the money it can bring in as a bonus that shows you someone likes your image so much they were actually willing to pay for it.

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

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

Kate Holt

Kate Holt is a Zimbabwe-born photojournalist who was inspired to take up journalism at the age of 19 while volunteering at a neglected Romanian orphanage for disabled children.

“Realizing that aid work touched the tip of much bigger issues, I turned to journalism as a way to expose these [issues] to a wider audience, and those with power to make a difference,” she writes on her website.

She joined the BBC, studied photography and has since worked in Bosnia, DR Congo, Kenya, Moldova, Somalia and Afghanistan. Her work exposing the involvement of UN personnel in sex trafficking led to the resignation of Ruud Lubbers, head of the UNHCR, and she has been nominated three times for the Amnesty Award for Humanitarian reporting, as well as the Prix Pictet Photographic Award.

Her Facebook page is now showing images from her Brothers in Arms exhibition being held in Nairobi, and contains shots of the African Union mission battling the Shabaab in Somalia. It’s work that should inspire other photographers to aim to make a difference too.

Chris Meyer

Chris Meyer’s images are much happier than those usually taken by Kate Holt. He’s a wedding photographer who had done much to pioneer the use of Facebook as a marketing platform for professional event photographers. Back in 2010, Chris told us that spending $1,000 on Facebook ads between December and March was enough to generate more than $100,000 in new bookings.

And that was just his paid ads. He also discovered that tagging the faces of wedding guests, and inviting them to add more tags, enabled him to spread his photos naturally to friends and relatives of his clients. It was a double-exposure of Facebook’s potential for at least one kind of photography, and an inspiration for other photographers looking for creative and cost-effective ways to promote their businesses.

Scott Wyden Kivowitz

Scott Wyden Kivowitz describes himself as a “portrait, travel and life photographer.” He used to own Photowalklist.com, the largest source of photowalks on the Web, which he sold in 2010, and he still operates HDRPhotog.com, a collaborative HDR blog. He’s an editor on HDR Spotting and writes guest articles for a number of photography publications including Outdoor Photo Gear, Current Photographer and Mack Camera Blog. When he’s not shooting images used by newspapers, magazines and ad agencies in the American northeast, he takes free portraits for low-income families.

His Facebook page though is an inspiring example of just how much the site offers when all you want to do is show off your work. He answers questions on an active wall and on a dedicated question wall, discusses his images and links in a separate section to his blog. The impression is of someone who loves photography, and loves talking about it with other photographers. That’s inspiring enough.

Andrew Farrington

Andrew Farrington is a British photographer whose Facebook profile is worth checking out for his Jack Nicholson-style portrait alone. His other images of models in various poses, outfits and styles though are no less inspiring and they flow through his wall with regular updates that appear more often than new images on his blog, which is mostly empty.

That might seem strange because Farrington has a professional website that shows off his portfolio as well as his personal work, and which is notable for placing a link to his Facebook page alongside his image categories.

The overall effect is to position his website as a professional space for clients and his Facebook page as place where he can connect to photographers and talk about art. His Facebook bio, for example, is aimed specifically at other photographers and models, and pitches workshops in Manchester and London. For any top photographer who wants to discuss his work with other photographers — and perhaps teach them some of his or her tricks — Andrew Farrington’s profile contains both inspiring ideas and some impressive images.

Carl K. Thorburn

All of the photographers listed so far have been professionals. Carl Thorburn is a 20-year-old amateur who shoots urban photography like a seasoned old pro. He has a portfolio site to back up his social media presence and a Flickr page that’s active even if it has few contacts, but it’s his Facebook page that seems to be showing the most life — including plenty of praise from admiring fans.

There are few creative marketing extras here. The bio says little about the photographer, let alone pitch for work. There’s no coherent message that a potential client could latch on to so that he could pigeonhole the photographer for a future job. But there is plenty of great photography shot by someone who likes to shoot for fun and does it well.

And that’s really what photography should always inspire people to do.

Flickr is still a better option for photographers who want to show off their work to other photographers and talk about it. It’s a place where buyers go to look for extraordinary images and where enthusiasts go to learn new techniques from people with similar interests. But they need to network, join groups and take part in conversations. Facebook has the advantage of hosting people who already know you and who are ready to say nice things about your images. There are plenty of talented photographers on the site and lots of great images. Now show us whose pictures you look at on Facebook.

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

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

Blogs, Like Portfolios, are for Leads

None of those people matter. Like the main site, the blog’s only goal should be to sell work. It should be aimed at clients and produced with the aim of showing your potential to people who might be willing to hire you. Other visitors are welcome (and may bring referrals) but the main target of any commercial blog should always be leads who will move from the blog to the portfolio to the contact page.

That suggests that the best strategy is to follow the same principle used on the site: add big pictures and just enough text to describe the images. It’s an approach taken by many photographers whose blogs seem to consist of little more than a Photo of the Day. But that kind of content is already available on the portfolio, and it ignores one of the biggest reasons for adding a blog to a photography website: the preference of search engines for sites with dynamic content.

Google is pretty weak at indexing images and relies instead on the surrounding text to interpret meaning and serve the page in search results. That means the images you post on your blog to show off your talent should be accompanied by a reasonable amount of text — usually about 350 words — to make the most of Google’s indexing. If your blog is failing to show up in search results, one reason may be that it has too many pictures and not enough writing.

Producing those words might look like a chore for photographers. After all, if a picture does speak a thousand words, then a blog page with a couple of images on it should already have said enough. But the right words can add a great deal to a photography blog, and they’re less welcome on the portfolio site itself. Writing in LPV Magazine, a new contemporary documentary and fine art photography publication, Bryan Formhals argues that photographers should write (and not just blog) more:

“Words can provide clarity and context. Whether it’s a simple caption, a funny anecdote or backstory,” he says. “When we see a photograph on the web, we generally look quick and then move on. When words are included, we stay with the photograph just a bit longer. It may be subtle, but I think it makes a difference. The words keep us with the photograph.”

Formhals says that he’d like see photographers creating more ideas and stories. Photographers are interesting people, he points out. They travel to odd places, hang out with other interesting types, move around on a whim, and indulge influences and interests from science to sociology. If the stories picked up on a wedding shoot can make for interesting blog posts just think how much more interesting the blog of an editorial or travel photographer might be.

But not all photographers produce those kinds of stories. While a blog should say something about the photographer behind it, one common mistake is to say too much about the person behind it. Leads and even most random visitors are likely to care little about the photographer’s personal life when it says little about them as a photographer. Reading about a spouse is interesting when he or she is part of a photography road trip across the United States and features in the images. It’s less interesting when a photographer just wants to express his or her love publicly. It’s sweet but not particularly effective as a marketing device and more likely to drive away leads than pull them in.

Support Your Blog

A professional blog that gets too personal may be one cause of failure but a more common one is the failure to support the blog by building a community. Just as a portfolio site needs the support of a dynamic blog to bring in viewers to its static images, so the blog needs the support of even more dynamic social media activity to target leads and inform them that the blog contains posts worth reading.

For photographers then, what should be an essential but simple way of showing off work becomes much more complex and far more demanding. But it should also be much more enjoyable than creating the basic platform of a portfolio site and a collection of images. When you’re enjoying your photography, you’ll also feel more inclined to write about the shoot and what happened on it. When you like the people that the blog attracts, you’ll enjoy chatting with them on Twitter and Facebook. And when all three of those elements are working together, you should find that you enjoy the extra work they generate.

Photography: Doug Beasley

Everyone seems to be doing workshops these days, says Doug Beasley, a former fashion, advertising and commercial photographer who now specializes in fine art projects. With a living as a photographer increasingly hard to come by, teaching enthusiasts and professionals has come to look like both a lucrative way to supplement commissions and license sales, and an enjoyable way for photographers to benefit from their expertise.

Beasley’s workshops though started long before the digital revolution hit the world of photography. He’s been teaching for more than 20 years, initially running classes locally in the Twin Cities but soon stretching further afield as offers came in to teach people as far away as Guatemala and Peru.

“When an offer of a new location came, I became good at saying ‘Yes!’” he recalls.

After a career that stretched to include shooting annual reports around the world, Beasley now puts on between twelve and fifteen workshops a year through his website VQPhoto.com, teaching classes that range from five or six students to as many as sixteen. Any larger than that, he remarks, and it becomes difficult to give each student the one-on-one time necessary to get to know them, to understand their creative blockages and to help them grow. Students’ backgrounds range from beginner to professional but Beasley does prefer that students know how to operate their cameras so that he can skip the technical lessons and focus on the creative process.

Photography: Barb Prindle

Read Poetry to Improve Your Photography

The workshops are made up of photo assignments and visual exercises but also include short writing exercises and analyses of why certain photographs work and how to improve images that failed. Participants will even read poetry as a way of releasing their own creativity. The emphasis is on developing the eye and deepening vision rather than on teaching aperture settings and exposure times. What really makes Doug Beasley’s workshops stand out though is the range of locations in which they’re held.

Between January of this year and March of next year, Beasley will have held workshops in New York; Oregon; Yunnan in southwest China; Big Island, Hawaii; South Dakota; Big Sur, California; Santa Fe; Wisconsin; Maine, Cortes Island, Canada; and Guatemala. He’ll visit some of those places several times.

The travel to exotic and picturesque locations isn’t necessary but it is important. While it’s possible to teach photography in a studio,

“it’s a lot more fun to be in an exotic location together with a great group of people! Also people tend to open up in new and beautiful ways when they are in unfamiliar territory,” says Beasley.

Fun it might may be and being in an inspiring location with a group of inspiring people who have a passion for photography is always likely to foster new ideas but it also makes the workshops harder to organize. Producing a syllabus, finding models, arranging insurance and marketing a class is difficult enough when you’re holding the event in your own space; it’s a great deal harder when you’re trying to bring people to southwest China or central America.

For Beasley, the logistical work is conducted entirely by his studio for some of his workshops, such as those in the Badlands of South Dakota and in Hawaii. For other workshops though, he can usually partner with art organizations that operate locally but have a national base, such as Santa Fe Workshops or Maine Media Workshops.

“They can organize the logistics and deal with the money, freeing me up to concentrate on helping students expand their photographic skills and vision,” he says.

The benefits of the workshops spread in both directions. By the time the course has finished, students should be able to respond more visually, with greater confidence and with a clearer unique voice. They learn to go deeper within themselves to find the answers, says Beasley, and they discover that the puzzle of representation can have more than one solution.

You Choose What You Learn

If all that sounds almost as spiritual as it does creative, that’s another of the advantages of putting on a workshop: the photographer gets to set the subject and can explore topics that they find interesting. Beasley’s own photography focuses on the expression of the sacred; his workshop titles include “Zen and the Art of Photography,” “The Sacred Landscape” and “Spirit of Place.” As he leads his students’ exploration of the subjects that inspire his own photography, Beasley’s ideas are refreshed by their reactions and their interactions.

  “I get to participate deeply in the creative process. That is always so exciting and such a privilege,” he says. “I get to feed off of their energy as they react and feed off of mine. I get to be part of that group bonding process. I learn new ways of seeing, doing and being every time.”

Putting on a workshop then can be as attractive as it looks. Fill up the places and the income can be lucrative. (The price of Beasley’s workshops range from a few hundred dollars to almost $5,000 for those with the biggest expenses.) But they can also be inspiring for the photographer as well as an education for the participant. They aren’t easy to put together, however, or even to run once they’ve started. Beasley recommends that teachers develop a strong outline but be prepared to ad lib when they reach the field. They should know how to read the energy and needs of the group, lead strongly but sensitively, understand what they have to teach, and never underestimate the intelligence of their students. And students too should be choosy. They need to make sure that the teacher is reputable, has the experience necessary to lead a group, and has work of a high enough standard to inspire others.

And that’s the big disadvantage of putting on a workshop. Not only is the organization a lot of work but as more and more photographers see teaching as an enjoyable way to create an additional revenue stream, the competition is only going to get tighter.

Photography: lubright

There’s never been a worse time to be a photographer. Newspapers are cutting staff. Prices are dropping through the floor. Rights are being reduced and the only part of the industry that’s showing signs of growth are the competition. There’s also never been a better time to be a photographer. The price of equipment is falling even as the quality improves. The walls that kept out talented enthusiasts are collapsing, giving part-timers a chance to bring their talent to market. If print is feeling squeezed, it’s only because the Web has stolen its readers — and the Web has an insatiable demand for images.

For the Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts, it’s the second of those two scenarios that holds true. The cup isn’t just half-full, it’s overflowing with new opportunities for people willing to put in the time and effort to learn how to use their camera:

“Realize your photographic vision to pursue a livelihood that satisfies your imagination!” the school’s website declares. “With constant digital advancements in photography, the demand for well-educated artists is growing!”

The school’s course lasts two terms for full-time students or four terms for those taking the evening classes. Both approaches lead to a “professional photography certificate.” Classes emphasize practical aspects of photography, with several modules on camera and workflow, Photoshop techniques, studio and location work,  wedding and model photography, as well as story building and portfolio development. Faculty include National Geographic photographer Cary Wolinsky, and fashion photographer Rob Van Petten. According to Allie Dennis, the school’s marketing manager, 60 percent of the photography students study full-time. Part-time students include retirees and seasoned photographers as well as lawyers and high school graduates. Students can benefit from unlimited career assistance and are welcome to continue using the school’s facilities and attend workshops even after graduation. The course costs $26,400.

“Every area of photography is growing.”

That’s not a small sum, and it’s only worth paying if you believe it’s going to lead to a lifetime of higher earnings in a career you love. General skill improvement for enthusiasts can be picked up for much less in dedicated workshops, books and even for free online. But the professional opportunities the center’s fee opens will only be available if the school is right to claim that the demand for skilled photographers is growing. Asked which areas of the industry are hungry for new images, Dennis was expansive:

“Every area. Because the technology has become so great, everyone can purchase a digital camera, but not everyone has the experience to go along with it.

“One of the big engines of growth, driving demand, is the web,” he continued. “Today, over half of work goes onto the Web. The Web is starved for content, particularly rich media.”

But measuring the gap between the number of photography graduates entering the market and the number of jobs available to them isn’t easy. In 2007, the Art Institute, a chain of private art colleges, reported that almost 84 percent of its photography associate degree graduates were working in a related field within six months of graduation. The number rose to more than 90 percent for bachelor’s degree graduates. The Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts didn’t provide figures but did point out that students have gone on to land jobs at National Geographic. One worked as a second shooter at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding; another had booked 22 weddings before graduation. Many work as photographers while studying and even those who do go on to take “traditional” jobs in photography, also do freelance work, says Dennis.

Freelance Work Is Not a Steady Job

Occasional freelance work though isn’t the same as a steady job, and even the demand from the Web might not be as insatiable as it looks. A two-dollar price-point for Web-ready microstock images is more likely to indicate a supply glut than a scarcity of good photographs for digital platforms. Online publishing might be growing and need images but the price sites are paying for them suggests there’s already more than enough to go around.

And it’s not just Web publishers who are enjoying the benefits of oversupply. According to the US Department of Labor, the median annual wages of salaried photographers as a whole in 2008 was $29,440. Two years later that median had dropped slightly to $29,130. That decline doesn’t suggest an industry enjoying booming demand, let alone offering high incomes.

It might be best then to redefine the nature of photography “jobs” and the kinds of opportunities that photography schools can offer. There will always be demand for full-time photographers but as schools like the Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts train enthusiasts to use properly their new low-cost DSLRs, so there will also be increased competition and larger numbers of images chasing buyers. For many photographers then, especially enthusiasts, working in photography may well come to mean accepting freelancing jobs rather than building a long-term career and watching their income decline as more photographers join the market.

The Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts is right to advise photography-lovers to “act now” and “follow your passion” because

“[t]his is a great time for creative people. With the growth of new media, it is a great time to be a creative professional.”

It is indeed easier than ever to make money out of photography. It’s easier than ever to buy professional equipment, learn how to use it, discover the images that the market wants to buy, and make them available to editors and buyers — something that is more likely to happen with the sort of knowledge that a school’s course supplies than without it. But it’s harder than ever to make photography pay, to turn photography knowledge into a career and to make a living out of photography however enjoyable it might be — and however much the Web might be demanding new imagery.

Photography: Todd Arena

For photographers selling their services directly to the public, the benefits of maintaining a business Facebook page are clear enough. Face tagging pushes pictures of brides and wedding guests to clients and their friends, showing off their work to potential leads for free. Paid advertising lets them focus their deal on demographics as targeted as engaged women aged 25-40 within 50 miles of their studio. But what about stock photographers? Does Facebook offer anything for professionals and enthusiasts whose buyers are more likely to be businesses than individuals? According to the experience of at least one stock photographer, if the aim is only to sell licenses, then the answer may well be no.

Todd Arena started his career as a graphic designer, using stock images to create custom magazines, ads, websites and corporate identities for large corporations. Realizing that many of the contributors whose images he bought were selling the same work hundreds of times, he began producing his own pictures, beginning with graphics and art elements before working his way up to photography. He upgraded his gear, improved his photography skills and in mid-2008, after being laid off from his graphic design position, switched to full-time stock photography, shooting mostly lifestyle images, food and sports. In addition to promoting his images primarily through microstock companies, he also now runs his own stock site at Arena Creative.

Keep Your Page Active

Todd created a Facebook page almost five years ago, when he first started dabbling in stock sales, and has now picked up more than 4,000 followers. Not all of them are active. Todd knows about 400 of his readers, and only a small fraction of them contribute to his page, placing comments after his posts and complimenting his images.

His wall contains a combination of RSS-fed blog posts, comments and interaction. The info section allows him to introduce his photography and place his links, and the photos area contains a selection of carefully chosen and watermarked images. Regular activity is important to both build and maintain an audience, says Todd, and participating on other Facebook pages can also help to attract new readers.

“It’s important that you structure your online activity into a plan of action, so that your page doesn’t lay dormant,” says Todd. “Joining different groups, participating in discussions in other public areas of Facebook also helped me to get a lot of new fans.”

By one measure then, Todd Arena’s Facebook is successful. It has a large following, a steady stream of content and even if only a fraction of his 4,000-plus followers do more than lurk, the page is lively enough to show that it has interest. The commercial benefits that the page has generated though are a little less clear.

The page does generate traffic to Todd’s website. Facebook pages, he says, are ranked higher in Google search results than most personal portfolio sites. Even face tagging, a practice that might appear less useful for stock photographers than for event photographers, can generate some viral marketing and some extra visits.

“Posting a few low-resolution, usually watermarked selects from a recent photo shoot and then tagging the models in them, definitely helps drive new people over to your page,” explains Todd. “If they like what they see, they just might inquire about their own photoshoot, or at least click the like button.  That activity shows on their wall and their friends’ news feed.”

The branding is important too, and the Facebook page shows potential buyers what Todd shoots and what they can expect from his own site.

Lots of Hits, No Sales

But despite that extra Google love, the viral effect of face tagging and the brand awareness that his Facebook page has helped to build, Todd has yet to see any significant effect on his bottom line. He can count on one hand, he says, the number of times he has managed to produce license sales from the extra traffic his social network efforts have generated.

“I’ve been able to accomplish building the traffic of my website by leaps and bounds, and I’m sure that having a solid participation in social networking have contributed to that. Has the added traffic caused me to license many stock photo sales?  Very few,” he says. “As a stock photographer, I’ve pretty much concluded that the majority of my social networking efforts have been mostly in vain.”

Even advertising on Facebook hasn’t worked for him. Todd recently used a $50 credit to test a banner campaign. He found that he generated lots of views and plenty of website hits. He might have pushed his brand and logo a little deeper into the minds of buyers, he thought, but none of those hits produced so much as a single sale.

Facebook then can generate traffic to a stock site but if Todd Arena’s experience is typical then it’s unlikely to generate much in the way of revenue. Most of his sales are the results of the promotional efforts taken by the stock companies rather than his own work on Facebook.

So perhaps it’s better to look for a different kind of benefit that stock photographers can pick up through social networking. Todd created his page as a “fun, social thing,” seeing it as a kind of forum that contained some additional cool features. It allowed him to communicate with models and photographers, and bring an interactive element to an otherwise lonely profession which tends to involve shooting objects, editing them on the computer then uploading them to a stock site. As a platform that provides social interaction for self-employed photographers then, Facebook might well have something to offer.

“I work from home. My two dogs don’t say much,” he says. “I find social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and my own blogging efforts to be a nice break from the everyday monotony of my daily workflow.”

Overall then, Todd Arena still recommends that photographers — even stock photographers — create a business page on Facebook. Just don’t spend any of your own money on advertising and don’t expect your posts, comments and pictures to actually produce any sales.

Wedding photography provides plenty of scope for creativity. Although it’s not as free as photographic art — which itself is only as free as collectors and gallery owners allow — it does leave plenty of room for experimentation. So some photographers have long combined the formals with photojournalism while others have gone as far as Trash The Dress photography, a style that takes the bride’s glamour to extremes. But what happens when you add video to your repertoire? How creative can your results become when you think outside your usual boundaries and what effect can the creativity that allows have on your business?

One professional who’s now discovering just what removing a job label can do for his work is Michael Escobar. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Escobar rejects the title “photographer” and offers creative media work that covers photography, videography and even Web design. He’s self-taught in all of those fields so his business should really have failed. It’s hard enough to master one competitive discipline but to cover three and to do it without professional training should be a stretch of ambition too far.

And yet Escobar has not just been in business for the best part of a decade, he’s currently enjoying some impressive exposure generated by a creative approach to a wedding client that made use of his videography skills.

“The Greatest Marriage Proposal Ever!”

His seven-minute footage shows a young woman settling into a cinema seat. The trailer starts but instead of running a preview of a forthcoming attraction, it shows an unidentified man asking another man for permission to marry his daughter. The young woman, whose reaction is seen embedded in the bottom of the video, wonders aloud whether that’s her boyfriend talking to her father. Having received the father’s blessing, the young man is then shown racing to his car and driving to the cinema where we see him — after stopping to buy some popcorn — proposing to the young man and receiving a round of applause from the audience.

Modestly titled “The Greatest Marriage Proposal Ever!” the engagement film has been discussed in outlets from the Washington Post to Time Magazine and has now picked up over 15 million views on YouTube.

The idea for the video came from the client, Matt Still, a former high school classmate of Michael Escobar’s wife.

“He had this elaborate idea to propose and I just brought it to life on the big screen,” explains Escobar.

Still approached the cinema, which loved the idea, agreed to show the footage and allowed Escobar to mount a small camera to the seat in front of Matt’s soon-to-be fiancée, Ginny.

The film itself is moving and funny, and hugely successful — and not just for Still. Ginny, not surprisingly perhaps, said yes and Escobar has been hired to shoot the wedding.  But for photographers looking to make a living photographing wedding clients it also raises interesting questions about the limits they place on their work.

While every wedding job is unique, most tend to be fairly routine, a combination of formals, family shots and candid moments that combine to make the client happy and pay the bills. Photographers who think outside the box and try to make their work a little different though don’t just have the opportunity to enjoy their work more, they can also enjoy more opportunities. For Christian Keenan, for example, a former Asia-based photojournalist who once won a World Press Photo Award (and is one of the photographers featured in our book The Successful Wedding Photographer) that means a career based on telling documentary shots that have made him one of the UK’s most sought after event photographers.

Keenan’s work, which is witty, evocative and unusual, is one example of a photographer standing out with a creative approach that remains within his field. Michael Escobar’s film is similarly unusual and takes him across creative boundaries. But what should photographers consider before they put down their still camera and reach for a video camera in the hope of finding an additional creative outlet?

Should You Shoot Video Too?

The cost will certainly be one factor. Still photography equipment is expensive enough and while much of your gear can serve a double-use, you can expect to be laying out more money on video equipment instead of adding to your studio tools. Escobar notes how surprised he was after buying his first camera when he discovered how much time and money he would have to invest to offer photography as a service. Move into videography and you’ll have a load of new expenses covering everything from hardware to software.

And there’s a new learning curve to overcome as well. Although some of the approaches used by still photographers can help them to become excellent videographers, there are some important differences between freezing a moment at an event and documenting it.

“Photography requires certain equipment and skill sets and video requires a completely different set of equipment and skill sets,” says Escobar. “However someone in photography would have great advantage over someone who isn’t because there are principles that apply to both.”

Michael Escobar though is unusual. Most photographers find that they prefer to specialize in one field rather than spread their skill sets, their training, their equipment budgets and their marketing across multiple fields. And not all have the desire, let alone the talent, to be filmmakers as well as photographers. But for those who are interested in stepping beyond the traditional distinctions between creators of still images and producers of video imagery, there are plenty of opportunities to be had — both in terms of the jobs themselves and the new creative outlets those jobs deliver.

“It is really up to the individual and what they want to do and if they want to take the time to make both their business,” says Escobar. “Understand what you are getting into… but if it is something you love and want to do, it is possible.”

Today’s photographers no longer need to learn darkroom skills or bone up on the different kinds of chemicals they’ll be pouring into trays, but they do need to pick up a wide variety of skills that have little to do with image-making. They need to understand the difference between RAW and Jpeg image formats. They have to  learn how to edit in Photoshop. And, toughest of all, they have to figure out how to market a website. While a plethora of portfolio sites now make the website-building relatively simple, bringing visitors into that site when there are so many alternatives available on the Web is a challenge as tough as capturing a bride’s beauty in dim light when she’s sobbing into her bouquet. One solution might be to team up with other photographers and hope that the crowd attracts clients.

That, at least, is the hope of Behance, a company aiming to bring together creative professionals from fields ranging from animation and architecture to Web design and woodworking. While the firm isn’t giving out membership numbers, according to Community Manager Sarah Rapp, photography is one of its “top creative fields.” The company has even launched a stand-alone product at Photography Served to help art directors and image buyers to find the right talent for their campaigns. For Rapp, the mass appeal of a service like Behance’s is the only way for creative professionals to effectively market themselves.

“The era of the static portfolio is over,” says Rapp. “While creatives can (and do) create their own isolated websites, having a static website like this is not effective – it will be just be one of millions of webpages, with very little opportunity of being ‘stumbled upon.’ By using a connected platform like Behance, there are dozens of ways your work and portfolio can be discovered. In the digital age, it’s essential to use these tools to market yourself with little effort, but much effectiveness.”

Want to Shoot for Apple?

It might just be working, at least for some contributors. Success stories quoted on the site include an illustrator who uploaded a personal project of cartoon supervillains. He soon found himself selling prints and talking to the creative director of a small design studio, which later hired him. Visitors to the network are said to include R/GA, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Apple, and JWT, clients large enough to make any advertising photographer happy. Portfolios placed on Behance are also shared across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, further increasing exposure — and improving the chance of finding work. And the site even operates a job board, allowing design companies to advertise positions. (Although most vacancies appear to be for designers and developers rather than photographers.)

Clearly, for art directors the ability to browse multiple portfolios in one place in a set format is always going to be preferable to searching the Web for appropriate talent. But a site whose goal is to make things simple for the creative industry has also managed to add a few layers of complexity.

In addition to its portfolio services, Behance also runs The 99%, which offers advice, tips, videos and even an annual conference on making ideas happen, which also happens to be the name of the company’s book. The Action Method is the company’s own productivity system, a kind of Getting Things Done for creative types, complete with Action Journal, Action Circa Notebook and Action Circa Refills (available for $17.50, $34 and $16 respectively.) When it comes to executing revenue-generating ideas, the portfolio company for creatives isn’t short of creativity.

Most intriguingly though, Behance also recommends that its members make use of its recently launched ProSite, a kind of drag-and-drop, template-based website service. Linked with Behance, users can draw their projects down from the platform and place them easily on their ProSite pages.

“The Behance Network is a platform for Creative Professionals to upload their work and host a portfolio,” explains Rapp. “With ProSite, you can create a fully customized online portfolio site, designed however you’d like, synced with your projects on Behance.”

The Static Portfolio is (Not) Over

It’s hard to see the difference between the two beyond ProSite’s unique domain and the Behance platform’s community. Both are methods of displaying work publicly to people who might want to hire you. More importantly, it’s hard to see too why a photographer would want to join ProSite if, as Rapp says, the “era of the static portfolio is over.”

Using ProSite to create a branded site however, Rapp argues, will take a “professional portfolio to a new level.” She recommends printing the custom URL on business cards and using it to refer people interested in your work.

None of that is new, of course, and even Behance’s gallery of creatives has long been superceded, at least for photographers, by PhotoShelter. And like building a website, creating a portfolio on Behance is still only the first step. Asked what members can do to stand out on a platform filled with plenty of other professionals competing for the same jobs, Sarah Rapp offered a long list of recommendations that included categorizing your work by creative field; using tags liberally; joining different networks such as the LinkedIn Network; connecting with other Behance members; and, for the greatest exposure, being featured on the main gallery, something that requires length, a strong concept and a clean presentation.

That sounds like a lot of work. A similar amount of work, in fact, as the kind of effort that photographers need to invest in making sure their website is seen. (And that website isn’t going to be linked to a platform packed with competitors.)

Behance’s platform does provide a useful service. Adding your projects to a platform viewed by the creative industry can only help to win jobs and land new commissions. But like any aspect of the photography business, don’t expect that work to come in without plenty of effort and large investments of time.

Image courtesy: Photowrap

When the Photographer’s Gallery in London closed its doors for refurbishment in September 2010, it opened a new kind of gallery online. Teaming up with Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren, authors of Street Photography Now, a collection of documentary images, the museum is now encouraging the book’s contributors to set enthusiasts weekly photographic challenges, and placing the results in a series of Flickr groups. It’s a year-long strategy that’s allowing for broad participation among the gallery’s supporters, extending the influence of the book and making good use of Flickr. One contributor though, has taken the approach a little further.

Documentary photographer Mimi Mollica followed up his challenge with some personal interaction, commenting on the images directly and guiding the photographers who took part in the exercise. Impressed by the enthusiasm shown by the project’s participants, he was inspired to create a new way of teaching photographic skills to people who want to improve their photography, wherever they may be.

“I felt there was a niche gap where I could teach photography to [people] who cannot afford to travel to exotic places to attend expensive four-day workshops in Cuba or India, and that I could teach photography to anyone even if they would need to carry on with their daily life,” he told us. “I realised that I could increase my income and have fun by running an online photography workshop, with dedication and love and still allow myself and the students to keep our daily routine untouched.”

The first workshop ran for three weeks in March with twelve students who represented a mixture of experience, ability, age and nationality. The course, which costs £500, is made up of three steps. For the first five days, students discuss the assignment together on Flickr and through Skype with Mimi, a rare opportunity for them to interact personally with a professional photographer as they come to understand the sorts of images they should be looking to shoot.

The next nine days or so are dedicated to taking pictures, using a members-only Flickr group as a workspace and individual Skype-based coaching as guidance. Three industry experts are also on-hand to offer their opinions and answer questions. (For the next workshop, due to run in June with the theme “Edges of the City,” Mimi is hoping to recruit  architectural photographer, Helene Binet, Kate Edwards, picture editor of The Guardian Weekend Magazine, and Johanna Neurath, commissioning editor of publishers Thames & Hudson.)

Finally, participants work on selecting their best images and improve their editing and presentation skills. The finished images are displayed on the workshop’s website, Photowrap.org, where the results of the last workshop are already visible.

Lots of Cameras, Few Photographers

The aims of the workshop include learning “how to observe,” “how to ‘read’ a photograph,” “how to work ethically and be faithful to your vision,” and “how to edit your work and present it to agencies and possible clients,” as well as the importance of basic concepts like light, exposure and composition. It also solves a couple of other problems though and makes use of a growing opportunity.

While camera technology has become both cheaper and smarter, putting an 8 megapixel lens on an Android smartphone or the latest consumer DSLR within financial reach, the same isn’t true of the public’s photographic eye. Camera owners often have little idea how to operate their state-of-the-art equipment or how to shoot impressive pictures. There’s a growing gap between ability and accessibility. The average level of the students who took Mimi’s workshop was, he said, “reasonably low” — at least when they started.

“Everyone has a camera now, but not a lot of people know what photography is about,” says Mimi. “Nowadays there are millions of self-defined photographers, but few of them realise the true potential of the medium.”

That leaves benefits available to knowledgeable photographers willing to help camera  owners realize that potential. The benefits aren’t new. Former Baltimore Sun photographer David Hobby has managed to create a second career out of teaching enthusiasts about lighting on his Strobist blog, even as the newspaper industry cuts staff positions. And professionals have long met hobbyists in exotic locations to teach them how to photograph mountains, lions and volcanoes.

But those real-life, location-based workshops are themselves problematic, argues Mimi, who has turned down several offers to teach in person. They allow photographers to enjoy a vacation but do little to improve photographic skills or help a photographer find their place in the environment and shoot images that are meaningful to them, he says. What he calls “zoo-safari workshops” in which photographers meet in one place and are expected to take pictures of real life

“are useless and damaging for the local reality that they are photographing in that there would be an implicit exploitation of a given surrounding, whether that’s an African village, or a London street market.”

Photowrap gives students the freedom to roam sites where they feel comfortable and removes the sense of competition that comes from having multiple photographers in one location, he says.

Online Workshops Are Good for Students and Teachers

An online workshop then might have real advantages over the usual lessons in which students arrive en masse to see who can shoot the best picture of the same scene. It allows students with day jobs, children and inflexible hours the freedom to improve their photographic eye without changing their schedule. It lets them learn from professional photographers wherever those photographers might be and wherever they might be.

But the biggest advantage is what an online workshop can do for a knowledgeable photographer. Mimi might have an ideological opposition to location-based workshops — even though the participants may well enjoy them, if mostly as vacations — but while they can be enjoyable for the photographer too, a long trip can also be an inconvenience. Giving tuition through a website, Skype and Flickr can be a lot easier, bring in a broader mixture of students and still generating a useful additional revenue stream to supplement sales and commissions.

Image: Courtesy PhotographersDirect

Stock photographers are being squeezed from two directions. From below, microstock images are providing a mass of low-cost competition and changing the perception of the value of an image in the eyes of buyers. From above, a small group of large stock companies have the power to determine market prices and typically to take as much as 70 percent of the fees paid by a buyer for a photo. It might not be quite as bad as coffee growing in Ethiopia but to a stock photographer looking to make a living out of his or her images, the current market conditions can make them feel equally powerless. They can’t set their own fees and they’re forced to pay a large chunk of the value of their work to middlemen. That’s a situation that Photographers Direct, a stock site, is trying to solve by using a sales model adapted from the Fair Trade movement.

The service was launched nine years ago, initially as a picture search that passed on requests from photo buyers to photographers. That service still exists, and the company also accepts commissions for its photographers, but its main product is now a searchable database of over 2 million stock images. Those images have come from over 15,000 photographers of which 5,000 are currently active in more than 100 countries. The site generates  more than 1.8 million page views a month.

Prices for licenses can vary. The average price paid is $200 but four-figure fees aren’t unusual and some buyers on the site have paid as much as $5,000 for a single usage license. To purchase an image, buyers usually contact the photographer and either ask for a quote based on their planned usage or describe their budget.

“Offers won’t generally be rejected by a photographer,” says Chris Barton, a Canadia-based travel photographer and Photographers Direct’s founder. “Instead, if they feel the price is too low, they will try to negotiate a price and terms of use which are agreeable to both parties.”

It’s Not About the Money

In comparison to the off-shelf purchases of other sites, that’s all a bit slow and clumsy, and the site is introducing an automated pricing system based on PhotoDeck. But the photographers are always free to set their own prices instead of having them dictated by the agency, and the agency itself is taking only a 20  percent cut.

That’s a rate well below the usual market rate taken by other agencies.

“Photographers Direct is not about making the most money we can,” explains Chris Barton.  “It is about doing the right thing for our photographers.”

The site, though, isn’t about doing the right thing for all photographers. Images have to be approved before they’re added to the database, and all of Photographers Direct’s contributors are professionals with the industry knowledge necessary to negotiate usage rights and deliver high res images in the formats and sizes needed.

Most importantly, a further condition of joining Photographers Direct is that the photographer does not currently have any images sitting on offer at any microstock site.

“Photographers providing images to microstock sites have damaged the earning potential of all photographers, and allowing those same photographers to join Photographers Direct would only dilute our photographers’ earnings further,” says Chris Barton.

The site, in fact, preserves special criticism for microstock sites, arguing that many new picture buyers now see the low prices and open licenses as the norm, and  fail to recognize that those fees do not cover the cost of equipment and production. They also encourage the production of low quality, “generic” images that are flexible enough to be sold many times — the only way to make any kind of income from microstock, says Chris.

Interestingly though, it’s not the prices themselves that bother Chris Barton, whose own images have been used by The Wall Street Journal, Readers Digest, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Thomas Cook and many others, but the low pricing combined with the open licenses. Microstock, he argues, can fill a need in the market, particularly for blogs and small businesses,  but when the same image can be used endlessly and for the same low fee, even when it’s being used on the cover of Time magazine, the system, he says, has a fatal flaw, and one that’s harming professional photographers.

The Growing Gap Between Microstock and Professional Stock

Certainly, it’s easy to see the benefit to a photographer of a system like Photographers Direct which offers all of the advantages of a stock agency but with an exceptionally low commission and the ability to set your own prices. But it’s harder to see how microstock images compete with these images. When microstock photographers produce images of “the lowest common denominator” they widen the gap between the quality of budget pictures and the excellence of the kind of images offered by the professionals on Photographers Direct. Chris Barton asks why Time magazine would pay more when a cover image is available for only $30 but very few of the images being offered for $30 are worthy of being Time covers. Usually, publications still pay the full price demanded by the market because low-priced suppliers can’t produce images of a high enough quality.

The question though is whether buyers will continue paying those prices through agencies. Photographers Direct doesn’t just provide a new pricing model, it also represents a new marketing model. The site’s new system allows photographers to  upload their high res images to PhotoDeck, set their prices and links them to their Photographers Direct account. Photographers can indicate which licenses are available and allow buyers to download once a purchase has been made. The only role left for the agency will be to put the pictures in front of buyers, says Chris.

“[A]nd that role is being threatened from a number of different directions and by game-changing technologies, which will, I believe, eventually make most traditional agencies obsolete.”

A photography stock market with no middle men at all. That really would be a revolutionary change.

Photography: Richard Keech

The usual reward that comes from creating photographic art is the praise the images generate from friends and family. Images of beauty shot from the heart might be the most satisfying kinds of photographs to take, but they’re rarely the easiest to sell. Galleries are choosy and private buyers hard to reach but there are a few options available for photographers with an eye for beauty and an enthusiasm to market their work.

The rise of RedBubble over the last three years has provided one particularly useful channel. The site launched in 2007 and picked up more than 80,000 members in its first year. Sales of art made through the site topped $1.2 million that year, of which photography, in the form of calendars, cards and prints, contributed around 40 percent. Images on t-shirts might even have added more to photography’s contribution to the site but RedBubble offers fewer other forms of products on which to place its sellers’ artworks.

“We don’t see ourselves as just a print-on-demand service,” the site’s founder Martin Hosking told us at the end of 2008, “but as an art site, which means that we don’t promote things like mousepads or a service of getting your dog’s photo on a mug.”

That emphasis on artistry rather than commercialism has helped RedBubble to stand out, and it does appear now that contributors are understanding the difference between the various options available, offering different kinds of products through different sites to match different markets.

DeviantArt is Dark and Moody

Richard Keech is a former chef who turned towards professional photography three years ago. An Australian now based in London, he mostly shoots nature images, macros and landscapes, but has been expanding lately to people, fine art and fashion. He joined RedBubble in March 2009, offering images that are rich in color, atmosphere and natural beauty. His most popular image, he says, is a shot of a water droplet on bottlebrush, although his photograph of a Gay Pride flag waved at a Sydney Mardi Gras also sells well.

RedBubble though is just one of the online sales channels that Richard uses. He also shares his work through Picasa and Flickr, and sells his images on Zazzle and Cafepress, two sites that cater to a broader range of products with more commercial imagery, and puts his artistic pieces on DeviantArt.

“On RedBubble, I’ll offer works that are more fine art style,” he explains. “On Deviant, I’ll go with darker pieces and for Zazzle I try to match the images with the types of products: dark, moody shots don’t really go well on fun upbeat products.”

Understanding the differences between the sites, and choosing the right images to match the products and their buyers is perhaps the easiest challenge of selling art photos online. A tougher problem is that none of the sites that Richard uses promote the photographers. Their own marketing is focused on promoting the site as a whole; each contributor has to find their own way to push their product and generate leads.

Richard does a number of things to put his work in front of potential buyers. He includes links in his email signature to his website, his RedBubble store, his Facebook page and his Twitter stream, which runs a daily featured picture. He also uses RedBubble to print business and thank you cards which he uses whenever he needs to send a note. The cards include his RedBubble URL printed on the back.

Art That Sells Itself

Of those strategies, he says, Facebook and Twitter are the most effective although the current lack of Google Analytics integration makes tracking results difficult. RedBubble also supplies a selection of Facebook widgets, website banners and buttons that make it easy to send users from your own site to the RedBubble store. Richard’s website has a links page that includes a slide show of his works, powered by RedBubble.

Ultimately, of course, it’s the quality of the imagery and its ability to connect with an audience that will most determine sales. Richard admits that he has done little marketing and also concedes that despite matching his images to his channels, his art may not be the most sellable or appeal to the widest market.

“Others I know sell several hundred of pounds of images each month without doing much marketing but then their art has a much wider market appeal and tends to sell itself.”

And price may be a factor too. Like other platforms, RedBubble gives contributors a base price for the printing, packing and shipping then leaves it to the sellers to add their own mark-up. That leaves photographers with the difficult question of estimating the value of their artistry to someone willing to pay for it. With fees offline ranging from single figures to millions, comparisons provide little guidance.

The top-selling works on RedBubble tend to range between $91 and $152 for an 11.2 x 8.0 inch print. Richard’s own prints sell for $152 and his cards start at $3.99 which puts him at the higher end (although not as high as this $835.99 demand). It’s possible then that he’s overpricing, something that he could only test by lowering his margins. The average mark-up tends to be around 40 percent, with higher fees demanded by the better sellers.

RedBubble’s attempt to allow photographers to sell work that’s artistic rather than commercial has made it a valuable addition to photographers’ marketing toolbox, however much effort they have to invest in selecting their images, pricing them and promoting them. But the site also offers another advantage. It brings a community, much like Flickr. RedBubble members invite each other to comment on their works, organize meet-ups, discuss marketing techniques and even put together photo walks.

Even if you don’t manage to make a decent number of sales then, RedBubble will at least let you win praise for your art from your peers — as well as your friends and family.

In January 2010, photographer Carlos Santos was commissioned to conduct an editorial shoot in Berlin. He contacted a local model agency, hired the models, prepared his equipment and planned the shoot. But the project was low budget and there was no room for the additional fees that would have been demanded by a location agency. Even as he boarded the plane, Carlos had no idea where in the city he would be taking the pictures. Recommendations from a local photographer eventually led  him to three suitable sites, but it still took him two days to pin down all of the permissions he needed, bureaucracy that would have been better handled before he left.

That experience of preparing a low budget shoot in an unfamiliar location led Carlos to establish an online forum on which location owners around the world could offer their sites directly to photographers. Instead of going through an expensive agency, photographers would be able to use a community resource where they could comment on photos, provide testimonials, score ratings and even moderate locations.

“We Want All the Locations in the World”

In the three months since its launch, GetLocations has picked up more than 240 sites in over 30 countries. The venues include vacation homes and bars, art galleries, pools, apartments and some of the best studios in the world, including that of Hasselblad in the UK.  Photographers have even been contributing a number of free public locations, sharing knowledge that enables them to create great images at little expense.

“We want Getlocations.com to become number one when searching locations to shoot,” says Carlos. “Our goal is that within five  years all places of the world where you can photograph and film are listed by us. I know it’s a great goal but we are committed to achieving it.”

The site has been designed to enable photographers and property owners to communicate directly and without passing through GetLocations itself. While that makes it simple for the two sides to negotiate, it does mean that GetLocations has no way of tracking exactly how many venues photographers have hired through the site. Based on the volume of visits and query data however, Carlos claims that “a lot” of property owners and photographers are already striking deals.

Prices vary broadly and not all venues list their fees, inviting photographers to call and inquire instead. Some locations state that they’re willing to provide space in return for nothing more than a credit and a copy of the image used; others are charging as much as $1,750 a day (although prices for many venues can also be set by the hour.) By way of comparison, Shoot Factory, a UK-based location agency, tells property owners that they can expect to receive between £500 and £1,000 a day for a photo shoot — more for film, and presumably more for the photographer who has to pay the commission.

“We have many different options,” says Carlos. “It’s really not possible to establish a standard price. We like that way. Diversity is the key.”

Rent out Your Studio

One of the more surprising consequences of launching GetLocations though has been the number of photographers not just looking for locations in which to hold shoots but offering their own studios for other photographers to use. They enroll as members, explains Carlos, enjoy the service and realize that some of the money they’ve invested in their own locations can be recouped in the same way that other property owners are doing. Their studios come equipped and the photographers themselves are often experts in certain fields of photography, providing a source of advice for enthusiasts using a professional studio to improve their skills.

Estimating a rate to charge won’t be easy though. Large, well-equipped studios will be able to charge more than small home studios, and privacy and light equipment are likely to be essential.

“Everything depends on the project,” says Carlos. “The most important thing is being honest with the customer and set[ting] a price according to the investment.”

GetLocations does appear to offer a new kind of opportunity then that may be particularly valuable for professional photographers who own studios with continuous maintenance fees but which have occasional use. In addition to earning from their images and selling their knowledge through workshops, photographers can now rent out their space and their lighting rigs, providing one more revenue source.

But location agencies tend to offer beautiful homes and unusual vistas rather than location alone. The Shoot Factory’s  listings include football clubs, basements, barber shops and log houses. Those are venues that provide more than just space; they also supply the kind of atmosphere and appearance that suits a specialized shoot. GetLocations’s current emphasis on studio rentals may be limiting to a photographer who needs a shoot to have a particular style —urban, rural, luxurious, etc. And offering a studio space alone may bring in responses from local photographers who need room for a one-off job but may be less likely to pull in assignment photographers looking for unique sites to suit the art direction.

And when the owner of a studio that has nothing to offer but white walls and big lights does win a hire from another photographer, the job is likely to generate two questions: how much can they charge; and why didn’t they win the job from the client in the first place? After all, they could have even supplied the studio.

It’s early though for GetLocations. With new venues being added at a rate of more than two a day, and with the site open to submissions of every possible location from garages and gardens to waterfalls and mountains, it’s clear that there is an opportunity for property owners and photographers to come together, cut out the middle man and match sites with a professional need. That will just leave the bureaucracy of payments, insurance, damage assessment and equipment to arrange — but at least they can all be done in the days before the flight, leaving the photographer to focus on the models, the shoot and the pictures.

Photography: Roman Schmitz

Among the sixty-plus courses taught at the Perfect Picture School of Photography (PPSOP) is a four-week class called The Art of Seeing. The class, which is listed in the “beginner/intermediate” category, aims to sharpen a photographer’s eye, and help him or her see what others miss. It’s taught by freelance photographer Chris Hurtt together with the school’s founder, Bryan Peterson. Being able to see an image in a line of sight is certainly essential for any creative photography, but Bryan’s success as an entrepreneur (as well as a photographer) isn’t just down to his ability to spot a potential picture in the mundane. His success also owes much to his ability to spot opportunities to put his knowledge to work in a way that others have overlooked – and that’s just as valuable a lesson for any photographer to learn.

Some of Bryan’s vision may be down to his entry into the world of photography, which began more than 30 years ago. As an artist, he complained to his brother, a photographer, that pen and ink drawings required spending large amounts of time on location. His brother suggested photographing the site then drawing the scene after he returned home. Peterson took a camera, developed his first image, and was hooked. That was back in the 1970s and he hasn’t picked up a pencil since, building a photography career instead that has seen him shoot for clients as large as American Express, BP, Kodak and Micrsosoft, and landed him the New York Art Directors Gold Award.

Photography Answers from Halfway Around the World

When he wasn’t shooting though, Bryan was also teaching, putting on workshops to teach other rising photographers how to use their cameras, and writing a series of books on photography technique. In 2006, he launched PPSOP, a photography school that holds all of its classes online.

“Over the years I thoroughly enjoyed connecting with people in person when teaching workshops, and with the internet growing it was just a natural evolution – a new way to connect with people,” Bryan told us by email between assignments in Singapore and Australia. “The fact that people can upload an image, ask what went wrong, and get an answer about that specific image from an instructor that might be halfway around the world is still something I find amazing.”

Classes are held over a period that ranges from four to eight weeks. Students are given a lesson that they can download, and provided with an assignment that they can complete over the weekend. They upload their image to the class and receive critiques from the professional instructors, and comments from students. A question and answer section provides a forum in which students can ask teachers about technique or other problems, and students are free to contribute to the discussion too. According to Bryan, the forums can become lively spaces in which participants don’t just offer advice but form friendships too, despite the distance. A number of students have organized their own photography adventures to put their new knowledge to use.

That the lessons are held online also gives the classes a varied mixture of backgrounds. Ages range from high school students to pensioners, and registrations for the January sessions have come from some seventeen different countries. The school’s Chinese webmaster has even created a local version of the site to cope with that country’s growing market of photography enthusiasts.

“Our classrooms are as diverse as passport control at any large international airport,” says Bryan.

Prices for the class range from $195 for a four-week course to $395 for an eight-week course, a not insignificant sum, especially for a high school student — and especially for an online course. Participation from other students around the world, and even regular assignments and critiques can be picked up for free at plenty of photography websites, not least Flickr. There are no shortage of groups that work in a similar way: choosing subjects, sending photographers off to complete challenges then letting everyone weigh in on the results. The difference though, apart from the price, is the input from a professional instructor, and the ability to send that instructor a question (and be confident of receiving a professional response).

Trust is Everything

It’s the trust in the quality of the knowledge that students receive that persuades them to pay for classes, and the ability to work with a teacher who has proven expertise.

“What we are told over and over is that the interaction with the instructor is invaluable,” says Bryan. “We are fast to respond and genuinely want to help people achieve whatever goals they have relating to photography…. There are a lot of choices out there and many of our students have tried them out — and after a course with us they let us know they finally found what they are looking for.”

If spotting the demand for a photography school that combined the ease of online access with the trusted quality of a real workshop was sharp, the real challenge was turning that vision into something that worked. Bryan had no experience of building a website and found the terms that the programmers he hired were using as alien as talk of f/numbers are to new photographers. His former students then became a resource upon which he could draw. Among his own workshop participants were programmers and database administrators whom Bryan asked for help. Building the site was difficult but it worked out well in the end, he says.

So what can other photographers learn from Bryan’s own experience? To shoot often, certainly — Bryan’s advice for turning photography technique into second nature. But if you want to teach your photography knowledge online, to have a passion for sharing knowledge, an ability to connect through email, and the candidness and personality that helps students connect to their teachers.

If you can see an opportunity there to expand a photography business beyond the images you create — and do it without leaving your computer — you might well have spotted something valuable.

Photography: L.C. Nøttaasen

Flickr isn’t the only photo-sharing site that’s been cosying up to stock companies this year. Back in June, Angelo Sotira, the co-founder and CEO of art community deviantART, wrote on his blog that “most of the players” in commercial stock had been in touch with him. deviantART, he noted, had a population of “hundreds of thousands of professional artists” who needed “dependable access to assets that have uniform permissions and contracts.” It also had “thousands of artists who might want to participate in selling stock to a larger user base than the artists on deviantART.” As a result, he had been looking for a way to add a stock offering to the site in  a way that matched its unique culture.

That couldn’t have been easy. deviantART has about 14.5 million registered users who have submitted over 140,000,000 works of art. Those works fit into 2,600 different categories, including painting, literature, artisan crafts, and digital arts, as well as photography. While Flickr allows members to upload an entire folder of images to their streams, contributions to deviantART have to be made individually, forcing artists to  think about the work that they share.

“Each user submission to deviantART has a level of intention,” explains Nicole Jordan, a spokesperson for the site. “Users do not dump 120 snapshots from the trip to Hawaii.”

Perhaps most importantly, deviantART operates as a community in which artists are accustomed to sharing works freely on which others can build. Many submissions come with creative commons licenses (although often restricted to works published on deviantART) and some 12,000 members identify themselves as community stock contributors — providers of free raw material to other deviantART artists. It’s not unusual to find a photomanipulation made up of the contributions of as many as ten different members, says Nicole.

The Free Images Stay

One big challenge then was assuring members that any introduction of a paid stock channel would still allow artists to help themselves to a rich inventory of creative commons-licensed works for their own productions.

“Some were nervous at first that we would upset the ‘free’ stock culture now available on deviantART,” says Nicole, “but they since understand that a commercial offering is not intended to get in the way of artists supporting each other.”

Certainly, the announcement in mid-October that deviantART had teamed up with Fotolia should have set most minds at rest. At the moment, the agreement only provides for a branded version of the microstock site, providing an easy way for artists to buy from Fotolia while supporting their favorite artist community — and giving the microstock site access to a large market of image users. The launch of the site however doesn’t allow artists to do anything that they couldn’t have done in the past directly from the stock company’s own site, although they may be able to enjoy some special offers. The choice of Fotolia was deliberate. deviantART spoke to all of the microstock providers, settling on Fotolia in part  because of the company’s international outlook but mostly because it was the only company that saw unique opportunities in working with a community that was more focused on art than commercialism.

“Fotolia understood, and others did not, that having an arts community as a resource enables more people to be interested in stock, more people to use stock to complete their works and more people to try stock who might not have before,” explained Nicole.

The new portal is only the beginning though. A plan to allow members to license their works through Fotolia is now in process and is due for rollout next year. In the meantime, deviantART has created a discussion forum to provide a space for members to express their concerns about the agreement. Most notable among those concerns have been ways to separate licenses for free use by other artists exclusively on deviantART from licenses sold to commercial buyers. An encouraging number of artists have also expressed an enthusiasm for signing up to Fotolia as contributors.

The Differences Between Stock and Art

But once the members of deviantART have finished grappling with the idea of selling their works to commercial buyers without harming their free contributions, they’ll have to come to terms with the differences between the demands of a commercial stock house and the needs of a free-sharing artistic community. When Flickr joined up with Getty, it forced members to license all of their images or none at all, sending a flood of potential new pictures to the stock company. But deviantART has a much smaller library of works, not all of which are photographs and many of which are photomanipulations built on non-commercial creative commons licenses. The inventories increase singly, while stock contributors have to build their portfolios by uploading large numbers of images if they’re to make a reasonable number of sales.

And the kinds of creative images usually shown on deviantART are a long way from the traditional smiling executives and leaping families of microstock.

“What a commercial stock house does and what a liberated free-sharing artist community does are completely different,” wrote Angelo Sotira on his blog. “That’s understood. At the same time, what a commercial stock offering provides – - like money to artists, access to standard use agreements that can be transferred to clients, focused search for items and tracking the people using the content  - – is a package that goes past artist exchanges.”

The real question for deviantART members hoping to earn from their artistic images then isn’t whether there will still be free works available for them to use once their fellow members realize that they can sell their pictures, but whether there’s a commercial demand for the kind of creative works that give them the greatest satisfaction to shoot — and whether they can produce enough of them to make any money.

If there is that demand, and if a microstock company can send back enough money to contributors, then the artists of deviantART may have found a way to support their passion. And Getty will have some real competition.

cover from our new book, Inspired Photography: 189 Sources of Inspiration For Better Photos
Whatever the end result of a photography shoot, whether it’s a bunch of images that pick up comments on Flickr, generate praise from friends and family, or win sales to stock buyers, magazines or even art collectors, all images start from the same place.

They begin with a spark of inspiration.

That inspiration will be different for every photographer. Some photographers will pull their first DSLR out of their box and immediately point it at the flowers in the garden and the leaves on their trees. Others will only be interested in capturing faces, shooting portraits and turning people into works of art that reveal personality and reflect character. For some photographers, it’s city scenes and urban decay that are most likely to have them changing their lenses and playing with aperture settings.

That inspiration, whatever it may be, is the vital element that runs through every great photographer’s career, from the landscapes of Ansel Adams’ images to the male form in the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. But while that initial spark is always natural and instinctive, it’s not always easy to maintain the enthusiasm through years of photography. Once you’ve shot the same scenes or the same subjects in a hundred different ways, once you feel you’ve mastered a technique or entirely got to grips with a style, what do you do next?

Ansel Adams, Photojournalist

While the first spark will happen automatically, future explorations might require a bit of prompting. The right prompts though, can really push photographers in exciting new directions and deliver surprising results. If Ansel Adams hadn’t been moved to take time out of the American wilderness to document life in a Japanese internment camp during the war, for example, we wouldn’t have this powerful collection of documentary images. If Robert Buelteman hadn’t chosen to put down his camera and look only at the images of the natural objects he was photographing, we wouldn’t have this incredible collection of unique Kirlian photographs.

Few photographers though can count on something as dramatic as government internment to provide new photographic ideas and not all photographers know about Kirlian photography, so over the last few months we’ve been putting together a new book describing 189 points of inspiration that photographers can use to start brand new photographic journeys.

The book contains ideas for actions and for styles, for city scenes and for country views, and always for inspiring, exciting photographs. In fact, when it came to the image themselves, we really pushed hard to include as many creative, artistic and original photographs as we could. (It was an exercise that provided a useful insight into the habits of photography buyers, as well as the prices they pay. Photographers might complain, perhaps justifiably, about the low rates charged by microstock firms for the smallest Web-use licenses, but start looking for licenses for top images in sizes big enough for print, and even microstock prices soon start to approach those of traditional stock.)

Hours of Creative Exploration

Each idea includes a summary of the concept itself, a description of some of the different ways a photographer might approach the subject so that they can make their own unique contribution to the form, and directions for further research.

The ideas are as varied as we could make them. Some are simple, such as joining a Flickr group or taking a photography class — both easy ways to pick up ideas and inspiration. Others might require some specialized knowledge or at least the willingness to obtain that knowledge, such as underwater photography or high-speed photography. And while some subjects, such as the night sky or gas stations, can lead to a collection that takes a lifetime to build, other ideas, such as shooting for contests, illustrating poetry or focusing on an antique market, will help to turn a quiet weekend into hours of creative exploration.

Clearly, we don’t expect any photography enthusiast to use every one of the 189 ideas in the book — although trying might be fun. But if it prompts a photographer try even three or four concepts that they might never have considered, if it means that a photographer never looks at his camera and wonders what they should be shooting next, it will have fulfilled a large part of its job.

The rest of the job is up to the photographer.

Unlike our other photography books, Inspired Photography doesn’t offer advice on marketing or sales. Instead of thinking about the last stage of a photograph’s life, the point at which it leaves the photographer and begins a new use in the hands of a buyer, we wanted to look at the beginning of the process: the idea that forms the image.

But that doesn’t mean that the beginning has nothing at all to do with the end. The ideas that inspire photographers the most are also the driving forces that define their look and the shape of their careers.

When commissioning editors examine the portfolios of photographers they’re considering hiring, they don’t just look at the tear sheets and the professional shots. They also look at the photographer’s personal projects because it’s that work that will tell them not just what the photographer has shot in the past but how they think about all of the photography that they’ll do in the future. It reveals their style, their approach and the kind of aesthetic that they’re aiming to reach every time they take a shot. As top microstock photographer Yuri Arcurs told us once, when his buyers need an image, they look for his portfolio because they want a “Yuri Arcurs” photograph.

Before you can create the personal projects that are most likely to inspire a commissioning editor to hire you, before you can settle into producing a line of images that define your brand as a photographer, you first have to know what inspires you the most — and that means trying out different ideas and looking for surprising new directions.

A photographic journey should last a lifetime, and while it might not have a definite destination, every turn and every direction should show you something new. You can find (189) new photographic directions on amazon.

Image courtesy: SmugMug

When Flickr announced its deal with Getty, allowing members to license their images through the stock giant, reactions were mixed. On the one hand, there was a feeling that it was about time. Photographers had been negotiating individual deals with image buyers keen to use their creativity for years but making those agreements was often a slow process that resulted in enthusiasts handing over valuable rights to experienced buyers who knew a bargain when they saw one. Those buyers, too, would often find that sellers disappeared when contacted, lacked model releases or didn’t have the images in the size they needed. Letting Getty sort through the process should make life a lot easier for both sides.

But Flickr photographers can’t yet choose to offer individual images, only their entire collection, and Getty takes 70 percent of the sales price of any image sold. That might be the stock industry standard, and it includes the cost of ensuring all the legal requirements have been fulfilled, but it can look steep if the buyer has come in through the photographer’s own Flickr stream rather than as a result of Getty’s marketing. That’s why some photographers have suggested cutting out the middleman, making clear that their images are for sale under their pictures and treating buyers professionally themselves.

Flickr though, might not be the best place to do that. SmugMug might be.

A Growing Family Business

The site was founded in 2002, some two years before the launch of Flickr, when Chris MacAskill discovered that members of his motorcycle forum were looking for ways to embed images into their posts, something that photo-sharing sites at the time didn’t offer. His son, Don, however, had a gaming network that included a photo-sharing component.

“Everyone we demoed it to asked if they could use it for regular photos,” Chris recalled in an email interview.

With no one willing to provide funds, the father and son team bootstrapped the service by charging photographers $30 per year to host an unlimited number of photos. Early growth was slow  but eight years later, the site has grown to employ 55 staff, including nine family members. It also hosts over a billion photos and receives 15 million unique visitors a month.

The annual fee however has remained, providing one important difference to Flickr, most of whose members use the site for free. SmugMug is free to browse and provides a two-week trial period for contributors, but fees then range from $5 per month to as much as $20 per month (or $150 per year) for Pro membership. What contributors get that for that money (that they can’t receive from Flickr) includes the ability to choose themes for pages, customize their websites and place their SmugMug galleries on their own domains.

More importantly, Pro members can also sell their images not just as prints but as digital downloads. The licensing options are pre-set and consist of just two royalty-free usages: one commercial, and one personal. It was a choice that provides the most simplicity, explains Chris MacAskill.

“RM licenses make customer heads explode and are hard to execute.”

The Fine Line Between Commercial and Personal

That still leaves the photographers with the challenge of pricing their pictures. Members are free to choose whatever price they feel their images are worth and can demand different rates for different image sizes. Buyers too are forced to decide whether the usage they have in mind is commercial or personal. A blogger looking for an image to place on an ad-supported website is likely to feel that a creative commons license that prohibits commercial use will qualify. Not on SmugMug, which expects even ad-supported bloggers to pay commercial license fees to photographers.

According to Chris, about 30 percent of SmugMug’s accounts are “Professional,” the type that can make sales. About a third of those are run by companies and organizations, leaving about 20 percent of SmugMug accounts that are actually owned by professional photographers. The remaining members tend to consist largely of travelers who want to show off pictures of their once-in-a-lifetime trip. Families make up the second largest group, and enthusiasts make up the third group of users.

Chris wouldn’t reveal the value of the sales Pro accounts have generated but says that he’s always surprised in general at the number of photos and prints sold on the Internet.

“Many companies are thriving online who sell prints and gifts, and it’s a higher percentage of our sales every month because one subscriber can sell so many prints.”

The ability to customize galleries and make sales both digitally and in print make SmugMug very different to Flickr — different enough for many of SmugMug’s members to have accounts on both sites. Chris himself often uses Flickr to search for interesting photos but, he notes, the Yahoo-owned site is about discussion rather than display. It’s about getting your pictures “noticed and talked about” while SmugMug provides better customization, privacy and, for professionals, more efficient interaction with customers. Some image protection is also built-in to SmugMug, with right click disabled even on mid-range accounts and custom watermarks and printmarks (that place logos or signatures on prints) available to Pro members.

If the biggest benefit for photographers hoping to make sales is not handing over 70 percent of their revenues to a stock company, there is a challenge to using SmugMug too. Flickr is known for hosting creative, unusual images placed there by enthusiasts. It’s a brand image that attracts buyers looking for photos that are less formal than traditional stock. SmugMug’s brand as a place for photographers to show off their pictures — rather than discuss them with other photographers — means that its members will have to work to attract buyers and sell their pictures, especially if they’re placing them on their own domain. SmugMug might give photographers the tools they need to cut out the middleman but it does mean they have to do the work that middleman is used to doing on its photographers’ behalf.

One of the attractions of the opportunity provided by microstock is that photography enthusiasts can shoot the images they love and make money out of them. It turns a hobby into a passive income generator without putting the photographer through the less pleasant process of having actually to work. In practice, of course, it rarely turns out that way. The most successful microstock photographers treat their contributions with the same seriousness with which a factory owner looks at his outputs. They plan their shoots, think about the costs of creating them and, most importantly, make sure that the images they photograph match the demand among buyers, even if they don’t match entirely the kinds of images they’d want to shoot for fun. To make those kinds of assessments though, photographers need to understand what the market wants.

That’s not always easy to do. While microstock sites are happy to show their most successful photographs, and a few list the most popular searches, matching gaps between demand and supply to spot valuable opportunities is a problem. It’s a problem that picNiche has gone some way towards solving.

Created by Bob Davies, a UK-based software engineer, the site offers a number of free microstock toolbars. The Microstock Image Search toolbar helps buyers to find images across multiple agencies, lets them send image requests directly to contributors, and notifies them when interesting new images are uploaded, among other functions. The Contributors toolbar provides photographers with notifications about sales and approvals, a keywording tool, an FTP-upload drop-box for six agencies, and other solutions too.

Photographers Work Harder than Buyers

The search toolbar is currently used  by about 500 buyers; the contributors toolbar has about 2,500 users. (Usage figures for both toolbars drop at the weekends though when buyer drop-off outpaces that of contributors by 20 percent. Buyers’ Sundays, it seems, are more restful than those of photographers.) The most popular toolbar provided by picNiche however is the newer Ultimate Free Stock Photo Search Tool which looks for free images across more than 200 websites, including many microstock sites’ own promotional collections. That toolbar has about 3,000 users, runs as many as 2,000 searches a day, and has been shown to convert free users to paying buyers.

The idea for the toolbars came three years ago, when Bob left his corporate job to find something that offered more freedom and a reliable passive income, but which also had enough data to make informed decisions about future development. Microstock, with its creativity and open doorway, looked like a suitable choice even though Bob sees himself as a software guy rather than a photographer. Once he’d started shooting, he found that he was frequently refreshing his stats to check sales and monitor the progress of his portfolio. The Contributor’s toolbar was a natural extension of that experience.

“On a dull day I’d waste a lot of time with F5-itis, constantly checking my earnings rather than creating images,” says Bob. “By incorporating my earnings checks it into the browser, any activity on my computer would also be accompanied by the nice little ‘dings’ whenever I made a sale.”

Once he’d added keywording and a dropbox, he started sharing the toolbar as a free plugin for Firefox. The toolbar has proven useful enough, but what Bob really wanted was a way of measuring the gap between image supply and image demand for particular keywords. If he could identify popular niches for which there were relatively few images, then he’d know that shooting those topics would bring an increased chance of sales.

None of the microstock agencies he contacted were willing to share their search data so Bob turned to his toolbars to extrapolate search terms himself. Using a sample set of images, he calculates the average views-per-file and the average downloads-per-file for each searched keyword phrase. The result is a score that shows the probability of an average-quality image selling at least once throughout its lifetime.  A “picNiche rating” of 100, for example, suggests that an image that matches that search term will sell at least once. A rating of 1,000 predicts at least ten definite sales, although once the figures start to reach 3,000 to 5,000 they become less reliable. Enter any term into picNiche and you should be able to see your chances of selling pictures that cover that topic.

The calculations though are only suggestions based on the number of views and downloads received for a keyword entered into picNiche’s toolbars. But as Bob notes, success at microstock depends on more than choosing the right topics.

“That rating… needs to be balanced against common sense and some rational thought. A higher rating does not ‘always’ mean better sales,” he warns, “and you need to be able to judge objectively both the quality of your own work and the time/cost it takes to create/produce.”

The idea though is that better your photography, the lower the picNiche rating you can shoot and still expect to make sales. Bob, who says that he is “not a particularly good photographer,” tends to shoot topics that rate around 75-400.

“If I produced work twice as saleable as the average image, I would produce for topics as low as a 25 rating.”

Buyers are Looking for French Castles

But the figures do appear to work. Bob has about 2,000 photos spread over ten microstock sites, which he describes as “general amateur shots.” The best selling images in his portfolio though are photographs of mobile phones, keys and other items that he shot in response to his picNiche results.

Each month, Bob posts a new cloud of niches that show the most potential. Users can feed these terms into picNiche’s search engine to see the views-per-file, downloads-per-file and ultimately, the ranking. At the moment, some of the biggest opportunities appear to lie in “carryon luggage,” “restaurant dinners” and “corn dog” among others. They’re probably easier to shoot than “French castle” and “tandem bicycle” which also appear in the list. In general, says Bob, the biggest opportunities tend to lie in alternative lifestyles such as gay and lesbian couples, seniors, and of course, ethnic niches. Buyers, he says, are also looking for more naturalistic images of professionals at work — a nurse administering an injection, for example, rather than a woman in a nurse’s outfit — images that might not be easy for a typical microstock enthusiast to capture.

“There are a lot of areas you’re just not going to be able to compete without thousands of pounds of equipment and a perfect eye,” Bob warns. “In all honesty, if  you want to really earn from microstock now, you’re going to have to work hard at it.”

Photography: Duncan

What you shoot will always define your reputation as a photographer. When it comes to generating respect and interest in your work though, what you say to other photographers about the images they shoot is no less important. Picking up an audience for your work on Flickr, for example, has always involved taking the time to view other people’s images and leave notes of admiration in the expectation that the photographer would reciprocate. As those photographers become contacts, awareness of your photography starts to grow as does the audience — and eventually buyers become aware of your work too. It’s a benefit that’s not been lost on Flickr members and the result is that images posted by any reasonably popular photographer quickly pick up fake awards, invitations to group submissions, and congratulations expressed in the form of “good capture” comments.

Those are exactly the sort of comments though that contributors are most likely to ignore. Words of admiration can be encouraging, and certainly plenty of budding photographers have been moved enough by the reactions their images have generated to put more time and effort into their photography. But what’s most likely to attract the attention of a popular photographer is not telling them that the photograph is good but actually talking about it. Contributors want to know what precisely the viewer liked about the picture and they want an opportunity to discuss it. There are a few ways that you can do that.

The easiest is to ask how they shot it. Although some pictures will be relatively straightforward, many will require a particular knowledge of lighting and technique without which the image can’t be created. Sharing the picture is a way for the photographer demonstrate their skill as well as their creativity and the comments are an opportunity for them to explain exactly what they did. An intelligent question about a photographer’s working method then is more likely to generate a response from the photographer than a quick compliment.

Make Comparisons

When Strobist blogger David Hobby, for example, posted this picture of his daughter reading in bed, the light apparently coming from the pages of the book, the photo generated over 10,000 views, 49 comments and 95 favorites. Most of those comments said little more than “excellent shot,” “great lighting” or “awesome.” It was only when “Squilky” noticed an error in the image’s technical description, questioning the choice of F2 at 1/60ths of a second and asking if the flash was diffused, that David Hobby himself entered the comments to make a correction. It was a question that went straight to the topic of the picture and demonstrated that the questioner was knowledgeable, astute and appreciative. It’s the kind of question that would make the photographer want to learn more about the questioner.

A question can make an effective comment because it invites the contributor to share knowledge. An even more effective comment is to share information that you know and which the photographer lacks. This David Hobby photograph of six photographers shooting a celebrity, for example, generated more than 33,000 views and 41 comments. With six photographers’ flashes synced and included in the photograph, it’s not surprising that many of those comments asked him how he had done it. One comment that attracted David Hobby’s attention offered an accurate suggestion but more importantly, it also told him that a couple of publications had recently run similar images. David Hobby then asked a question himself, enquiring where he could see those pictures.

For David Hobby, posting the picture hasn’t just allowed him to demonstrate his skills, and answering questions hasn’t only enabled him to share some information.  It’s also given him some helpful new knowledge — and introduced him to a photographer with an understanding of photography and a photographic education that can benefit him too.

It’s certainly a lot more effective than offering another pat on the back.

What Do You Think of This?

Comments though don’t have to be only questions and answers about the way a particular image was made. Some of the most interesting comments are those that develop from a note about the photograph to a fully-fledged debate about photography in general.  Rebekka Gudsleifdottir’s photo of her niece tucking into an oversized slice of cake and a giant glass of milk picked up a remarkable 258 comments. As usual, many of those were acclamations and group invitations. Plenty of other comments though were questions about whether Rebekka had used Photoshop to resize the props, enough to make her add a note in her description that she had used “real, oversized props.”

It was when “werdan” wondered

when we’ll cross the line that it is no longer worth doing oddities like this ‘in camera’ because everyone will just think that it’s ‘shopped’ anyway which was the simpler alternative to begin with. Or perhaps we have already crossed that line.

that Rebekka chimed in with her own comment, one of many contributions to the discussion her picture generated:

@Werdan: I think the line has apparently been crossed, where the majority if people now assume everything is PS’d, even things that are relatively simple to create for real…

Regardless of others oppinions on the matter, i myself will stubbornly stick with creating things and shooting them as is, rather than painstakingly create them with aid of computer. It just doesn’t float my boat..

When a comment goes beyond praise for the execution to touch on the subjects that inspired the photographer, then the commenter always has a chance of attracting attention and engaging in conversation with a photographer he or she admires.

There are no solid rules about posting comments that lead to return views, reactions and new contacts — except for one: be respectful and polite. Browsing photographer comments both on Flickr and on websites tends to be a pretty happy affair but that’s not true of all websites or all occasions. A bad picture won’t kill a photographer’s reputation — their skill can always improve — but a bad comment certainly will.

Photography: Photos8.com

You’d think that microstock companies have nothing to worry about. This time last year, iStockPhoto was predicting revenues of about $200 million — and that after Getty had bought the company just three years earlier for $50 million. Six months ago, Fotolia announced that it had 8 million images available, and as companies battle for plug-in space on the ribbons in Microsoft Office 2010, these hardly look like difficult times for the low-cost image industry. And yet something does some to be bothering the stock world as a whole. It’s a threat so large that Getty, Shutterstock, PACA (Picture Archive Council of America) and BAPLA (British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies) have all teamed up to fight it together.

They’ve launched StockPhotoRights.com, a website intended to educate image buyers about the rights issues associated with photography. According to Shutterstock:

“Stockphotorights.com is an educational resource which unravels the complexities and exposes the potential legal pitfalls of image use. It is intended to provide image users with information and advice so they can purchase and use images with confidence.”

In fact, the site has the exact opposite aim: it’s intended to undermine the confidence that images users feel when they help themselves to photographs that they haven’t paid for or which are licensed directly from the photographer. And there may be good reason to do so.

Four Kinds of Rights Owners

A survey by Redshift Research of 1,200 new and established image users in the US and the UK involved in sourcing stock imagery, and released with the launch of StockPhotoRights’ website, revealed that almost 45 percent of respondents were unaware that they could face a legal claim relating to an image they’d used. That’s true even if they’d paid for a license.

The threat, if the image has been paid for, doesn’t come from the photographer – the more usual source of trouble when images are taken without permission. But it might come from the owners of three other rights in the picture, those related to models, trademarks, and designs. Buy an image that contains a recognizable individual, for example, and if that person complains, the image user would be liable even if they’ve bought the picture from a photographer. The same is true of a business whose logo appears in a photo, and even of a product that’s easily identifiable and the main subject of the picture. Shutterstock, for example, not only refuses images of people without model releases, it would also not approve an image for commercial use that shows an isolated, identifiable car in case the auto-maker complained about the final usage. It may however accept “generic-looking” objects, including those that have been digitally altered to remove logos.

Those multiple rights issues are a concern for image users licensing some photos directly from photographers. They’re also a problem for photographers selling certain types of pictures through their websites or on Flickr. They need to make sure that they have model releases for the people in their images and that they’ve removed any commercial logos.

Forty-Four Percent of Image Users Source from Google

But direct sales like these are rare in comparison to the large numbers of licenses sold each day by stock companies. A much larger threat to the growth of the stock industry comes not from individual photographers but from images stolen from search engines and photos licensed as Creative Commons. According to Redshift Research’s survey, an incredible 44 percent of small business decision makers admitted sourcing their images from Google Images. The survey didn’t make clear whether those images were used as specs for internal purposes or actually placed in commercial publications (although it did indicate that the 22 percent of image users who license images from photo-sharing sites use them commercially) but it does suggest a real problem among image users who fail to understand that a photographer owns the rights to an image that appears in Google — and that others may own the rights to elements within the photo.

And, of course, it’s an important sales point for stock companies whose prices include indemnification against legal complaints, and which employ selectors to filter out potentially problematic compositions. According to Shutterstock, one of the main reasons the site has been successful is that it can stand behind its images and provides signed model releases when necessary.

If the aim is to persuade image users to pay for that indemnification though, it’s hard to say how much a site like StockPhotoRights will help. The site’s case studies focus in part on illustrating the kinds of issues that could face bloggers and website owners, but it’s those small users who are also the ones who feel the most immune. The chances that someone would spot their picture on a blog or that BMW would sue a small blogger for using a picture of one of their cars are pretty small. Even when photographers themselves complain about illegitimate image use, the response is more likely to be an apology and a quick change of image than a willingness to cough up money for a stock photo.

In fact, one of the few instances of a law suit described in StockPhotoRights’ news section links to a case brought by a Greek man against a Swedish company that used a picture of him to sell Turkish-style yoghurt. He’s claiming a frightening $6.9m in damages. Unfortunately for StockPhotoRights, the dairy company’s defense is that they bought the image from a photo agency.

Small photo users, the ones most likely to use legally questionable images, may be put off stealing images or licensing photos that don’t come with all of the necessary permissions, but only if they see other users like them facing lawsuits. Until then, the stock world, photographers and other rights holders will struggle with breached rights in the same way that the music industry has struggled. A better target for education then may be not users but photographers. Even if the publisher is liable for the way an image is used, and not the photographer, few sellers want to face complaints from their customers. If you’re selling your images yourself or making them available with Creative Commons licenses, you need to make sure you’re not offering pictures for commercial use with rights issues.

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: WisDoc

The usual order for shooting travel photos is to go somewhere far away then take some beautiful pictures. A competition currently under way at Shutterstock is trying to reverse the order: submit your best travel image and they’ll send the winner (plus one) to South Africa. They’ll enjoy three nights on safari and another three nights exploring Cape Town. The prize doesn’t include plane tickets but it does include $2,000 to pay for them, good enough for someone based in the United States to which the competition is limited. It’s a nice reward for shooting a great vacation photo, and with entries so far numbering in the hundreds rather than the thousands, the odds for photographers with an eye for an exotic landscape aren’t terrible. (Although Felicia Morton, a Shutterstock spokesperson, says that she expects many more entries closer to the May 12 deadline.) Photographers can only enter one image but they retain copyright over it and it won’t become part of Shutterstock, although it may be used to promote the competition.

The judges, photographers Zack Arias, David duChemin and Chase Jarvis, are looking for pictures that are creative, striking and artistic. They’ll review 100 of the best photos chosen by popular vote — a chance for popular photographers to improve their odds, and for the competition to benefit from a little viral marketing as entrants send their pals to the voting page.

“We aren’t looking for specific kinds of travel images for this contest, just ones that are inspiring and creative,” says Felicia. “Every photograph that makes it to the final round will be judged on its unique attributes, its technical quality, its artistic value, and how well it represents the theme of travel.”

Who Wants a Picture of a Japanese Keep?

That makes them at least a little different to the kinds of travel images that sell best on stock sites. Shutterstock has over half a million photos tagged with the keyword “travel” and they include sites that range from the Eiffel Tower to Matsumoto Castle. But however innovative and beautifully shot, those kinds of photos aren’t necessarily the type that buyers want in large amounts. There will only be so much demand, after all, for a photograph of a sixteenth century Japanese keep. Arrange the travel images on Shutterstock by popularity and the first image offered is a shot of an old suitcase covered in travel stickers that looks like it was created in a studio rather captured in the field. The next most popular image is a montage of a plane and a road for which the photographer needn’t have traveled further than the airport departure lounge before rushing back to his image editing suite. And the third most popular travel image is… well, the same idea.

In fact, you have to look past about fifteen generic images of beaches, bags, planes and backpackers before you reach the first photograph of a specific place, a boat in Maya Bay, Thailand. And even that is more about the beauty and serenity of a tropical sea than the place where the movie “The Beach” was shot.

When it comes to selling travel stock then, location doesn’t seem to matter so much as the story the image conveys and the number of ways it can be used by a designer.

“In contrast to personal travel photos, stock library shots tend to be conceptual, useful for many purposes, and shot with great technical skill, often in a controlled environment with models and lights,” says Felicia Morton. “Conceptual images generally sell better than images of specific places. For example, more customers are likely to search for a rock climber than for the name of a specific mountain.”

And stock travel photos also tend to come with model releases that allow them to be used commercially even when they contain pictures of tourists, who are more likely to be posing than genuinely lost.

Conceptual Photography is Commercial Photography

Photographers whose hobbies also include traveling to beautiful places, the type of places they’re most likely to want to bring their camera, are faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, they want to shoot the kinds of beautiful, creative, artistic photos that reproduce the unique appeal of a location and sum it up in one shot. These are the kinds of photos that make photography so enjoyable and which Shutterstock’s judges want to see. On the other hand though, if they also want to generate a little income from the photos they shoot on their trips, they’re forced either to push their images as editorial photos to magazines — a difficult thing to do at the best of times, although not impossible — or create the kind of vague, conceptual images that multiple buyers with different messages to communicate want to use.

To create those images, Felicia Morton recommends that photographers pay attention to the photos used in travel advertising, “think about the images that businesses would want to use,” and look at Shutterstock’s most popular photos and the most common keywords on the site.

“Think about images that are difficult to get and that might be of value to image buyers,” she advises.

Of course, it’s not impossible to take more than one kind of photograph on a trip to a beautiful location. It’s possible to take stock shots of the beach or even the airport that strip away the location but leave a sense of travel and movement, and upload them to a stock site, suitably keyworded. And it’s possible too to take other pictures that capture the story of a trip or a place and pitch them to magazines or even offer them as prints when you get back.

Although Shutterstock offers images that cover a wide range of different topics, the company chose travel as the theme for its competition partly as a joint promotion with photography suppliers B&H and travel firm Zozi, but also because photographers are so enthusiastic about the subject. It would be nice if buyers were also enthusiastic about buying the kinds of travel photographs that photographers most want to shoot, but creating commercial conceptual images at the same time isn’t a bad alternative. And your most artistic images can always win you a competition — and another trip.

Image Courtesy: BuyaPhoto.net

Prints don’t sell on the Web. You can sell digital downloads through microstock sites. You can turn your photos into books and offer them on online stores. You can even put your pictures on products and offer them as t-shirts, mousepads and even skateboard decorations. But create a gallery and suggest that people who like your pictures should order up a print to place in their living room, their study or on their desk, and you can’t expect to make a dime. There’s too little demand, too little available wallspace and too much competition from other photographers with beautiful pictures of similar subjects. It’s just possible though that that old assumption about what sells on the Web might not be true. At least one site has been happily offering pictures submitted by photographers for more than six years – and making regular sales.

BuyaPhoto.net was originally created by Dean and Kathy Outlaw, owners of a photo lab in New South Wales, Australia, as a way for a local newspaper to upload photographs from its editions. Their lab would print the pictures on the newspaper’s behalf and send them to its customers. The couple approached other newspapers and the service began to grow. By 2004, the idea had become so popular that they decided to sell their lab, subcontract the printing work and rewrite BuyaPhoto.net as an online gallery service with enhanced print-on-demand features.

More Than 20,000 Print Sales Every Year

Today, the company has 80 active and contributing photographers, and offers images submitted by three newspaper groups covering more than 90 newspapers. Altogether it’s sold more than 135,000 prints, a rate of more than 20,000 every year.

The price for those prints ranges broadly. Contributors are free to set their own rates and different photographers operating in different fields can charge very different amounts. According to Dean Outlaw, some photographers are demanding AU$15 for a 6×8 inch print while others are asking for as much as AU$35. For larger photos, prices can reach as high as around AU$240 for 24×36 inch canvas.

“It depends what market they are in and also what sort of marketing money they are spending on selling their prints,” he says.

The most popular subjects that individual photographers sell on BuyaPhoto are scenery, flowers and events, the kind of decorative images that buyers might want to place around the home. Newspapers that contribute to the site tend to sell pictures of people featured in the publication, such as a child with his soccer team on the weekend, an item from the social pages or perhaps a shot from a current story. Most of those orders will come from the subject’s family.

The photos are sold through the site through three different channels. The gallery is the main part of BuyaPhoto and acts as a warehouse that stores all the images submitted by all the contributors.

“It enables photographers who are just starting out to be able to sell their images as prints or downloads,” says Dean.

RSS galleries provide a showcase and shopping cart for photographers who already have their own website but want to add ecommerce functions. A file uploaded to their website uses the photographer’s images on BuyaPhoto to create a gallery which is updated automatically whenever new images are made available for sale. The shopping cart and gallery are branded with the photographer’s logo but the logistics and page creation are handled by BuyaPhoto.

Finally, photographers who already have a gallery online, can add a piece of code that generates a buy button, allowing them to make sales without even uploading their images to BuyaPhoto.

Most Images Are Sold on Photographers’ Own Websites

Together those three tools make the sales opportunity simple to create, but actually bringing in the revenue is a lot harder. That more than half of BuyaPhoto’s contributors are professional publications with established audiences is likely to help its sales a great deal, but according to Dean Outlaw, there are a few things that an individual photographer can do to increase the chances of selling prints.

Most important is the quality of the images rather than size of the portfolio. Photographers should take a long, hard look at the images they’re planning to upload, Dean says.

“If their wife, husband or whoever wouldn’t want it hanging in their lounge then they should think seriously before uploading it for sale. Quality is always better than quantity.”

Keywording is vital too, a necessary aspect of online sales that’s familiar to stock photographers but still not very enjoyable. A small gallery on a photographer’s website can be easily browsed but images added to a large gallery such as the one on BuyaPhoto have to be found through a search engine. That means doing more than just shooting and uploading. BuyaPhoto has put some effort into strengthening the site’s keywording options.

And it’s vital, too, to get off the site and onto your own where “the photographer is not competing with another 80 photographers to sell their images and they get the full value of any marketing money they spend,” says Dean.

In fact, about 90 percent of BuyaPhoto’s printing work comes from photographers using either the RSS gallery or its PrintMe button to pitch their products to their own customers. It’s a figure that suggests that successfully selling prints on the Web may not be about putting them on a site like BuyaPhoto’s, which only brings 10 percent of the buyers. Rather, the sales depend on the relationship between the photographer and his or her community of customers. Uploading carefully chosen, comprehensively keyworded images to BuyaPhoto’s galleries may help but to continue making regular sales, a photographer will need to build a relationship with buyers, keep them coming into his or her website, and create the kind of decorative images that they want to own.

Selling prints on the Web then may not be impossible. But while you can outsource the printing, the billing and the payment systems, you’ll still have to find and satisfy the market — and that’s still difficult.

Image courtesy: Light Blue Software

Become a successful photographer and it won’t be long before other photographers are asking how you did it. They’ll want to know how you take your pictures, what sort of equipment they should use and what tips you can offer about shooting in low light, bright light, no light. If you’re on photography forums, you can expect to be fielding questions and receiving giant amounts of gratitude for your professional answers. And people will even pay for that advice. For many successful photographers, the stage after building a full schedule and a glowing reputation isn’t hiring more photographers or even publishing a photography book. It’s putting on a photography workshop.

Workshops though usually explain the techniques of photography. Sometimes, they’ll also explain the business of photography, teaching marketing and business-building. But they always sell information that the students have to take away and use. A few photographers are going a little further. They’re not just selling their knowledge, they’re offering the physical tools that they’ve created to build their photography business.

Tom Catchesides, for example, began his photographic career while studying economics at Cambridge University. He hoped to become a writer for the university’s student newspaper, but between assignments volunteered to photograph the bands the newspaper was reviewing. After leaving college in 2003, that interest in picture-taking grew into a photography business that combines wedding photography with corporate photography and occasional PR work.  In 2008,  he was voted one of the ten best wedding photographers in the UK.

Invited to Put on Workshops

Tom’s move into workshops wasn’t planned. Two years ago, he was approached by Calumet, a chain of photography equipment stores, who invited him to put on some seminars for other photographers.  His last workshops have been about post-production and workflow, teaching professional photographers how to stay on top of the work that comes after the shoot.

“So that they can spend more time taking pictures and building their businesses,” Tom explains.

Tom will do another set of workshops for Calumet this year, but his main focus, he told us, is divided between his wedding photography and a software company that he launched last year to sell business programs to photographers.

Light Blue Software’s main product is Light Blue: Photo. A workflow and studio management program, Light Blue: Photo lets photographers manage enquiries, send personalized messages to clients, place bookings in calendars, issue invoices, track expenses, and even review the effectiveness of a photography business’s marketing strategies. It can also create Web galleries with a built-in shopping cart and, as a bonus, publish commitments to either iCal or Google Calendar, allowing photographers to view them on their iPhones and Blackberries.

“We’re well aware that it’s possible to manage a photography business with bits of paper, various spreadsheets, a diary, etc.,” says Tom, “but Light Blue: Photo brings everything together into one streamlined package. That saves you from having to remember where everything is and, more importantly, it save a lot of duplication.”

Whether it will save enough time to cover the program’s £295 price tag is another question. According to Tom, the program’s profitability depends on the amount of time a photographer’s current system takes to use, but he predicts that it can save busy photographers “hours every week.” Depending on how much the photographer earns per hour, those saved hours should quickly add up to more than the price of the license.

Create a New Revenue Stream

What is clear though is that the program provides another dimension to Tom Catchesides’ photography business. In addition to earning from wedding clients, corporate shoots and workshops, he’s been able to add another revenue stream based on a program that he’s been using in one form or another since he created his business.

Like his workshops, the idea to offer the program came as a result of demand from others. Photographers, said Tom, had been hassling him for years to let them use his workflow system ever since he had created it for his own business in 2003. He formed the software company in 2008 then spent six months working closely with a variety of photographers to test the program before release. Today, the development and company management does take up much of his time — perhaps not the best result for a process that was first developed to allow him to spend more time shooting — but he is able to leave the work to his team while he’s out taking pictures.

Tom though, isn’t the only photographer to have seen his workflow system as a product that can be sold as well as an asset to his own business. Fran Howlett is a portrait and wedding photographer in Perth, Australia. Her husband, Peter is an electronic engineer, and the couple together run TimeExposure, a professional photography software company. Their main product, ProSelect, was designed for photographers who choose and lay out the images in front of their clients. The company claims to have sold “thousands” of copies and “many” businesses using the software “have reported at least a 50% increase in sales.”

Clearly, programs that share a successful photographer’s workflow tool have to be effective. Learning a new system takes time and expense, even if that investment is paid back in the long run. Creating the system and marketing it also demand a whole new set of skills that go beyond the challenges of building a wedding photography business. Having a professional engineer close at hand, as Fran Howlett does, will always be helpful. But more important is the kind of drive that’s strong enough to move a photographer outside the relatively comfortable world of photography into an area as different as software production and marketing. It means hiring coders, designing functions, testing the program and setting up a way to field the inevitable support questions that technical products always generate. It requires the kind of willingness to take risks that’s essential for every high-flying photographer. As Tom Catchesides puts it:

“Any successful professional photographer needs a combination of photographic talent and an entrepreneurial streak.”

It’s not easy to make money out of photography. Learning how to shoot great pictures is hard enough but you also have to be able to put them in front of buyers, persuade those buyers that they want them and beat off the competition. Traditional stock companies are choosy, galleries are selective, and microstock sites are bursting and cheap. But there are ways to make money out of your knowledge of photography without selling a picture — and even without standing in a regular classroom and following a curriculum.

Many of the world’s biggest photographers supplement their income by offering workshops that pass on their knowledge to other photographers. Scott Rouse of the The Lightroom Lab, for example, is one of the instructors teaching a five-day workshop in the Glacier National Park this summer. Wilderness photographer Carl Heilman is doing something similar in the Acadia National Park this June.

You don’t have to head out into the wilds to teach photography though. Denis Reggie, said to be the creator of wedding photojournalism, offers a three-day wedding photography workshop with partner Joe Buissink. With twelve participants each paying $1,495 (not including travel and accommodation) those workshops allow Denis and Joe to earn almost $18,000 from three days’ work. And they do it more than once a year. The February workshop was sold out; the May workshop appears to still have places.

Selling Your Name

Denis Reggie though can charge those sorts of fees because he has a name and a reputation. An investment of over $2,000 (by the time you’ve added accommodation and travel) looks like a safe bet if you gives you the kind of skill and knowledge that has allowed Denis to shoot the weddings of Kennedys and celebrities. But even relatively new photographers can put on workshops if they’re bold and confident enough. Corey McNabb, for example, says on his bio that he only started shooting weddings “a few years ago,” although he comes from a long line of photographers and his commercial clients have included Pepsi and Gucci among others. That relative lack of experience in wedding photography however hasn’t stopped him supplementing his income with his “McWorkshops,” designed to pass on his photography knowledge to other rising photographers.

Corey’s workshops are sold entirely on the teacher’s photography skills. When Scott Rouse and Carl Heilman teach though, the students aren’t just getting a lesson in how to take pictures in nature. They’re also getting a vacation of a lifetime, a trek though some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes. That’s what Geraldine Westrupp and Martin Sammtleben offer through their company Wild Photography Holidays. Based in Iceland, Geraldine is a climber and mountain guide, who has traveled and led groups in South America, the Himalayas and the Alps among other locations. She has always taken pictures on those trips, and says that she has been an “adventure photographer” since before the term was popular. Wild Photography Holidays, which launched in September 2009, aims to produce special trips to suit photography enthusiasts like herself and her partner, a German designer and keen photographer who came to Iceland for a vacation fourteen years ago, and stayed.

The idea to offer unique trips aimed at photographers, she said, came while leading a tour in Bhutan. While some of her party, which included a couple of triathletes and a marathon runner, wanted to push on and cover as much ground as possible, the photographer in the group wanted time to stop and shoot the scenery.

“[He] was getting really frustrated and I really had great empathy with him as the landscape in Bhutan both culturally and geologically is quite remarkable,” recalled Geraldine. “Often he was not getting the time to get the shots that he really wanted.”

Photographers who take Geraldine and Martin’s tours, which currently take in the landscapes of Iceland and northern Spain’s Picos de Europa, are receiving workshops in shooting in those specific locations — Geraldine and Martin have photographed in both of them — but they’re also getting a well researched tour and someone to take care of the safety, logistics and planning, as well as knowledge of the best places to take pictures. It’s a tour that’s sold as much on the knowledge of the sites as on the ability to capture them on disc.

Go Where You Know

And that’s something that any photographer with knowledge of their local landscape can offer on a smaller scale. Without Geraldine and Martin’s tour-leading experience you might not want to start organizing hotels, flights and certainly not mountain hikes, but if you know of great shooting locations that few others know about — or know how to shoot — in your area, you can still take a leaf out of their book and take enthusiasts to the area and show them how to photograph the scenes. Even a simple day trip to a local lake to photograph birds or a walk through your neighborhood to point out exciting street photography scenes could bring in some useful extra income. While Wild Photography Holidays are planning an adventurous tour to a mountain hut close to an erupting volcano, they’re also organizing a more sedate eleven-day tour for flower photographers.

Teaching isn’t for everyone. Photographers who have turned to college classrooms as a way of generating a stable income and encouraging new photographers often find that they miss shooting too much. Preparing classes and checking assignments also takes time and however much they might enjoy teaching, photographers tend to get into photography because they love taking pictures not teaching others.

Workshops though provide one way that experienced photographers can supplement their income without committing themselves to months away from their business. The lessons can even take just a few days (plus organization and marketing). Guiding photography tours though can be even more enjoyable. If you’re going to be heading out into the wilds anyway, why not take some other photographers with you and earn as you shoot?

We’ve heard the hype before. Citizen photojournalism, we’ve been told, is the future of editorial photography. Newspapers are shrinking their photography departments just as cameras have become standard features on mobile phones. With a camera-holder at every news scene, all a media outlet has to do is ask for submissions from any accident, disaster, terrorist attack or demonstration to be immediately inundated with a choice of free, quality images. Why bother sending a pro when the amateurs are already there, good enough and willing to work for next to nothing?

It was that hope that led to the rise of services like Scoopt, which took open submissions of news images and distributed them to the media. It was the potential of citizen photojournalism that led Getty to buy Scoopt in 2007. And it was the limitations of citizen photojournalism – the poor images, the rarity of important enough events, the inability of agencies to get between the photographer and the media, the difficulty of distributing images it did have to the right outlets – that led Getty to shut the service down two years later.

But crowd-sourced photography is back, and this time, it might just be working.

As Seen in Le Monde

Citizenside has been around long enough to have seen both the hype surrounding citizen photojournalism and the risk of believing it. Formed in 2005 as Scooplive, it was inspired by the London bombings when co-founder Matthieu Stefani saw a need for a way to deliver the images shot by people at the scene to editors in the news rooms.

“We got the idea then that there might be a market for eyewitness photos and videos of newsworthy events,” Matthieu told us. “So we started building what is now Citizenside to help connect people on the scenes, whether pros or amateurs, with people in the media. Essentially bringing the supply to the demand.”

The site now has 50,000 contributors based in more than 100 countries, of which over 10,000 are active on a daily basis, submitting more than 500 photos and videos each day. More importantly, Citizenside, which is based in Paris, has also managed to forge good connections with the local media. In the last fourteen months, the company has signed agreements with the three largest French dailies, the most popular radio station, the most watched TV news network and the two best-selling gossip magazines. Those connections mean that when an important image does come in, Citizenside knows who to call first and can place while it’s still hot and exclusive. Top contributions are also placed on AFP’s ImageForum, making them available to 9,000 media buyers around the world. This year, Citizenside plans to make similar agreements with publications in the UK and in other parts of Europe.

“We will hit the US market too,” says Matthieu, “as we think there is a real need for media, newspapers specifically, to reconnect with their readers.”

Some of Citizenside’s customers have already bought subscription programs, locking them into the service and committing them to purchases of videos and photos on a daily basis. Other sales though are more occasional, at just “a few pictures a day.” The launch of Editorside, a microsite intended to help buyers find content, and which is now undergoing testing, should push that figure past ten sales a day and “into the hundreds,” predicts Matthieu.

Sold for $100,000

That might suggest that we’re hearing the same old story: excitement about the power of citizen journalists failing to translate into more than  a handful of real sales. But although Citizenside is interested in receiving “illustrative images” as well as its more  usual demand for news shots, and while contributions may be sold more than once, it’s not a stock site that needs to make large numbers of frequent sales at relatively low prices. According to the Guardian, Scoopt’s most valuable sale was a picture of a Doctor Who monster, which went for £2,000 to a buyer who never used it. Citizenside’s biggest sale so far was a video of Jérôme Kerviel, the trader whose losses were believed to have cost French bank Société Générale around €4.9 billion. That clip was sold for an impressive $100,000. The seller would have received around 75 percent of that fee.

Most prices, of course are lower, and depend on the publisher as well as the quality, exclusivity and comprehensiveness of the package. A local website might  pay only a few bucks for an image but a print publication looking for international exclusivity could pay tens of thousands of dollars.

Citizenside also tries to make use of Web 2.0 to turn its contributors into what Matthieu Stefani calls “a community of amateur reporters.” Members can communicate with each other, comment and vote on the stories they send in, and use the site as a source of real-time news. Citizenside is also able to use its members’ geolocation data to call for witnesses to particular events that it knows its buyers want to cover. Between three and ten such calls for go out every day for events that include bank robberies, natural disasters or violent demonstrations. The company is now working on an assignment service that will allow buyers to order images directly from locations where they don’t have staff photographers.

“The idea is that a magazine in San Diego might be interested in some event on the West Coast or in Europe, and could use someone qualified around the place where it takes place,” explains Matthieu.

But there will still be a difference between the kinds of images that an amateur shoots and the sort of pictures that a trained news photographer would produce, which is why Matthieu says that he regards his site’s contributors as witnesses rather than reporters, and their products as supplements to traditional reporting rather than replacements for it.

“We don’t believe what we do relates to ‘Citizen Journalism,’ but rather ‘Citizen Witnessing,’” says Matthieu. “We’re about facts and undeniable visual evidence.”

Maybe that’s one way to beat the hype about citizen journalism: rebrand it, then connect to the media and actually sell the pictures.

When you’re searching for a niche in which to specialize, there’s often one ideal place to look. Pick a subject that genuinely interests you, something that you’ve been shooting anyway just for  fun and you’ll not only be earning a little extra cash, you’ll also have that unbeatable feeling that you’re being paid to do something you find immensely satisfying. It’s the perfect combination: an interesting photography project that costs you nothing and that actually gives you money.  That’s what happened to Kevin Baumann, a photographer and Web developer from Detroit.

Kevin’s 100 Abandoned Houses project is a collection of images showing the derelict homes of his city. His images sell as prints, his online gallery earns ad revenue and his work has been highlighted in the New York Times and on ABC. Best of all, the attention his images have generated have helped him to bring donations to local charities that work in the subject his images portray.

Kevin had been a professional photographer for about five years, shooting architectural images, product photography and lifestyle photos for Michigan businesses. As the car industry continued to shrink though and as automotive photographers in Detroit began to look for other lines of work, so Kevin found the photography market increasingly saturated. Web development had looked like an interesting challenge and what was once a side job has now become his main profession, with photography a paying hobby. And it was as a hobby that he first began shooting pictures of abandoned houses. Kevin traveled around Detroit taking pictures of dilapidated properties that caught his eye. The pictures are shot front-on so that the building’s façade — and that façade’s decay – is clear. It’s a style that allows the building to speak for itself, with minimal interference from the photographer, Kevin explains.

70 Print Sales in One Week

After a few years, his trips had given him a large collection of images which he decided to turn into a series of 100 pictures.

“At first 100 seemed like a lot of abandoned houses, but it’s really not, and I’ve gone well beyond 100,” he told us. “Almost every abandoned house is interesting in some way, though I don’t photograph every single one I see. Some are more striking than others.”

There was no agenda, he points out. He wasn’t intending to make a political point about the city through his images or appeal for funds for renovation. The buildings simply fascinated him and in photographing them, he felt he was able to understand Detroit and its problems a little better.

Kevin placed the photos online and found that when the economy declined – and in particular, as the automotive industry declined – so attention turned increasingly towards Detroit’s problems. When the New York Times described the project in its New York edition, traffic to the website leapt. Around 8,000 unique visitors stopped by to look at his photos on the day the article came out, attention that led to a sudden jump in sales.

So far, Kevin has sold 100 limited edition prints and 25 prints in “other sizes.” The limited editions of ten 5 x5 inch prints sell for $35 each, plus postage, of which ten dollars is given to charities such as Habitat for Humanity and The Greening of Detroit. The larger prints, of course,  sell for more. Seventy of those sales came in the week the New York Times ran its article. The pages also have some carefully optimized AdSense units which do particularly well with visitors who reach the site from AOL. StumbleUpon and Digg both send Kevin lots of traffic but none of those users convert into buyers.

That might be because the images to appeal to a focused market. The prints are particularly popular with ex-Detroiters, followed by people who live on the coast. New Yorkers make up the largest geographical area for buyers, but no one living in Detroit has bought any of Kevin’s photos.

“[W]hy would they?” he asks. “I don’t think someone who lives among abandoned houses finds them to be intriguing like so many others do.”

None of the owners or former residents of the houses have contacted Kevin after seeing their homes on his site, but he has been asked by owners of other properties to take pictures of their old houses. Many haven’t seen them in years, Kevin explains, and wonder about their state.

Keep the Prices Low

For photographers looking for a project which would be both interesting and rewarding then, Kevin’s experience offers a number of lessons. The most obvious is to shoot what you enjoy first and then look for a way to make money out of it. Kevin was motivated primarily by his fascination with his city, and not by the attention or the money his images might generate.

When it comes to making those sales, it’s a good idea to keep the prices low – unless you already have gallery representation or a big name (and big value) to protect.

“Most people who are interested in photography can’t afford or won’t spend hundreds or thousands on prints,” says Kevin. “I will, and do sell, larger and more expensive prints, but the smaller less expensive ones allow more people to purchase them.”

Affordably-priced prints then are important, and Kevin is now working on a photography book that he’ll make available too. Finding a cause to support is helpful as well. Kevin stresses that he didn’t want take advantage of Detroit’s situation but rather do something helpful with  his project. The donations he gives to local environmental charities make his prices more appealing to potential customers who get to feel that they’re not just buying a print but also giving back to the community.

As for subjects, Kevin has been contacted by plenty of other photographers who want to do something similar in their areas, but he questions whether there would be as much interest in a city that wasn’t as politically sensitive as Detroit is now.  New neighborhoods though, especially those have not been completed and which also include abandoned houses, might make for some interesting projects, he says. That’s something to think about as the economy picks up.

Twitter’s limitations mean that it might not be a great place to show off a photo gallery, but the site can still be a valuable resource for photographers, both amateur and professional. We’ve scoured Twitter and produced a categorized list of all the accounts that can help photographers improve their picture-taking, and produce and sell their images. This isn’t a list of photographers on Twitter; it’s a list of businesses, organizations and outlets on Twitter that can help photographers. We’ve provided the name, the Twitter username and, in most cases, an edited version of their bio.

Photography Organizations

Wedding and Portrait Photographers International @WPPI_2010

professional photography organization that puts on professional photography trade show and convention every year.

S F Camerawork @sfcamerawork

A non-profit organization that encourages emerging and mid-career artists to explore new directions in photography and related media.

The Lucie Foundation @luciefoundation

Non-profit photography organization aimed at encouraging and exhibiting photographers of all styles.

North American Nature Photography Association @nanpa_news

National Press Photographers Association @nppa

National Press Photographers Association: advancing professional visual journalism through education, information, networking, business resources and advocacy

White House News Photographers Association @whnpa

White House News Photographers Association

NAPP @NAPP_News

National Association of Photoshop Professionals (led by Scott Kelby), resource for Photoshop training.

ASMP @ASMP

ASMP – American Society of Media Photographers

PPA @OurPPA

Photography association

Photo Labs and Supplies

Apollo Photo@apollophoto

Online, full-service photo lab specializing in digital prints, press-printed photo products, specialty photo items, and studio marketing products and services.

F-11 Photographic @F11Photo

Photographic supplies store and full service lab.

McKenna Pro Lab @McKennaPro

Pro Lab.

PhotoWeek @Photomart

Digital Photographic Supplies

Pictureline @pictureline

professional camera store.

foto care@FotoCare

sales, support and rental of all of the latest gear.

Jennifer Vasile @probackdrops

Professional Backdrops

Elephas Creations @SudhirShivaram

Nature and Wildlife Photography Solutions. Lens Library (lens rental), Photography Workshop, Outdoors, Stock Photography.

Photography News @PhotogNews

News about new cameras, digital photography tips, equipment reviews, and examples

Nikon Pro @NikonPro

Nikon news, Nikon tips, and information about photography and Nikon equipment. Written by Mike Downey @mdowney

DigitalFusion Rental @DFrental

Professional Digital Photography Equipment Capture and Rental

Doug Murdoch @thinkTANKphoto

professional photography equipment manufacturer

Robert Medina @thelightcaddy

Off Camera Flash Photography Equipment Bag

Chris Klapheke @ChrisKlapheke

Online nature photography equipment retailer

Sinar Bron USA @Sinarbron

distributes professional photography equipment in North America

Photography Reviews @photoreviews

Providing reviews of photography equipment, cameras, tripods, lenses, monopods and more

Camera Cart @Cameracart

photography rental equipment

Owen’s Originals @OwensOriginals

Photography Equipment Seller

Intova @Intova

Carl Fischer @nikoncameralens

blog on digital camera lenses.

Peter Wipf @alzodigital

Designer and manufacturer of video and photography equipment

Henry Posner @bandhphoto

B&H: The Professional’s Source since 1973

Lee Filters @leefilters

Cameta Camera @cameta

A Camera Store

LensRentals.com @LensRentals

Internet photo/video rental company, presently carrying 2014 copies of 281 lenses, plus cameras and accessories

Calumet Photo @calumetphoto

Camera retailer selling Nikon, Canon, Hasselblad and more.

Leica Camera AG @leica_camera

Hasselblad USA @hasslebladusa

Stock Agencies

John Lund @stockphotoguy

Stock Photographer, Stock Blog, Photog Interviews, Photoshop stories…

iStockScoop @iStock

iStockScoop: The ultimate (unofficial) resource clearinghouse for all istockers!

istockcharts.de @istockcharts

Shutterstock images @Shutterstock

Subscription Royalty-Free Stock Photography

Tyler Olson / Leaf @microstockgroup

A meeting place for microstock photographers.

iStockphoto @istockhelp

Online Stock Photography Community

Getty Images @GettyImages

Dreamstime @dreamstime

Image Source @ImageSource

royalty free stock photography.

Sodapix Photo Agency @Sodapix

Stock Photography @dynamitestock

Stock Photography site offering low cost economical images for immediate download.

painet @painet

Stock Photo Agency & Photograph Search Engine & photography research. Painet publishes topical websites of images as Twitter Tweets.

Maggie Hunt @StockShop

Exclusive Model Released Stock Photography

Phototake, Inc. @Phototake

Medical Images – Illustrations-Photography-Microscopy & Custom Work

Stock Photos @Colorado_Image

Stock photography focused on Colorado, licensed for advertising and promotional use… follow for newest photos

Aurora Photos @Aurora_Photos

Stock photography agency based in Portland, ME with offices in NYC, CA and London offering an archive of exotic, visually dynamic, and diverse imagery.

EmageStock @emagestock

The Site of Natural Photography Stock

picNiche @picniche

Automatically reporting stock photography niches found scoring above 400. Follow (@bobbigmac for info )

Matt Brading @OzImages

Stock Photography Co-op. Follow for photographer and library updates.

AVID StockPhoto @AVIDStockPhoto

royalty-free stock photo subscription

Amy J. Boyd @amyjboyd

IPhoto Researcher for a stock photography company, also directing and producing my first independent documentary about a local non-profit cinema arts co.

fotosearch @fotosearch

Stock photography and stock footage website.

NoEquivalent Art @noequivalent

A fine art and stock photography store ; focus on High-end Wall Decor and Unrestricted Exclusive Stock images.

visualsafari @visualsafari

Creative Wildlife, Landscape, Nature & Travel Stock Photography.

colouria Stock Photo @colouria

Edited stock photography collections

Cutcaster @cutcaster

Product Outlets

Zazzle.com, Inc. @zazzle

custom products marketplace

cafepress @cafepress

Etsy! @etsy

handmade marketplace.

blurbinc @blurbinc

Real books. Made by you.

SmugMug @smugmug

Photography Magazines

LayersMagazine @LayersMagazine

The How-To Magazine for Everything Adobe®. 

Jpgmag @jpgmag

Magazine made by you.

Photoshop Creative @PshopCreative

magazine for Adobe Photoshop inspiration and advice

Advanced Photoshop @advancedpshop

The magazine for Adobe Photoshop professionals

ePHOTOzine @ePHOTOzine

photography community.

Lens Culture @lensculture

online magazine celebrating current trends in international contemporary photography, art, media, and world cultures. Edited by Jim Casper

1854 @1854

weekly magazine for professional photographers.

Photography Monthly @Photomonthly

The photographic community. Galleries, camera equipment reviews, tips, techniques and locations.

Amateur Photographer @AP_Magazine

photography magazine

414 Magazine @414Magazine

BCP Magazine@BCPMagazine

Breakfast Club Photography Magazine, a magazine by photographers

1000 Words@1000wordsmag

online magazine dedicated to highlighting the best of contemporary fine art photography in the UK and beyond.

LiveNLoud Magazine @LiveNLoud

Music Photography Magazine

PicturaPixel @picturapixel

Pictura means painting, image. Pixel is the smallest element of an image. PicturaPixel is a multimidia magazine dedicated to photography.

dphotomagazine @dphotomagazine

New Zealand’s Photography Magazine

Light Leaks Magazine @LightLeaksPress

Nature’s Best @naturesbestpics

Displaying the beauty of nature through the art of photography.

Flare @flaremag

German magazine for young photography

Susan A. Zadeh @EyemazingSusan

Photography Director EYEMAZING magazine, International Contemporary Photography magazine

koko magazine @kokomagazine

New Music, New Fashion, New Photography.

WINk magazine @WINkmag

Photography News and Views

Smartphotography.in @SPmagazine

India’s  photography magazine

Santa Art Magazine @santamagazine

A leading Brazilian magazine about visual art and photography.

BlackFlash Magazine @BlackFlashmag

photography and new media in art. art from Canada, USA, Europe and beyond.

L’image Magazine @Limagefashmag

Photoicon Magazine @PHOTOICON

Popular Photography @pophoto

New York Times Photo @nytimesphoto

Photography, Video, and Visual Journalism from The New York Times

Awards & Prizes

Just Add Stock @justaddstock

A new international awards scheme for design that uses stock imagery.

Digital Camera POTY @DCPOTY

photography competition, brought to you by Digital Camera magazine.

Pixelglo @pixelglo

Social monthly photography contests

WorldPhotograhyAward @WorldPhotoAward

Sony World Photography Awards: global competition open to Professional & Amateur photographers. Prizes include being exhibited globally, cameras & cash.

Photoshop

PSD TUTS @PSDTUTS

Tutorial9 @Tutorial9

Photoshop_GU @Photoshop_GU

Roger Ridpath @campphotoshop

David Peters @davidpeters4

garaham Taylor @Photoshopinaday

Photoshop-Pack.com @pspack

Scott Rouse @TheLightroomLab

mcpactions @mcpactions

LeetMindz.com @ LeetMindz

Jim Sichinolfi @EssePhoto

HowtoCapture @HowtoCapture

photoshopcafe @photoshopCAFE

FreakingNews.com @FreakingNews

Freaking News Pictures, Photo Hoaxes, Photo Illusions, Photoshop Satire, Image Manipulations

Rodney Urton @Leica1956

ADD YOURS

If you know of any other useful accounts that we missed, do feel free to add them in the comments!

(And if you want to learn how  to make the most of Twitter to earn some extra revenue, do check out the Twitter Business book from our sister-blog Geekpreneur.)

Photography: Chris Burkard

The Web might have made it easy to show your images to admirers but the appeal of the old methods of displaying pictures still hasn’t disappeared. Photographers continue to look enviously at gallery walls, and a name on the cover of a photography book still delivers the kind of warm fuzzies that no website can ever inspire, however flashy.

There’s no shortage of photographers hoping to see their images gathered together, surrounded by text and sitting on bookstore shelves or, even better, decorating coffee tables around the world.

Part of that comes from the thrill of publication itself. When persuading a publisher to bet on your book idea is so difficult, success feels like an endorsement. An expert hasn’t just complimented you on your photography; he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is. You don’t find that often in the comments on Flickr and in terms of support, encouragement and kudos there are few stronger endorsements of your talent .

Publishing a Photography Book Is Not About the Money

But part of it is also the quality. The publishing company might take a big cut of the sales price, but they also know what makes a book sell and they employ professional designers, editors amd marketers to make sure that the images are placed on the best possible platform.

“For us it wasn’t about the money,” says Chris Burkard, a 23-year-old professional photographer and co-author of The California Surf Project, “we just wanted it to be the best it possibly could be.”

Chris’s book was the result of a road trip taken with co-author Eric Soderquist along the Californian coast. Chris, who had been shooting surf pictures professionally for three years, handled the photography and image editing while Eric did the writing (and all the surfing, notes Chris). Neither had planned the trip with a book in mind, but saw the images and text as a way to share what they loved about California and inspire others to explore the state.

“We had no idea it would ever actually turn into a real deal book,” Chris recalled. “We were inspired and just did it because we wanted to, book deal or not. Needless to say when we came to Chronicle and presented the idea, it was pretty much a packaged deal. They were stoked on the idea and the motivation behind it.”

Persuading Chronicle to publish the book was perhaps a little easier than the experience encountered by most photographers. Chris’s editor at Surfline.com had published a book with Chronicle in the past, and gave Chris and Eric an introduction. Chronicle saw their vision, loved the photography and, importantly, allowed the authors to take part in the development process, retain creative control and ensure that the book was not over-designed. The company also supplied a publicist and marketing manager, paid for printing and distribution and even came up with an advertising budget. Chris and Eric were able to focus entirely on quality control and photo quality.

The Marketing Is Up to You

That’s unusual. According to John Fielder, a professional photographer and former owner of Westcliffe Publishers, a publishing company which he sold to Big Earth Publishing after 26 years, the support of publishers tends to stop at paying for the production and distribution.

“The rest is up to you,” he told us, “including most of the marketing.”

That suggests that book authors could find themselves faced either with high advertising bills — as they try to promote their book themselves — or low sales, as the publication withers for lack of exposure. When it came to publishing his own books, most of which focused on Colorado (his latest is about Coloradan ranches), John tended to use two strategies that enabled him to reach a large audience without having to rely on a large advertising budget.

The first was to focus on publishing books that were unique and which didn’t compete directly with other published titles. And the other was to produce books that had an environmental component. They might have related to the protection of a natural resource or benefited the goals of an environmental non-profit organization. The idea, says John, was to attract the media to report on the project it covered.

“This reduced the need for paid advertising,” he explained, “and support from the publisher… which in my case was me. And it’s easy to get a book into bookstores if there’s publicity.”

Choosing to photograph a controversial topic that can pick up media attention then might be one way to make publishing – or at least marketing – easier but what about landing that first publishing deal?

Put yourself in the publisher’s shoes, recommends John. Imagine what it would take for the book to sell then submit your proposal. Tell the publisher whether the book is  unique in the market, how well competing books have sold, who will buy it and why, as well as technical details such as format, page count, photo count, price and proportion of photos to text.

Or alternatively, you can do what John did when he produced his first calendar back in 1981: create your own publishing company, self-publish, then commission books from other photographers as well.

While that would guarantee that you get to see your images in print though, it’s still not going to guarantee that you see any money. John says that his books paid him well because they sold in relatively large quantities.

“In general,” he says, “a photographer cannot rely upon book royalties alone.”

It seems that it’s not only the appeal of photography books that hasn’t changed; the pay hasn’t improved either.

These aren’t the easiest times to be an entrepreneur. Banks aren’t lending. Customers aren’t buying. Funding for even the best ideas is about as easy to find as four-leaf clovers and winning lottery tickets. And yet never have entrepreneurs had to shoulder so much responsibility. As even America’s biggest companies drop into receivership, it’s becoming increasingly clear that small businesses and talented individuals – people with smart plans and the drive to succeed – will be the ones who will create the recession’s green shoots and encourage new growth.

That, at least, was how things looked to Allana Taranto, a professional photographer. After attending an entrepreneurial workshop in January of this year, Allana decided to use her skills to create what she discovered  many of the entrepreneurs at the workshop lacked: a professional portrait that was compelling to their target market and which provided a narrative to their brand.

At the same time, she realized, taking those pictures as she and her husband, Trent, drove 4,000 miles across the country during a relocation move, would give her a unique opportunity — a chance to capture the face of today’s ‘American Entrepreneur.’

“The idea of the American Entrepreneur Project was a way to get more involved and give back to the entrepreneurial community by bringing attention to how entrepreneurs are dealing with the economy and by providing portraits free of charge,” Allana explained to us by email. “Trent and I had a once in a lifetime experience, met inspiring entrepreneurs across the country and the entrepreneurs we met will receive professional photographs to use for their Web presence and great exposure… We hope this will continue to grow their businesses.”

Finding the Cash

As any entrepreneur knows though, having an idea is always the easy bit. The difficulties come when you start looking for the cash and putting the plan into action. Allana started by telling a friend at LaunchSquad, a boutique PR company, what she wanted to do. Her friend put Allana in touch with Infusionsoft, a software company that caters to small businesses.

“It turned out that our idea for the project was perfectly in line with Infusionsoft’s message – that this is the age of the entrepreneur and that small business growth will be the key to bringing the country out of our current economic situation,” said Allana.

Infusionsoft accepted her proposal so with funding secured, Allana then turned to Mike Michalowicz of Toilet Paper Entrepreneur,  one of the speakers at the Monetizing Your Passion conference, where Allana had first had her idea. Mike put up a blog post and sent an email to his subscribers inviting entrepreneurs to take part in the project. With additional input from  Infusionsoft and word-of-mouth recommendations from friends in specific communities, Allana’s initial plan to photograph and describe twelve entrepreneurs in cities across America grew to twenty. Profiled on Allana’s blog, they include Adam Theurer and Alex Wander, founders of Lone Oak Organics, an organic hydroponic greenhouse, Paul Scheiter, founder of Hedgehog Leatherworks, a leather design firm, and Tom C. Zdunich and Dan Debenham of LENZworks, a video production company.

Altogether, the entrepreneurs cover a huge range of different types of businesses, different niches and different ways of working. All of them though, Allana said, had shown tenacity, self-determination, a willingness to adapt in the face of change, support from family and
community, and a passionate belief in the importance of their  work, characteristics that make up much of what it means to be an entrepreneur in America today.

“Although individual entrepreneurs definitely have unique ways of approaching life and business there is an undeniable mindset they generally hold in common,” Allana explained. “The ‘American Entrepreneur’ has a surprising and inspiring capacity to harness any fear or anxiety and create energy, passion and excitement. The ‘American Entrepreneur’ uses that energy to face challenges. The ‘American Entrepreneur’ doesn’t take work, clients, or paychecks for granted. All of the American entrepreneurs I met were interesting to talk with, passionate about what they do and very much alive.”

A Photographic Entrepreneur

Many of those characteristics,  of course, apply to Allana herself. A graduate of the Photography and Media Studies departments at Hampshire College and a Master of Arts in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art, Allana had spent several years as an art teacher before setting up as a professional photographer. Like many of the entrepreneurs she interviewed, Allana points to the support, optimism and advocacy of her family during her first years as a sole proprietor. She could also point to the challenges met in raising the funds for her project, planning the logistics and putting together the content, all challenges familiar to anyone trying to create a small business.

The final stage is yet to come though. Allana is working with Infusionsoft to create a more exciting online presence for her images and interviews than the project’s current life on her blog, and she has to capitalize on the publicity and the branding that the project is bringing her with the help of LaunchSquad.

And in that too, she’s following a strategy that she says is vital for every small business:

“[B]eing willing to outsource what you aren’t good at  in order to focus on what you are good at doing is difficult for many entrepreneurs, but is absolutely essential,” says Allana. “Focus on the value that you love to create and support your business by hiring experts in other areas. From my observations, it’s the smartest way to create a profitable business that can grow.”

What do photographers want most? Do they want to sell their photos and enjoy the income that their talent can bring? Or is it enough simply show their pictures to as many people as possible and bask in the acclaim and praise of their peers? In practice, of course… photographers want both, and they want them as much as possible. Being told time and time again that your photos are wonderful, that you’ve done a great job and that you definitely have a photographer’s eye never gets old.

But there’s no more powerful proof that you’ve got it what it takes as a photographer than finding someone’s name at the bottom of a check. And spending the money is nice too.

The problem is that it’s much easier to persuade people to look at your pictures than it is to persuade someone to buy them. When it comes to sharing your photos, there’s a whole range of different channels to choose from. While galleries might be the most prestigious way of showing your pictures, you’re likely to pick up more image views on a website, on a popular blog and on a well-networked Flickr stream.

And now you can pick up millions of views – every day, provided your images are good enough — by submitting them to CoolIris.

10 Million Image Views a Day

CoolIris, once known as PicLens, is a browser add-on that allows users to surf the Web graphically. The News category, for example, appears as a scrolling, three-dimensional wall of thumbnails. Choose one thumbnail and the image expands to fill most of the screen, revealing a caption and a link to the news page on which the photo appears. Instead of choosing content according to the headlines, Internet users can find what they want based on images. So far, the application has been downloaded 10 million times and is used by photo enthusiasts, as well as tech types and “avid mainstream media consumers,” says the company.

One of the channels that CoolIris offers is called Photos of the Day. While some of the images in that channel are sourced from premium providers like AFP and Getty, since March 6, 100 photos each day have been selected from user contributions submitted by photographers through the company’s Flickr group. Selections are made on the basis of quality and relevance, and the top photos are released throughout the day within hours of being submitted.

According Laura Holmes, Product Manager of CoolIris’s Discover Channel, and Discover Team Member Maria Ignatova, the thumbnails that appear in the channel’s Photos of the Day are viewed a total of 10 million times each day.

“Photos of the Day allows you to display your photo in a beautiful 3D environment along other very high-quality photos,” they told us. “Submitting your photos to our Discover channel exposes your content to millions of users worldwide.”

That’s all very enjoyable, of course, and CoolIris’s Photos of the Day wall is certainly eye-catching, impressive and attractive – a good place to have your pictures seen. But none of the photographers whose images have appeared on the wall has told CoolIris that they won a sale as a result of the appearance, and the group discussions are quiet on that point too.

Nor does CoolIris pay photographers whose images it chooses, so the wall effectively functions as an elite extension of Flickr – a place to show your photos to as many people as possible and enjoy the warm fuzzies that come from knowing you have talent.

But when your photos are good enough to stand alongside those created by the professional news photographers of AFP and Getty, surely that means they’re also good enough to be sold.

Making the Most of the Image Wall

The sales can’t be made on CoolIris itself – the application doesn’t provide a way for viewers and photographers to communicate directly – but there are a couple of ways to turn your appearance on the wall into a licensing agreement or a print sale.

The first is through the caption. Photos of the Day takes the original title of the image as the caption. Those titles are usually entirely descriptive, such as imfreelykeely’s “Does your delectation come from 92/65” or Kathy~’s “Reflection of a Sunset.”

Although those sorts of description tell the viewer something about the image, they don’t tell potential buyers what they really want to know: whether the image is available for licensing or printing. It wouldn’t take a great deal of effort – or harm the viewing experience too greatly – to also mention in the title that the image is available for purchase. “Reflection of a Sunset (Available for licensing and purchase)” isn’t a major change to the image but it could make a big difference to the results of placing the image on the wall.

The other way of making the most of a CoolIris wall appearance though is even easier. Because the images are taken directly from the Flickr stream, clickthrough data is recorded and counted.

“You can see how many times your photo has been viewed because every hit within Cooliris counts as a hit on your Flickr page stats tracker.”

As long as you have Pro membership of Flickr, you’ll be able to see how often an image is clicked and which kinds of images generate the most views. Even if that particular photo doesn’t sell then, you can see which subjects generate the most traffic flows through your Flickr stream as a whole.

In theory, the more people who see your images the more sales you’re going to make. In practice, it doesn’t always work that way. The more people who see your images, the more comments, praise and confidence you’ll generate. But you’ll still have to take steps to pick up the sales.

You can find them all over the Web. Publishers want photos. They want them for a wide range of different subjects. They want them for a bunch of different uses. They want them now.

And in return, they’re prepared to offer… an impressive portfolio. Well, that’s more valuable than money, isn’t it?

Tell that to a professional photographer and he’s likely to demonstrate a novel use for his longest lens. Tell that to an enthusiast though, and there’s a good chance that he’ll be so thrilled at the idea of having an image published that he’s prepared to accept it.

That’s why Flickr has around 81 million images covered by some sort of Creative Commons license.

But Flickr isn’t the only place that publishers can turn to pick up free images easily. Some stock sites offer freebies as a way of bringing in buyers and a quick search of Google turns up all sorts of sites that just can’t wait to give away photos.

Morguefile is one of them, even if it doesn’t quite intend to be.

An Online Picture Cabinet

Created in 2001 by Michael Connors, a New York-based multimedia artist, the site aims to function as a reference center for creatives looking for inspiring images. The service is named after the file cabinet used by newspapers to store paste-up flats and the pile of material used by comic book artists for inspiration.

“If you had to draw a picture of a super hero foiling a robbery in a supermarket, you might need a photo of the supermarket — from top of the shelves, from the store room, a picture of someone holding a gun, the cash register, etc.,” Michael explained. “Stock photos never really concerned themselves with that type of concept and that’s where a morgue file comes in.”

Currently the site has around 2,500 creatives who have contributed about 197,000 images. Those figures are likely to grow though following a revamp which has added two new services. In addition to offering free photos, contributors can now create portfolios complete with copyright protection, and use online storage centers.

According to Michael, people who make their images available for free on the site can enjoy a number of benefits. Photographers with images that haven’t sold can find that their pictures have uses beyond the stock site. (Shots rejected by sellers can sometimes be a photographer’s most popular images on morgueFile.) And of course, you can get a nice portfolio.

“The biggest benefit comes from the amateur photographer early in their career who needs to build a portfolio,” Michael says. “After the beginning steps of posting to the morgueFile they can be up and running with a published piece.”

More hopefully, linking free images to similar but higher quality copyrighted images in a portfolio might just turn a free search into a purchase. That’s because Michael doesn’t see the free images available on the site as an alternative to paid photography but as an adjunct to it. Many of the images are not as polished as typical stock photos, and that might be exactly what a designer needs for inspiration, he explains.

A designer working on a project, for example, might begin by downloading images from morgueFile to generate ideas then move on to stock sites, image libraries and even the major stock companies.

“Usually for any project one of the first steps is to download photos from various different sites and then place the folder of images on the project’s server for the rest of the creative team to work from,” Michael says. “I would be surprised if we were the only photo source used on any project but I am sure many times morgueFile is included as one of them.”

That might perhaps be a little naïve though. While the most popular subject submitted by photographers is “flowers,” the most sought images are shots tagged “people,” “business,”
“beach” and “computer,” exactly the sort that buyers are looking for.

Not All Creatives are Creative

The problem is that while Michael might have been inspired by a tool used by creatives, today’s creative workers aren’t just trained graphic designers and professional editors. They’re also bloggers who need images for their websites, mom and pop businesses who want a photo to use in an ad, and even small companies who’d rather keep their money for paid advertising when they can see that it’s possible to pick up photos for newsletters and brochures for free.

Large companies with dedicated creative teams then might well function exactly as Michael describes – using the free images for inspiration and planning before heading to the paid sites to do some shopping – but it’s unlikely that the morgueFile doesn’t also have plenty of small freeloaders who might well have been willing to pay a few bucks for the right photo.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that a photographer should steer clear of morgueFile though. As Michael points out, the kind of images that do well on the site are often those that can’t sell somewhere else. All photographers have a giant stack of images that they know they can’t sell and while they might want to think twice about publicizing their misses, if they can use them as bait to lead a professional creative to their hits then they might pick up a valuable new client.

And perhaps there is something to be said for giving back. Michael Connors’ vision of morgueFile is as a service that creative types provide for each other. They might not want to donate valuable photos that they can license for a fee but they might be willing to help designers with images that have few other uses beyond inspiration especially when it gives them an excuse to shoot the sort of images that they wouldn’t normally take.

“People who delve in and become enamored with the concept at first become overwhelmed,” says Michael. “We’ll get pictures of everything from what is in their backyard to what is in the fridge, most likely their pets, you name it. It’s an understanding that a great image is easy to find because it is everywhere. It really is a great way to fall in love with photography for the first time or all over again.”

That certainly could be more valuable than money and more valuable than a rich portfolio. But go for those first.

There are lots of different ways to learn photography, from Flickr groups and meet-ups to evening classes and books.

But you can also go to college, study in a classroom and turn your hours with a textbook into credits towards a degree.

It’s a choice that usually requires a huge commitment – both of time and finances – so it pays to choose a photography school that will deliver the knowledge you want and the opportunities you need to turn your education into a career.

One of the leading places to learn photography is The Art Institute.

A collection of private art colleges located across the United States and Canada, The Art Insitute has  41 campuses, 25 of which teach photography to a total of 2,600 bachelors and associates degree students. The number of photography students at each location ranges from 337 at the Art Institute of Colorado to a cozy four at the Art Institute of Vancouver. Graduates have included Carol Guzy and Martha Rial, the only women to have won a Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism.

The Institute’s range of photography courses is broad and may include Large-Format Photography and Location Shooting, as well as business classes such as Advanced Communications, Composition and Language, and Business of Photography. The actual classes offered though will vary from site to site. Each campus has its own website where applicants can review the classes available. Faculty members usually have backgrounds as photographers and real-world experience in photography branches from fine art to event to photojournalism.

Interested in Photography? You’re in!

In general, the courses are open to just about anyone with “a high school diploma and an interest in the subject,” says Suzanne Cibotti, an Art Institute spokesperson. But requirements may be higher depending on whether the student wishes to receive a bachelor’s or associate’s degree. More restrictive perhaps, is the pricing. Total tuition for an associate’s degree in photography at the Colorado campus, for example, is $52,734. While financial aid may be available and the cost can be seen as an investment in a future career, that’s still an eye-watering amount of money – especially when starting salaries for new photographers and photography assistants are so low. These are intended as professional expenses rather than the cost of improving an enthusiast’s knowledge.

That’s reflected though in the courses’ results. According to Suzanne Cibotti, around 84 percent of 2007’s associate degree photography graduates were working in a “a field related to their program of study within six months of graduation.” That number rises to an impressive 90.4 percent for bachelor’s degree graduates.

“Graduates of The Art Institutes’ Photography programs enter the field in a variety of entry-level positions; including photographers, assistants to photographers or digital photographers,” said Cibotti. “Areas of employment can include advertising, photojournalism, digital image manipulation, editorial, fashion, portraiture and wedding.”

It will be interesting to see how those figures hold up as the economy continues to tighten and  would be nice to know too how quickly photographers are able to move up from entry-level positions to winning commissions, opening their own studios and earning enough to pay off their student loans. But the fact that such a large number of new photographers are able to get started in a profession that’s been under such pressure in the last few years is at least encouraging.

Take a Photography Degree Online

Even more encouraging is the flexibility that allows those who already have day jobs to study photography as well. In addition to the traditional evening classes, which can still take a big chunk out of someone’s day and be problematic for students with families, The Art Institute of Pittsburgh also has an online division which allows students to study whenever they want. Students can print out lectures to read at their leisure, upload their work to receive comments from teachers and discuss projects with other students online. The interface is attractive and easy to use so you won’t need to study programming before you can start studying photography. Subjects available include Principles of Digital Photography, Advertising Photography, Portraiture and Portfolio Exploration.

“[The course’s] goal is to provide students with a rigorous study of the elements of image production and manipulation, as well as a wide range of professional camera and lighting equipment,” said Cibotti. “Some things like color management may still be easier to learn in a regular classroom setting.”

The requirements for the online course though are relatively simple. Bachelors students need only be high school graduates with a GPA of 2.0, or hold a General Education Development (GED) Certificate with a score of 225 or higher, or possess an associate’s degree or higher. That might sound like too broad an acceptance criterion. After all, becoming a professional photographer requires more than the ability to listen to (or read) lectures and understand how to handle equipment. It requires creativity and talent, skills that aren’t easily taught in a classroom. The Art Institute didn’t have figures available for drop-out rates so it’s possible that those without a photographic eye end up leaving before graduation.

It’s also possible though that The Art Institute’s courses are capable of turning almost anyone with an eye for composition into the kind of photographer who can earn a living from their camera.

“I would encourage someone interested in becoming a student of our Photography program not to worry about what they have done before, but to leap right in,” said Karen Antonelli, photography faculty member at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. “You need to be the kind of person that spends a lot of time observing the world around you and have the ability to derive meaning from what you see.”

That’s not a bad place for any photographer to start. The question is how much The Art Institute can help a photographer translate that meaning into an image, how far it can take them – and whether it’s worth paying for.

There are many different ways of selling your photos. You can hang them in a gallery and hope they sell for thousands of dollars. You can submit them to stock companies and hope that someone buys them.

And you can stick them on t-shirts, mugs and mousepads and see people walking around in them, drinking from them and running their mouse over them.

That might not be quite as prestigious (or as lucrative) as having a one-person show at the Irvine Contemporary Gallery in Washington, D.C. but it can steal be a useful way to turn your images into cash.

Provided you know how to do it.

In theory, it should be easy. The Internet is now stuffed with choices for photographers and designers who want to put their pictures on items. Cafepress might have been the first with its range of t-shirts and clothing, homeware and gifts, cards and stationery, and arts and posters, but Zazzle wasn’t far behind… and neither was Red Bubble and Etsy.

The first thing you need to understand when looking to turn your photos into products and sell them then, is the differences between the store sites.

Etsy is Crafty and Red Bubble is Arty

Zazzle and Cafepress are fairly similar. Both sites allow contributors to create their own stores for free. Photographers can then upload their images and allow buyers to purchase them on a range of different product types. On Zazzle that range can extend as far as skateboards and shoes. The buyers pay the cost of production plus a mark-up set by the contributor.

Although Cafepress has a basic program that costs nothing, serious sellers tend to sign up for the Premium program that costs $59.95 per year and which provides greater visibility and more promotional tools.

Zazzle has also struck deals with the owners of brands as famous as Disney and Star Wars, making it a site for shoppers as much as producers.

Red Bubble and Etsy, on the other hand, tend to be much more artistic. The product range of Red Bubble, for example, is limited to t-shirts, wall art, calendars and cards, and the emphasis is on creativity and artistry more than the products themselves. Stores are free and, once again, contributors can set their own prices above the basic production costs.

Etsy though takes a different approach. The site focuses on handicrafts, although it also sells photographic prints, and charges sellers a small amount for each item they want to sell.

So which store should you use to sell your products?

In practice, it really doesn’t matter a great deal. You can think of Zazzle as being somewhat downmarket, Cafepress a touch swankier, Red Bubble a kind of designer store, and Etsy as a craft fair but because none of the sites has much through traffic of their own, it won’t make a huge difference to sales.

Your sales figure will depend on the buyers that you manage to bring to the site yourself.

Zazzle tries to make that easier with a bunch of basic and advanced promotional strategies while Josh Elman, the company’s Head of Marketing, has talked to us about the need to be outgoing and in-your-face about the fact that you have an online product store. Keywording helps too, he says.

“Don’t be shy about having a link to your store in your email signature, on your website, your profiles, etc.  Most of all, be sure to tag and organize your photographs properly so people can find them!”

Create your Own Photographic Community

That’s all basic stuff and by itself, is unlikely to generate too much traffic. Much more important is targeting communities that are related to your work. Create a store dedicated to biking, for example, and you can talk about your designs in Facebook groups. You can even ask other bikers their opinion in forums (but not for sales – few people like sellers in forum threads so take the feedback and hope the sales come naturally).

That will also mean creating separate stores for each photography subject. Community buyers will want to feel that you’re as much an enthusiast as they are. If they’re right, you’ll certainly find those sales easier to make.

But perhaps even more important than approaching communities related to your topics is to create your own community. The hard way to do that is by being active on the store site’s forums, a place where buyers can chat with sellers. Some photographers have made sales that way, but it can be a lot of work.

A better option is to build a community based around your own blog or website. This is the approach taken Vlad Gerasimov, a photographer and designer who sells wallpapers on a subscription basis from his site and t-shirt designs on Zazzle. Note not just the professional quality of his designs but also the appreciations on his comment wall.

Buyers already familiar with Vlad’s work through his site — which he promotes on a word-of-mouth basis — come to Zazzle to find more. In effect, the site functions not as a store which Vlad has to promote alone, but as an adjunct to a website that he’s already promoting. For Vlad, Zazzle functions as kind of simple technical solution to the challenge of delivering goods that are already popular to an audience that wants to buy them.

One way to make photography product sales then is not to try too hard. Shoot good pictures. Build an audience for them on your website or even on your Flickr stream. Then tell your admirers where they can pick up your pictures in different forms.

Rebekka Gudsleifdottir, for example, an Icelandic art student, has used her icon status on Flickr to promote not just her photographic prints, which she sells through her website, but also her knitted sweaters. They have nothing to do with her photography – except for the fact she wears them in her self-portraits – but once you’ve built a community that loves your work, your brand power can be strong enough to sell anything that you endorse.

The best advice for selling your photography products then isn’t just to get out there, to market actively and tell people where they can find you. It’s to shoot images that you love and tell people who might also love them where they can see them. When that happens, they’ll click through to your product store and make their purchases.

Photography: Ryan Libre

Making the shift from photography enthusiast to professional photographer is never easy. Plenty of people own cameras. Some of them have talent and a good eye. And there are very few buyers.

But the pleasure that comes from spending your days taking pictures, the satisfaction of making a sale and the thrill that comes from seeing your images on walls, in books and inside magazines can make the struggle worthwhile.

That seems to be the case for Ryan Libre, a former US soldier who became disillusioned with life in uniform, left the Forces and picked up a degree in Peace Studies. After spending some time as a peace activist, he took up photography, a medium that, he says, allows him to “be active and have a voice without being attached to dogmatism of any kind.”

Now dividing his time between Hokkaido, Japan and Chiang Mai, Thailand, Ryan is trying to make a living out of his photography. Shooting mainly photojournalistic and travel images, he has photographed Japan’s Daisetsuzan National Park, shot artistic images that portray “enchantment,” and documented the Kachin Independence Army on the border of China and Burma. So far, he has been published in thirteen books, five magazines and a newspaper, and his pictures have been profiled on both the BBC website and National Geographic’s Your Shot page. His photographs have also been displayed at several shows, both group and solo exhibitions, and it’s those shows, he says, that are most important for a photographer’s development.

“I learn so much every time I do one.  It really forces me to think about what is my best work, and how to show a complete and diverse yet unified view of something. No matter how many times I have seen those photos before, when other people are carefully examining a large print of them in a gallery, I find mistakes and strong points I never saw before and may have never noticed otherwise.”

Nor are these benefits attainable by displaying the images online. While a website can provide access to images, Ryan argues, the resolution is low and the viewer’s attention span is short. Few people will spend more than a few minutes browsing images on a website. At a gallery, they’re likely to spend an hour or more, plenty of time to fully absorb the work.

Photography: Ryan Libre

Pictures of Graves are Taboo

Of course, obtaining those shows isn’t easy. We’ve described before how photographers are organizing their own exhibitions or teaming up with restaurants to find wall space. Ryan’s first shows took place when he was a student, and were group exhibitions held at the university and in cafes. His first solo exhibition was held at a local library in Hokkaido where, he said, he made plenty of mistakes. Pictures of graves were taboo in Japan, he discovered, and even flowers can have unique cultural meanings.

“Local knowledge is important to missionaries and businessmen, and important for photographers too,” he notes now. “If you just take photos and go home you can stay blind to many things, but when you show and sell them locally you have to be aware what the locals see in them if you want either to go well.”

Other mistakes were more prosaic. Ryan printed his photos in a size for which he couldn’t find frames, but most importantly, the exhibition had no story. “It was just 20 photos from that year that I liked.”

Those lessons were important when he approached more prestigious venues. Fuji Film Sapporo is an important photo gallery north of Tokyo and is usually booked two years in advance. Ryan was the first non-Japanese photographer to have a show there, and the first photographer under the age of 30. A long preparation time contributed to the show’s success, he says, but even more vital was a connection. The owner of the camera shop where Ryan prints his images knew everyone at the gallery and was able to get him the introduction he needed. In the end, Ryan sold $1,600 worth of prints at the show, allowing him to generate a small profit.

“[B]reaking even at a photo show is considered good,” Ryan explains “[T]he main goal is usually for publishers to see your work and ‘prove’ your merit as a photographer so you stand out a little from the crowd and get commissions and students easier.”

Pitch the Show, First Shoot the Photos Second

For his show at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Sapporo, Ryan took a slightly different approach. Instead of showing the venue his portfolio and asking for a show, he asked if they’d be interested in displaying the images of Cambodia that he planned to shoot the following winter, images that he believed would  suit the gallery’s style. The gallery couldn’t promise to display photos that they couldn’t see, so Ryan agreed to upload his pictures to his website as soon as they were ready. The gallery agreed to save him a space if they liked what they saw. Had he waited until he returned with the images to approach the gallery, Ryan explained, he would have had to wait a year for a space to open up.

In the end, the galley did exhibit his pictures. But here too, Ryan just broke even, a point that emphasizes the difficulty of earning with photography even when your pictures are good enough to win audiences.

In fact, Ryan describes his financial situation as “getting by” and says that he has to accept “being poor sometimes and flat broke others while I wait for [my photography] to grow.” His description of ten days in the life of an aspiring photographer contains plenty of interesting travel, far too much cycling to be healthy… and no billable hours. Although he’d like to be able to afford better gear and more travel options, Ryan tries to live cheaply.

He also tries to do more than turn his photography into cash. His images have been described as “a means of embracing the world” and he’s starting an NGO called Documentary Arts Asia which is intended to form a community and center dedicated to the “education, production and advocacy of the documentary arts in Asia.”

It might not be the way a professional usually measures his success, but it’s certainly a sign of enthusiasm for photography and it’s likely to be at least as rewarding as a profitable show.

Is there a hole at the center of the photography industry? Is the current licensing model sustainable? Or will the open sourcing of microstock continue increasing image supply until there are so many pictures available, photographers can’t give good photos away and can’t earn even from those that sell?

In theory, that nightmare scenario should happen. Shutterstock alone already offers over 5 million royalty-free photos and, according to the company’s CEO Jon Oringer, the number of new submissions each month never drops below six figures. Because old images – sold or otherwise – remain available on stock companies, inventories will continue to grow without limit. As the supply increases faster than demand – the world has always contained more photographers than buyers – prices should keep falling.

In fact, you could argue that this is exactly what microstock has already done. There’s little difference between charging one dollar for a license (and paying the photographer pennies) and giving the images away.

But it’s not just the overall number of images available that photographers have to worry about. After all, it’s hard to see how prices can fall any further. They also need to concern themselves with the growing size of the competition. As supply continues to increase, each photographer’s overall share in that supply decreases, reducing their chances of being the contributor that makes sale. The same amount of money might be flowing through the photography industry but it will be shared among a growing number of photographers, leaving less and less money for each.

That, at least, is the thinking behind NoEquivalent Art, a new photo-selling service launched by Eugene Burtman, a photography enthusiast with a background in economics. The site aims to protect prices — and the income of photographers – by limiting the supply of its commercial and art images to just 200,000 pictures at a time. Only 1,000 photographers will be accepted and they will only be able to offer 200 photos each. You can think of it as OPEC for images.

One Image, One Sale, One Time

By itself, that kind of supply control is not unique. Ecard company, HarmonyWishes, also places strict limits on the number of contributors it accepts and the number of images they can offer. But to make sure that buyers are receiving unique works, NoEquivalent also restricts photographers to just one sale.

Contributors must state that their images have not been sold anywhere, are not available for sale anywhere else and that there are no other copies available. Once a sale has been made, the photo is removed from the site and all other high-resolution copies must be deleted.

“[Photographers] do get to keep low resolution versions of the image, which they may use for administrative purposes such as keep in their portfolio,” Eugene explained. “Photographers do understand that to truly sell a unique image they cannot keep a full resolution copy as that would make the image not unique and devalue it. Removing the full resolution version also protects them from liability in case someone steals the image off their storage media and publishes/resells it.”

The compensation for that single opportunity is the value of the sale. Because each image is unique, its rarity means that the photographer can demand a rare price. NoEquivalent contributors begin in a price band that ranges from $500 to $800, an amount that many stock contributors would be happy to earn over the lifetime of a photo. The photographer receives 40 percent of the sale price.

Good sellers will be free to raise the band but the pricing follows market research with companies and individual stock buyers  which found that customers are willing to pay different amounts depending on the image’s end purpose.

“This price strikes a balance between the premium concept of the product and the need to be affordable enough to not be prohibitive of most business needs,” Eugene told us. “Finally, this band fits well into the artistic wall décor industry.”

Giving Up Your Photo Rights

Image are offered in two categories: art and commercial. But they’re also delivered with all image rights short of authorship. Buyers aren’t just free to use an image repeatedly in any way they wish, they’re also free to resell the images they purchase in whole or as part of a product. Eugene reassured us though that the economics don’t really allow for an as-is resale market developing, presumably because if the images could sell for more money, they’d sell for more money on the site.

The company plans to open for sales in early 2009 but has been recruiting photographers since November and picked up the first twenty of its 1,000 contributors within its first month.

As for the type of images NoEquivalent wants to sell, the emphasis, not surprisingly, is on uniqueness.

“The simplest way to think of it is by asking oneself the following question: ‘Is my image either capturing a unique moment, difficult to replicate, or highly marketable such that someone would want to own it all to themselves?’” says Eugene. ”If the answer to any of these questions is yes then you have a NoEquivalent image regardless of whether you sell it through us or not.”

Photographers can find out by applying for NoEquivalent membership here.

What they won’t find out for a while though is whether a model that allows a photo to be sold only once will provide more income than stock models that allow for repeat sales because there are flaws in the argument that underlies NoEquivalent. Even if real inventories do continue to grow, NoEquivalent’s own research shows that buyers are willing to pay varying amounts depending on the use. They can already choose from almost 100 million free CC-licensed images on Flickr but if they want a commercial image, they turn to microstock and for higher end uses, many are still prepared to pay for traditional stock.

More importantly, stock inventories might grow limitlessly but the patience to search is very limited. Unsold photos are soon buried and old photos soon go out of fashion. Photographers happy with their stock income quickly find their revenues dry up if they stop contributing new photos.

There may be a hole at the center of the photography industry but it’s more likely to be the idea of endless, effort-free photography sales.

We’d like to think that at Photopreneur we have influence in the photography world. We’d like to believe that we’re among the movers and shakers, the people who set the agenda, the picture-taking elite who are changing the face of photography forever.

But we’re far too modest for that.

And besides, the people who are really changing the photography business are you: the enthusiasts, semi-professionals and professionals who are grabbing the opportunities that the digital age has thrown up and seeing where it can take you.

You have had some help though. Over the last few years, a number of websites have launched that have had a huge effect on the photography business. In no particular order, here are the most influential.

iStockPhoto

The idea was simple, horrible, successful and completely revolutionary. To inject some competition into a stock photography market now dominated by one big company was no bad thing. But to do it by making the images royalty-free and to charge a price that many photographers saw as insultingly low was, in their eyes, outrageous. It wouldn’t last they said. No one would want to contribute.

They were wrong. Bruce Livingstone, the site’s founder, had spotted that the relatively low cost of digital photography meant that good quality cameras were now in the  hands of talented amateurs who would be happy to shoot for small payments, especially if they were getting those payments multiple times.

iStockPhoto Started as a Free Stock Site

In fact, initially, Livingstone assumed that those amateurs would be willing to supply their images for nothing more than the thrill of publication. At its launch in May 2000, iStockPhoto was a free stock site supported by Livingstone’s Web development company Evolvs Media. By 2001, the site was charging for images and generating a profit. It has remained profitable ever since, boosted by a community of more than 3 million registered members and a portfolio of nearly 4 million photos.

The threat to traditional stock photography, long an elite club in which top photographers contributed their best images to large companies which then sold usage rights to other large firms on their behalf, quickly became clear. In February 2006, Getty Images, the industry leader, realized that it couldn’t beat them and would be better off if the company joined them. It bought iStockPhoto for $50 million.

The price may have been a bargain. In 2007, the site generated almost $72 million in revenue, sharing almost $21 million with its contributors.

iStockPhoto is no longer the only microstock site on the Web. Plenty of others have followed in its wake – some successfully, others less so. But iStockPhoto was the first and it changed the way photographers sell their images, the way users buy them — and the amount they expect to pay for them too.

Flickr

Image: notsogood

Not everyone who owns a digital camera wants to sell with it though. Most people just want to show what they photographed. When Flickr gave camera-owners a place to store their images, show them to friends and family, and even join groups where they could chat about picture-taking, photographers had a home on the Web.

They could improve their skills, make friends, pick up new ideas and, we’ve found, even generate sales and build careers.

Like iStockPhoto, Flickr began with modest intentions. Developed by Canadian firm Ludicorp, Flickr was initially part of the company’s attempt to create a massive multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. Its first incarnation was based around a chat room called FlickrLive which allowed users to exchange photographs. Gradually, the site began to emphasize uploading and filing, and the chat aspect disappeared to be replaced eventually by forums and groups as influential as David Hobby’s Strobist and Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography School. Game Neverending ended as a photo site where photography enthusiasts could endlessly play and learn.

You Can’t Ignore Flickr’s 3 Billion Images

If all Flickr had done was to become the main center on the Web for image-sharing, that alone would already have made a huge difference to the way photographers used the Web and improved their skills. Certainly the 3 billion images it now hosts could hardly be ignored.

But it did much more than that.

Tagging images in the same way that stock companies keyword their photos gave contributors a sense that their images were waiting to be discovered and introduced them to the world of professional display. Enabling the addition of geo-tagging, including the ability to drag-and-drop photos onto a map, gave location scouts a whole new way of preparing for shoots and checking out sites, while the challenges set in groups and the attraction of winning a spot on the Explore page – an award made according to a Google-like algorithm based on views, faves and comments – motivated already-motivated photographers to shoot better pictures and to network like unemployed bankers at a job fair.

And then there was Creative Commons. By allowing photographers to apply a range of different Creative Commons licenses to their images, Flickr has managed to build a giant bank of almost 90 million free photographs. These have granted countless photographers enormous exposure and provided a fantastic no-cost resource for image users. Flickr photographs now turn up on outlets from small websites to The Economist’s blogs and even, controversially, on advertising billboards.

As if that wasn’t enough, The Commons also makes some of the world’s most iconic – and copyright-free – images available on the site too.

Unlike iStockPhoto though, the company has yet to come up with a solid business model. Annual membership plans which allow for limitless uploads, better organization and stats are unlikely to make a large dent in the firm’s running expenses. Nor are the sponsored groups, run by firms looking for free advertising images and we-get-social-media branding. None of that though stopped Yahoo! from buying the site in 2005, replacing its own Yahoo! Photos with the then smaller but faster-growing service.

If microstock offers cents as the reward for getting images seen, Flickr, soon likely to become part of Microsoft’s stable, has built a site in which views alone is the most important currency.

Google

What would a list of influential websites be without Google? Sure, it’s not a photography site, but Google’s versatility and efficiency have made it a valuable tool for both photographers and the people who use their images.

Some of the influence has come from its hosted service. Like Flickr, Google also allows users to browse historic images. Life magazine’s photo archive is now searchable by keyword and includes millions of images that have never been published. As a way of viewing inspiring pictures and understanding the development of photography it certainly beats an hour browsing the art books at Barnes and Noble.

Learning about Copyright

Most of Google’s influence on photography though has come through Google Images. While Yahoo! Photos fizzled and died, giving up its life in favor of Flickr, Google Images has stuck around, returning millions of pictures based on size, file type, color and even content. And unlike stock sites and Flickr, those pictures appear in context, showing how and where they were used. The recent addition of Google Image Labeler may make the searching quicker and images easier to find while removing a time-consuming headache from overworked photographers hoping to turn up in search results.

The biggest impact though has probably fallen on copyright. Too many users feel that if an image turns up in a Google search result then it’s free for anyone to copy. Using Google Alerts to receive notification of a credit – even when the user hasn’t asked permission – hardly helps.

As a result, artists who might never have worried about their works being used without authorization are creating watermarks, concerning themselves with image sizes and keeping track of how their photos are being used and where. Thanks to Google, we’re all copyright experts now.

Cafepress

Back in the old days, there were only a handful of ways that photographers could sell their images. They could talk to gallery owners and develop a taste for rejection. They could contact stock companies and get used to hearing “no, thank you.” And they could cold visit retail stores and usually hear the owner tell them that they didn’t want to sell their postcards, posters or photos on a t-shirt. If they were very lucky though, they might win an agreement based on sale or return which meant dishing out a fortune on prints in the hope that one day they’d see a profit.

Cafepress changed the dynamics of at least the last option. Founded way back in 1999 by Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, the site allowed artists to offer user-customized products on demand. Photographers then could sell mugs, bags, t-shirts, clocks and calendars decorated with their images and do so without any risk of losing their production costs. They didn’t even need to worry about the hassle of packing, shipping and storing inventory. Cafepress handled all the logistics for them, allowing contributors to focus on production.

Cafepress Sets a New Trend

The quality of items on the site has always varied – a problem faced by any commercial outlet with no entry restrictions –  but the service has nonetheless done well. It now offers over 150 million products created by more than 6.5 million contributors. In July 2008, Cafepress bought the photo printing business Imagekind giving it a chunk of the photography art-on-demand business too.

Perhaps the only area it hasn’t dominated is print-on-demand photography books, a  niche dominated by Lulu and especially Blurb.

Cafepress’s biggest effect though may be that it set a new trend. The service might have been revolutionary when it appeared but these days it has to share a space with competitors such as Zazzle, Etsy and Red Bubble. Each of those sites allows photographers to use their images to decorate household objects and to sell them with little or no risk (Etsy charges a subscription fee which keeps out the truly amateur but benefits from the appearance of more professional items.)

But Cafepress ratcheted up one more result that’s also reflected in the me-too sites that followed after it. None of the services does a great deal to market itself to buyers; contributors  are forced to do that for themselves. They might not have had to worry about filling boxes but if they were to make sales, photographers had to learn about sales points, market sources and joint ventures. Cafepress showed photographers that in the digital age, creating isn’t enough. If they want to make money, photographers have to be creative marketers now too.

eBay and Craigslist

eBay is another site that isn’t geared towards photography but which has had a huge, if largely unseen, effect on the photography industry.  Launched in 1995 by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb, the site removed commercial mediators, allowing the market to set the true price for an item based on exactly what buyers were willing to pay. Right from the beginning, that’s thrown up some surprises. The very first item sold on eBay was a laser pointer (although laser pointers are now banned) which went for $14.83 even though it was listed as “broken.”

More importantly from the point of view of photographers is that eBay also allows artists to put their works in front of potential customers without the challenge of dealing with gallery owners – or paying them half the sales price. Currently more than 3,200 printed photographs are on offer on the site with asking prices as high as $7,500.

Galleries might have a cachet and eBay is a long way from Sotheby’s but the ability to reach the art-buying public directly has created a whole new opportunity for photographic artists.

The No-Cost Way to Market Photography Prints and Services

And Craigslist has done something similar for photography services. Founded by software engineer Craig Newmark in the same year as eBay, the site was intended to do little more than function as a kind of noticeboard, helping the local community become aware of social events in San Francisco. Soon the service grew, with companies in particular using it to recruit staff. Today, the offers placed on the site range from erotic encounters to second-hand refrigerators, it covers 550 cities in over 50 countries worldwide and serves 12 billion page views a month. It’s also part-owned by eBay.

Little of that translates into cash though. Craigslist refuses to accept banner advertising, preferring only to demand small payments for some job and real estate listings.

It’s the company’s broad reach and low cost which, although they’ve been devastating to the classified sections of print newspapers, have given photographers a valuable gift.

Small photography businesses with tiny marketing budgets are now putting ads on the site, updating them regularly and winning orders with little effort and no cost. One photographer told us that she picks up a wedding job for every ten to fifteen free ads she runs on the site.

It’s just another way in which entry requirements for photographers have been lowered, allowing novices and part-timers to start earning.

Photography: nortron

A number of factors have changed the photography world. The Internet has created a whole new market with a limitless demand for images – even if not everyone actually pays for them, and those who do often have very limited budgets. Microstock, Flickr and a host of other services have broken down the barriers between producers and buyers so that anyone – and not just professionals — can offer images to people who might need them. And cameras are everywhere. That’s not just because almost everyone now owns at least a simple point-and-shoot while professional-quality DSLRs are within the reach of even budget-conscious enthusiasts. It’s also because just about every decent mobile phone comes with a camera included.

With estimated sales of more than 10 million units then, the iPhone should be every photopreneur’s most valuable tool: a camera they carry everywhere without even noticing.

It isn’t, of course. With just two megapixels, you might just scrape past iStockPhoto’s 1200 x 1600 pixel minimum but you’re not going to be producing gallery-sized prints from your iPhone. The inability to play with the camera’s settings gives little, if any, control over lighting and, of course, you’re stuck with the iPhone’s tiny lens.

The iPhone as the Music-Lover’s Camera

It is possible though to produce interesting pictures with an iPhone. CultofMac recently ran a number of concert pictures shot with an iPhone, some of which went beyond snaps to show some interesting effects. At least eighteen iPhone photos have made it to Flickr’s Explore page, including this beauty.

But it’s still going to be hard to sell an image from an iPhone. Buyers, after all, don’t care whether the image was shot with a top-of-the-range Hasselblad or through a pin-hole camera. They only care about the result. Getting a good result from an iPhone will always be a challenge and telling the buyer that the picture might be grainy but it was shot with a very cool mobile phone is unlikely to close the deal.

But does that mean it’s impossible to sell a picture from an iPhone?

We haven’t come across anyone who’s actually done it (so if you have, there’s a comment box at the bottom – we’d love to know) but we did wonder what it might take.

Exclusive access could be one requirement. InStyle’s account of New York Fashion Week in February 2008 featured a number of behind-the-scenes images of reporter Katrina Szish interviewing leading designers. Those images were shot on an iPhone by Michael Hopkins and were presumably included in the report because InStyle didn’t have anything else they could use.

When the subject is hard to come by – and there’s a demand for it – there’s always an opportunity to make a sale. Matt Pagel, for example, put his photograph of the new de Young museum in San Francisco on Flickr after he was one of the first people to gain access to the building. The interest in his picture led to the photo being printed in Icon magazine and later sold as a print.

Matt’s picture wasn’t shot on an iPhone but if you have an one, it’s always with you. That means you’ve always got a chance to take pictures of events and subjects that other people miss – and might want.

Be a Winner with your iPhone

Contests can be another way of making your iPhone pictures pay, although they have to be pretty specialized. The annual iPhone Photography Awards, launched last year, promised a 20 inch iMac to the winning entry. In the end, the winner apparently received an iPod Touch instead, and this year, the first three winners “will be publicized on IPPA online gallery and published in the IPPA Annual Book.” That’s not going to make anyone rich.

Kelby Training, on the other hand, creators of the iPhone Book, did a little better with a $500 Apple Store card as the first prize in their iPhone photography contest. The winner was free to exchange it for a $100 iTunes Gift Card and a copy of Kelby’s book.

Interestingly, while some of the winning entries were as head-scratchingly snappy as you might expect from a two megapixel mobile phone, the best in the show was as good as anything a better grade of camera might produce and underlined the old adage that good cameras don’t shoot good pictures, good photographers do.

And that might be the third way you can turn your iPhone into a photography money-making machine: make use of the phone’s strengths and weaknesses to create atmospheric pictures. It’s not too hard, for example, to imagine a picture like this by Sion Fullana selling as a postcard, while many of the concert photos highlighted by CultofMac featured similar bleached lights. The inability of iPhone users then to control shutter speed and aperture might mean that while the camera’s range is limited, shoot a light source at night and you’ll create one particular type of effect. If you can find a market for that effect – whether it’s on Zazzle or Cafepress products, postcards or even iPhone wallpaper – you might be able to turn a shot made on the spur of the moment into revenue. That could be especially true if you’re also a whiz with Photoshop.

Clearly, you’re not going to  be using your iPhone to build your stock portfolio, shoot a wedding or create portraits. But if you use it to take opportunistic pictures, regard any specialized contests as a challenge and a chance to be a winner, and focus on the camera’s strengths rather than its limitations, you might just be able to find the occasional buyer for the result.

Digital imaging changed everything. The darkroom turned into a Mac, rolls of film capable of holding no more than 36 pictures became plastic rectangles capable of holding  hundreds of shots, image selection began to take place immediately after the shoot, photographs could be delivered to clients at the click of a button, and deadlines became tighter than ever.

And of course, new sales channels opened up, allowing anyone with a camera and talent to put their work in front of buyers, revolutionizing the world of commercial photography.

So what happens now?

It would be nice to believe that after the upheavals of recent years, we can all take a breather, get used to the new ways of working and spend our time figuring out how to make the most of them. But life doesn’t work that way. The photography world is still changing. Smaller microstock sites like DigitalRailroad and LuckyOliver have found that selling images at a buck a piece isn’t as easy as it looks. Larger firms like PhotoShelter have discovered that buyers don’t always know what they want – or don’t buy what they say they like. And there’s still plenty of room for improvement in image searching, display and purchasing.

Consolidating Three Million Images

One new trend then might be seen in BrightQube. Launched in 2007 and headed by Lee Corkran, a former professional photographer who has also worked for Digital Railroad, the service has few images of its own. Instead, it consolidates more than three million stock photos from more than 40 different companies, including Corbis, Jupiter Image’s Comstock and Getty’s Stockbyte as well as many independent niched firms such as GoGo Images and Photo India.

For buyers who don’t want to flip from site to site while looking for images, that already makes BrightQube a useful portal. But the service also stands out in the way that it displays search results. Instead of offering page after page of images, ordered usually according to a secret recipe of keyword relevance, views and downloads, BrightQube presents what it calls a “Dynamic Mosaic” interface – a giant, automatic-loading, animated wall of thumbnails which buyers can navigate with their arrow keys or a navigational grid, zooming in on the images that look the most promising. According to Lee, the system, which looks like a two-dimensional version of PicLens, allows customers to search “hundreds of times faster than on other sites.”

Images are initially ordered by keywords, with the most relevant photographs placed in the middle of the mosaic, but buyers can then choose to order the images by price or size.

[P]hotographers working with collections large and small can be assured their images will appear on a single, equitable page of search results, in front of buyers’ eyes, giving every picture a fighting chance to be found, seen and sold,” Lee told us.

But first, photographers have to get their images onto the wall, and that’s where things can get a little tricky. In a May interview with SocalTech, Lee indicated that the company was experimenting with adding user-generated content and that a private beta would be available in early fall. When we asked him in mid-November whether independent photographers could submit their images to the site though, Lee merely said:

“Not at the moment, but we are looking into this feature in the future.”

The Back Door to the Mosaic Wall

In the  meantime, photographers will have to use some indirect routes. While some of the companies from which BrightQube sources its images have the kind of acceptance standards that could block non-professionals, BrightQube does divide its inventory into two collections. “Everyday” images are microstock photos sourced from Dreamstime; “professional” images come from everyone else. The lack of exclusivity in microstock means that the service offers photos from just one low-cost royalty-free site: buyers looking for “everyday” photos would likely end up looking at a wall made up of identical photos.

The easiest way for a photographer to get their photos onto BrightQube’s wall then will be to submit them to Dreamstime, giving the company an important advantage if the service takes off. It would also help to make sure that the photos show the right subjects. According to Lee, the  most popular keywords currently being sought by buyers are “woman,” “couple,” “young,” “business” and “wildlife” – broad enough categories to suit most photographers.

The remaining question then is whether the service will take off. One of the reasons put forward by Allen Murabayashi, CEO of PhotoShelter, to explain the collapse of his company’s stock division was the subscription model that locked buyers into companies that they’ve used in the past; changing sources in the middle of a month risked a financial penalty. That’s still a challenge that BrightQube will have to overcome. At the moment, they’re not sharing their sales figures though so it’s impossible to gauge how well they’re doing that.

Even if BrightQube itself doesn’t turn out to be the future of stock photography though, it’s likely that future will include faster searching, a neater display… and the consolidation of stock libraries.

Photography: Andrew Houser

One of the great things about the new photography world is that each new entrant brings with them not just enthusiasm for digital photography and a willingness to learn and experiment, but also the skills and knowledge they picked up in their old jobs.

That’s likely to influence their image-taking. Andreas Reinhold, for example, is an engineer by day but his love of photography has led him to create a second career for himself as a car photographer, regularly winning commissions from leading auto publications. Andres Rodriguez was a Web designer. Now as one of the world’s highest-earning microstock photographers, he creates the images that thousands of other designers use every day.

Photographers Just Push Buttons

That additional knowledge is something that Andrew Houser has used to his benefit too. A Web programmer by profession, Andrew had experimented with film photography after high school but hadn’t been impressed. In fact, he came to the odd conclusion that photographers did little more than push a button, never producing anything of their own. It was only when he picked up a simple point-and-shoot digital camera that he became hooked, quickly upgrading to a prosumer model and finally to his first Nikon D-SLR.

“There was such a lag between when I took the shot and when I saw the results [on film] that learning that way was nearly impossible and certainly not enjoyable,” Andrew explained. “Digital has changed all that for us and photographers are much more involved after the shutter has exposed the image.”

Today, Andrew shoots a mixture of landscape photography, portraits, fine art and nudes, as well as long exposure for fun and development. He’s been earning from his images for about two years and offers prints and commissions through his website.

Photography: Andrew Houser

What helps Andrew stand out as a photographer though — and become well-known — is a combination of his love of looking at beautiful images and his knowledge of coding.

In addition to creating outstanding images, he’s also the creator of FlickrLeech, a way of avoiding Flickr’s clunky search engine. Users can search favorites, sets, groups, specific member’s images and even the whole site bringing up as many as 200 thumbnails on a single page. Best of all for photographers like Andrew keen on seeing and learning from other great images, FlickrLeech also offers 500 thumbnails at a time when exploring photos that Flickr’s algorithm has marked up for their “Interestingness.” That’s a vast improvement on the handful that Flickr offers on its own site.

“I found that being able to see only ten photos at a time, I had to click through 50 pages to see everything,” Andrew told us. “What’s worse, because the algorithm behind Interestingness is dynamic, it meant that sometimes I’d change pages and an image that was on page 3 was now on page 4. Even worse, I could miss some images as they moved up the list before I viewed them. Being a programmer as well as a photographer, I decided it would be great if I could take a snapshot of all 500 images at once and not miss anything.”

The response, says Andrew, has been generally positive despite complaints from some photographers that FlickrLeech steals images (a charge Andrew refutes). The tool, which in its first incarnation took just two evenings on the sofa to create (the latest version took two weeks), makes clever use of Flickr’s API to enable photographers to find the best photos on the site and improve their own picture-taking by looking at the best new uploads.

Skills that Make Friends… and Make you Stand Out

That makes Andrew a friend  to other photography-lovers (or at least to those who recognized that FlickrLeech only displays images without swiping them) and an important member of the online photography community. It might also make him a friend – and well-known — though to image users looking for photos to buy and hoping to use a system that can dramatically cut their search time.

Andrew, of course, didn’t create FlickrLeech for any of those reasons. He did it because he didn’t like the way that Flickr displayed images on the Explore page and thought he could use his skills to create something better. But that was true of Andreas Reinhold too, who simply liked cars and cameras… and now finds his images on the covers of magazines.

The point is that that anyone who comes into photography from another profession brings with them a set of skills that gives them a unique advantage. You don’t have to use those skills with the goal of winning a benefit but you might well find that when you do use them in the world of photography, you get to enjoy those benefits anyway.

“It was a lie then, and it’s a lie now.”

That was the opinion of MarcW, a commenter on this blog writing in response to our post on the failure of PhotoShelter’s stock division. He was referring to claims photo buyers had made in the company’s survey that they wanted images that were “edgy” and “outside the box.” Drawing on his own experience with buyers in other industries, MarcW wrote:

“We’d show them a new toy, or a game treatment, or a prototype, or whatever, and the buyers would love it and it would test great and marketing would kill it because they didn’t know how to sell it.

Over and over and over and over and over and over.”

It was a fascinating answer that seemed to provide a good explanation for the failure of a company that had put so much effort into offering products the market said it wanted: the market was lying. Buyers said they wanted controversial but when it came to reaching into their pockets, they bought safe.

The moral was that stock companies – and photographers — should stick with the standard images because those were the only photos that actually sold.

Buyers Beat Getty

And yet, that’s not entirely what’s happening. Buyers are looking beyond Getty and Corbis and their sub-divisions for photos that are different and original. We’ve seen that they’re approaching photographers on Flickr, even when those images aren’t being offered for sale, and they’re looking through personal galleries too.

Dan James, for example, works at a small Web company that employs fourteen people. In the last two years, four of the people at his firm have been approached by buyers who wanted to purchase their images.

“Four different organizations had stumbled upon these photos, looked up who we were as individuals (our contact information was not on our galleries), contacted us, negotiated a price, and ultimately we ended up selling the photos,” he told us.

“The buyers are not settling for what’s in the stock portfolios and are searching the Web and making cold calls on images.”

None of the images that Dan and his colleagues sold were classic stock images. One image by Steven Garrity, for example, was simply a snap of his messy desk. After selling a license for his image of a Peruvian condor to appear on the cover of a travel guide, Dan submitted it to a number of stock sites to see what their response would be. All rejected it.

“One actually labeled it as ‘unsellable or something ironic like that,” he said.

Although the marketing had been simple – none of the photographers had done anything to promote their pictures other than upload and keyword them – the negotiations were difficult and conducted by email. None of the sellers had any idea how much the photos should cost while the buyers were experienced professionals keen to land a usable photo at a rock-bottom price.

Making Flickr Sales Easier

Dan’s response to that experience has been to build a service that allows anyone to upload any image they want and make it available for sale. Clustershot places no limits on the types of images that can be uploaded (other than that the photographer should own the rights to it) and lets the photographer set the price. Currently, these range from 50 cents to “hundreds of dollars.” Clustershot will take 12 percent of the sale price, leaving the photographer with an impressive 88 percent. The service is fairly new and the number of photos is currently between 50,000 and 60,000 rather than the millions that can be found in many stock inventories. Interestingly though, just over half of those images come from Flickr, reflecting the service’s broad base and non-professional contributors. The rest have largely been uploaded through the RSS feeds of other galleries.

Sales so far though have been low and number just a handful.

“This is an Internet startup. We’re not focused on sales,” Dan explained.

That’s a luxury Clustershot can afford because it’s sponsored by SilverOrange which allows Dan and his colleagues to develop the site as a side-project. Eventually though, Dan hopes that Clustershot will become “the Ebay of photos.”

Reaching that goal will presumably depend on photographers continuing to upload images, tag them well and include descriptions that make them easy for buyers to find and understand. Perhaps most importantly, it will depend on the images being priced correctly, perhaps still the hardest thing for non-professional photographers to do. Dan notes that the rarer the subject of the image, the more expensive it should be. Photos of the Statue of Liberty, he suggests, should sell for pennies; photos of almost extinct plants in the middle of the Amazon should be offered for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

In practice, that’s likely to mean that most images on the site will be dirt-cheap, perhaps not the best way to build a big non-stock, stock site. But despite Dan’s Ebay fantasy, that isn’t really the aim of the service. The goal is to actuall make it easier for buyers to source unconventional images and for amateurs to make occasional sales.

“For us this is much more about a platform and free market than being a traditional stock photography website,” Dan says. “We have no delusions of grandeur though. If it allows us to sell our own photos now and then and make a few bucks for lunch then great.”

Photography: Jeff Bauche

As times grow harder, it’s likely that the number of professional photographers is likely to grow smaller. Photography businesses that have long lived on the edge of breaking even will find their cash flows squeezed by wedding couples who cut back on their expenditures and by companies that choose to spend less on product images. Some corporate clients, of course, will disappear altogether.

As at least one commenter on this blog has pointed out, that means richer pickings for those photographers left behind. Photography companies with solid client bases and established revenue streams may well expect to come out of the recession stronger than they came in.

But what do you do in the meantime?

If you know that another photographer is going to the wall, do you lend them a hand to keep them afloat? Or watch them sink and sweep up the remains? There might be little room for sentiment in business but there’s plenty of room for solidarity between fellow photographers struggling through hard times.

Brother, Can you Spare a Lens?

In fact, there doesn’t always have to be a contradiction. News photographers – perhaps the most competitive photographers of all – might fall over each other to swipe the best spot at a news conference and they’ll certainly keep scoop-winning information to themselves, but they’ll think nothing of lending a fellow photographer a lens if they haven’t brought the right equipment or, in the old days, sharing a roll of film with someone who’s on their last load.

That sort of small-scale co-operation is easy to understand. The competitor is in trouble because of bad luck or a one-off mistake in preparation, not because their business plan is flawed or they don’t have the talent to stay in the profession. They’ll still be around next year, even if they’re having a bad day, and if it’s the kind of mistake that anyone can make – and everyone does – then helping out is just good sense. The next time you pack the wrong lens, you can expect the same assistance in return.

The kind of co-operation you can find on Flickr makes sense too. The site is famous for groups in which professionals advise amateurs, swap tips among themselves and help enthusiasts move from part-timers into paid work… even though that might mean less work available for them.

It’s even possible that we’ll see even more of this kind of co-operation as hobbyists look for ways to justify an expensive pastime and camera-owners start to see their equipment as a way to bring in some useful extra income.

Photographers are willing to help here because they don’t really see those they’re supporting as direct competition. Distance might mean that they’re operating in very different geographical markets, and if one photographer is asking for help, that’s a good sign that they’re working in different qualitative markets too.

Help in Wyoming, Not Wichita

There’s a big difference between an experienced wedding photographer in Wichita helping a new photographer get started in Wyoming, and telling a new photography business in the same town how to trawl for clients and what people really want to see in a portfolio.

But co-operation can sometimes extend to photographers working in the same market too. Wedding photographers, for example, often need back-up in case they fall ill on the day of an event or find that they can’t make it to a shoot that’s already been agreed. On those occasions, the damage inflicted by a broken contract and a disappointed client is likely to be far more harmful than the loss of a good client to another good photographer. That’s especially true when the co-operation works both ways and each photographer is able to rely on the other for emergency support.

In fact, when clients become so much more valuable, being able to promise guaranteed back-up becomes the sort of sales point that can help to land deals.

You can think of this kind of co-operation as happening in the best of circumstances: when you have more work than you can handle, even if you’d like to.

And that’s perhaps the most popular form of co-operation between photographers and one that could well be a huge opportunity for those photography businesses that do manage to survive the financial storm. New photographers are likely to be less enthusiastic about starting up on their own when credit is tight and clients hard to find. Instead, they’ll be happier to work with an existing studio, take a salary – even a small one – and build up experience until they’re ready to start their own businesses. Assistants then should be plentiful, allowing photography businesses that are looking strong to grow at the right pace and with minimal risk of over-reach.

There is one more type of co-operation you can look to perform though, and that’s with businesses that aren’t competitors. There’s never a better time to set up joint ventures than when money is tight and everyone wants all the help they can find. Help related businesses stay open now, be generous with your assistance, and when the recession blows over you might well find that you’re not the only one still standing – and that you’re standing strong.

Photography: Reid Carr (Red Door Interactive)

Photographers usually want to make money out of their own images. But when you appreciate photography and love your specialty, making money out of other people’s photos can be rewarding too.

Stephen Searer, a history teacher, is at least partly on his way to doing that with OfficeSnapshots.com, which posts photographs of the insides of corporate offices. Launched in August 2007, the site has already featured the workspaces of 233 different companies. Most of those businesses are hi-tech, which probably reflects the kind of work its users do, and because some of them are very large (they include Google and Yahoo!), a number of firms have appeared more than once, so the actual number of photographed offices is even higher.

Offering a sneak peek through the windows of companies we’ve all heard of and businesses whose products we use, the site appeals to our curiosity. We get to see where the websites we read are put together and the desks on which the software we use every day is written. The idea, says Stephen, came after seeing several office picture collections on Digg’s home page.

“I enjoyed seeing the insides of those offices, but after looking around, there was no place that was dedicated to just that idea. So I created it.”

Considering its source, it’s no surprise then that the most popular office on the site is Apple’s Cupertino campus, followed by the offices of Digg itself.

The site’s users range from nosy types who just want to see what someone else’s office looks like, to interior designers looking for trends, to employers hoping to create a better work environment for their employees. Although the companies sometimes invite Stephen to shoot the offices himself (and occasionally send in the pictures in a bid to generate interest and improve search engine optimization), most of the images are sent in by the site’s users or are CC-licensed on Flickr. That can raise some interesting legal dilemmas. Stephen says that he makes sure that publication of the photos is always authorized by the photographer, and during his own shoots is usually asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The company may also ask to view the images before they’re uploaded to make sure that visible whiteboards do not contain any confidential information.

Photographs sent in by employees though can present tougher problems.

“[W]e have had several emails from a company asking that a specific photo of an employee be removed upon their request,” recalled Stephen. “We have also had instances where an employee would like to send images, but they have not received the okay from their bosses.”

The type and quality of the photographs that users contribute tends to vary too. Offices can clearly provide an opportunity to shoot beautiful, artistic images but the site serves a purpose. For Stephen, the goal of OfficeSnapshots.com is to reveal what the office actually looks like for employees.

“We do get quite a few ultra-clean, amazingly photographed sets, but I just like to be able to imagine what it would actually be like to work at the particular company,” says Stephen. “If a picture is able to capture that, then I think it is an effective picture.”

The importance of an image’s utility then, is always going to be important — even when posted to a free website — something that photographers always need to consider.

While the legal restrictions of posting photographs taken of private spaces can be relatively easy to handle (provided you’re careful and move quickly to handle complaints), generating income from a site like this is much harder. OfficeSnapshots.com has an online store offering affiliate-linked office furniture but that has yet to generate any money at all and may soon be phased out. Advertising brings in some income but that depends on a larger audience. Stephen’s day job means that he doesn’t give the site as large a marketing push as he would like, but he is looking into ways of expanding the site to bring in more users. In the meantime, he’s having fun creating the site and from seeing his readers enjoying it.

In theory, with enough users, targeted ads and time spent marketing, there’s no reason why the site’s income shouldn’t grow and provide some useful extra revenue for someone whose main motivation is to look at interesting pictures.

And clearly, there’s also no reason the same system couldn’t work in other fields of interest. If people want to take a peek inside offices, they might also want to see pictures of hotel rooms, bars, restaurants and homes. Or how about golf courses, libraries, colleges and airports?

The question is probably not whether you can make it pay but which topics would interest you the most – and how much satisfaction you’d get showing other people’s photographs and not just your own.

Microstock might have hit the stock world like a kick to the shins, but it carries one big advantage and one giant disadvantage. The advantage is that anyone can now earn from their photography. Photographers no longer need to be professional full-timers to license their photos and they’re free to upload as many or as few images each month as they wish. The disadvantage is that the pay is terrible. With sales starting at a dollar a download, photographers can receive just cents for an image that may appear on a website with millions of readers — and then be used by the same buyer on ads, marketing material and anything else for no extra payment.

Traditional stock companies, on the other hand, might return hundreds of dollars — and often, thousands – in royalties for image use. Even if you’re uploading and selling enough licenses to bring in a useful additional income, as some microstock photographers are doing, that’s still a high price to pay for open access.

Open Access is not the Same as Free Access

fotoLibra, however, attempts to provide all of the advantages of microstock with none of the disadvantages. The company, which describes itself as a “picture library,” allows anyone to upload images, has no submission panel and does not demand a large portfolio. In the three years since it launched, fotoLibra’s collection has grown to a quarter of a million images of which only four have been rejected for being inappropriate (although 750 are turned down each day for failing to meet the company’s technical requirements).

“We accept all images because our taste cannot be the same as the buyers’,” Gwyn Headley, the company’s founder and managing director told us. “Recently I saw one image on the site which I felt must have been uploaded as a mistake because I personally thought it was so bad. I pointed it out to a colleague, who told me it had just been sold to a theatre company for £450. Let the photographers choose what they feel will sell.”

Open access isn’t the same as free access though. fotoLibra charges photographers to store their images with the company and make them available for sale. For £18 (about $33 USD) per quarter, photographers receive 5 GB of storage space; £45 (about $84 USD) per quarter increases that to 100 GB and boosts the royalty rate from 50 percent to 60 percent. A free membership also allows photographers to upload twelve pictures once to try the site out. According to the site’s blurb, at least one free member has uploaded one image and sold it five days later, receiving a royalty of more than £1,000.

If a business model that allows anyone to join, demands payment from photographers but markets images on both a royalty-free and rights-managed basis for traditional rates sounds unusual, it does at least reflect the company’s origins. Gwyn, a book publishing consultant, had run a specialist picture library for about twelve years, offering images of architectural follies shot mostly by himself and about two dozen other part-time photographers. His work in publishing had also brought him into contact with many of the leading players in the picture library world, so he knew the value of images, he says. When a burst water tank wiped out 120 years of family photographs, he developed a plan to allow photographers to store their images on servers and added his photo sales knowledge to allow them to sell their pictures too. Even the monthly subscription price was based on the cost of a roll of Fujia Velvia film in Gwyn’s local camera shop.

Today, the site has more than 19,000 members of whom 71 percent are based in the UK – fotoLibra works out of a national park in Wales – and the remainder from some 151 different countries. About a third of the British photographers are professionals, mostly working in the high street and wedding photography business, but contributors also include Linda Wright, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Although photographers can choose whether to offer their images on a rights-managed or royalty-free basis, about 80 percent of the images are rights-managed.

Wanted: Images of Knights Jousting

The images are marketed hard. While many stock companies rely solely on online advertising to bring in buyers, fotoLibra is a regular at book fairs, where it’s able to pitch directly to publishers face-to-face. Members also receive a newsletter that includes picture calls for specific subjects. Topics have ranged from “knights jousting” and “Nigerian schoolrooms” to “American people interacting with each other” and “San Francisco.” In general though, the demands tend to be very specific.

“The point of the fotoLibra Picture Call is that we ask for clearly defined situations and locations,” explains Gwyn. “[A] generic shot of the Chicago skyline is great, but every picture library has millions of those. fotoLibra needs and gets specific places like ‘Animal Kingdom pet store, 2980 North Milwaukee Avenue.’”

Because of the level of specificity, the results of the picture calls tends to vary according to the topic. A call for “colorful greetings cards,” for example, has brought in 529 images of which most are suitable; “Nigerian schoolrooms” produced about a dozen submissions. The calls have never drawn a complete blank. Occasionally, a client will also ask fotoLibra to find a photographer for a commission. That’s not a service the company pushes but it has happened four times this year.

Unlike Gwyn’s original photo library, fotoLibra does not specialize. Asked what sort of images the company needs most, Gwyn replied with a blanket “everything” but then referred specifically to images of people.

“My personal beef is not seeing enough people face-on or close-up — we always seem to have crowds of people with their backs to the distant camera,” Gwyn says. “I think scare stories about invasion of privacy and people running to lawyers trouble a lot of photographers and hamper their confidence when it comes to getting in close. It doesn’t seem to trouble the paparazzi. And they manage to sell their pictures.”

Images submitted to fotoLibra do not have to be exclusive but if an image is licensed on a rights-managed basis, it has to be removed from other outlets for the period of the license, an important consideration. The rewards though can more than make up for it. Although fotoLibra has more than 1,000 different prices to offer buyers depending on what they plan to do with the image, the average sale price is £51 ($95 USD). License a few images at those prices and you can give microstock its own kick on the shins.

It used to be that photography books were once the preserve of established professionals – people whose names would be familiar enough to make publishers take notice and promising enough to enable booksellers to stick enormous price tags on the cover. Today, of course, that’s all changed. Anyone can now produce their own photography book using a service like Lulu or Blurb and make it available for sale.

But there’s a difference between creating a photography book and creating a photography book that works. The subject has to be right and the images too, of course, but so do the sequencing and the layout. Eileen Gittins, CEO and founder of Blurb, has talked to us about the importance of storytelling in photography books and the role of white space on the pages. Both of those can help to make a collection more interesting to browse – and both were likely to have been among the factors considered during the judging of the company’s Photography.Book.Now competition whose grand prize winner was announced recently.

The Power of Platinum

Beth Dow, a landscape photographer with more than twenty years’ experience and a long list of group and solo exhibitions, beat out 2,000 competitors to collect the $25,000 grand prize for her book “In the Garden.”

“Ms. Dow’s photography is truly outstanding,” Darius Himes, the competition’s lead judge said. “Her elegant images of the cultivated natural world, her devotion to a traditional photographic process, her ability to make work that feels contemporary, and her intelligent use of the book form to showcase that work is what ultimately separated her work from an impressive field.”

Beth’s book contains 78 pages of images shot in British gardens and printed on platinum-palladium prints. The topic, she told us, captured her imagination during an eight-year stay in London when she would spend as much time as possible in the countryside visiting National Trust properties and admiring the planned landscapes of English stately homes.

“These gardens are such extreme expressions of design, history, science, and style, yet I’m always looking for those little gestures of nature’s rebellion,” Beth explained. “For all their careful pruning, staking, and wiring, nature still likes to throw a finger (or two) at the gardener. I guess that’s me in a nutshell.”

Sequencing is Fun

Despite using a print format whose richness she concedes is not easy to capture in a book, Beth says that she always regards the end goal of her photography as a printed volume. She’s seduced by the “thingness” of books, she says, and even if some of the subtlety of platinum is lost in the transfer, the physicality of the book itself can reflect the sense of the image as artifact.

That Beth was always thinking of her photographs as part of a book collection is likely to have helped during the planning process. The book was already designed in her head before she began playing with Blurb’s software, she explained, and choosing the sequencing was fun rather than a chore.

“Pictures tend to have an effect on each other, and I like to mess around with that. Flipping through a book of landscape photographs feels to me like going for a walk. Each page leads somewhere else, and I start to notice visual patterns. I also like to mess things up a bit to see what happens.”

It’s a process that’s very different, she points out, to planning an exhibition where the layout of the gallery can dictate how works can be hung and can even affect the elements in the composition. It’s also why she chose single-image spreads in her book: to create breathing room around the pictures and make the photos the focus of the book rather than their arrangement or the volume itself. One approach to creating a photography book, Beth explains, is to produce a handmade artist’s book in which every detail contributes to the whole. The second approach – and the one that Beth took – is to treat the book as a vehicle for delivering the images.

Ultimately, that’s because the success of any photography book is always going to depend on the images.

“First of all, the pictures need to work,” says Beth. “There are a million different ways that can happen, but they need to stand on their own with the umbilical cord neatly cut.”

Of course, there are also lots of different ways to measure success. Creating a photography book that people admire is one. Creating a photography book that people buy would be another. “In the Garden” sells for $80 which is likely to give it a fairly limited market and Beth’s marketing appears to be restricted to linking to Blurb from her website’s home page. Nonetheless, she has, she says, sold “several copies.”

A third measure of success though would certainly be winning $25,000 in an international competition judged by experts. That’s especially true when the money will be used to fund a return to England and an attempt to expand the project even wider.

On October 10, 2008, PhotoShelter will close the PhotoShelter Collection, its stock outlet. In an announcement on the company’s website, Allen Murabayashi, PhotoShelter’s CEO declared:

“We believed that we could create a more democratic system – a marketplace for stock photography where virtually any one could participate. And a few months later, The PhotoShelter Collection was born. Upload your images, keyword & price, attach the appropriate releases, and voila! You were now a stock photographer…

We knew that sales would be challenging, but we honestly underestimated the complexity of sales. Licensing photography isn’t like selling a widget on eBay. It’s intellectual property fraught with clearance issues”

The bottom line is that the collection failed to make enough money in enough time to justify continuing. PhotoShelter will continue with personal archiving — the company describes its financial position as “strong” – but it will no longer be offering stock images to photo buyers.

The Slowness of Crowds

In a blog post, Allen describes some of the “learnings” that his experiment with stock selling taught him. These include the dominance of Getty, the difficulty of persuading buyers to break with subscription plans which lock them into a relationship with a supplier, and the inability of crowd-sourcing to move quickly enough to meet market demands.

It also apparently taught him to steer clear of stock, perhaps a wise choice for a business owner. But that’s not necessarily the smartest move for a photographer who hopes to earn money from his or her images. Although there are now plenty of options for photographers hoping to sell their images, the ability to repeatedly – and largely passively — sell licenses for the use of photographs is always going to be attractive. Allen dismisses microstock because of its low prices even though it too is democratic, provides some dedicated professionals with a real income and gives others some valuable extra revenue (and unlike the Photoshelter Collection, it works) but there are alternatives that fall between the low prices of microstock and the closed doors of traditional stock.

The Nimbleness of Niche Sites

One of the advantages that Allen Murabayashi hoped PhotoShelter would enjoy over its rivals, for example, is its ability to announce a market demand to thousands of photographers, and in a short space of time, have enough offerings to satisfy the client. In practice, he says, that didn’t work because “many research requests are due within a day,” forcing buyers to scour libraries for the photos they need. If that’s true – and the success of fotoLibra’s photo calls suggests that perhaps it’s not always true – it does create an opportunity for niche stock sites to steal a move on their larger rivals.

We’ve already seen how some photographers are doing this. Mark Maziarz has a string of boutique stock sites that offer images related to sports photography, Park City, Utah and the good life. Josh McCulloch offers licenses for his outdoor images through his own website, and Greg Epperson’s websites only provide photos related to rock-climbing.

Interestingly though, Greg, who concedes that major clients tend to go to the big stock houses, leaving him to deal with the smaller designers, has two sites through which he offers licensed photos.

“One shows the dramatized versions that stock buyers and designers are more likely to license and the other is the ‘real’ thing,” he told us. “The real thing sells poorly because the clients don’t get it. The dramatized versions sell because the client can understand it.”

That might suggest that PhotoShelter made another mistake – one not listed in Allen Murabayashi’s mea culpa: that it was wrong to believe buyers when they told PhotoShelter they wanted more realistic images and fewer posed photos. That fact was one of the more interesting things that came out of the company’s Shoot! The Day project, a plan to rejuvenate PhotoShelter’s stock library with unique offerings that art editors actually wanted to buy.

The buyers’ survey comments and requests made sense. Stock images tend to be fairly similar. Photographers can see what sells and tend to reproduce it rather than risking their time and effort on unusual images for which there might be no market. PhotoShelter attempted to provide those naturalistic images… and found that buyers stayed with the traditional shots available at Getty.

It’s hard to say though whether that’s because there’s a difference between what buyers say they want to see and what they’re actually willing to buy, or whether Getty’s subscription plans have the market for major buyers sewn up. For rock-climbing, at least, it seems to be the former but that might be something to do with the complexities of clambering up mountains.

So what does all this mean for photographers? The loss of another mid-stock outlet might mean nothing but it should show the importance of being independent and not relying too much on one sales channel. And adding a subscription model to your own stock site could be a good idea too.

We’re always banging on about the importance of niches here. When the market’s crowded, being a small fish in a big pond can be much easier – and a lot more profitable – than trying to steal scraps from the big boys. It’s why we’ve seen photographers choosing to specialize in rock climbing, astronomy and car photography.

Interestingly, though it’s also an approach that some photography services are taking.

Pikeo is a photo-sharing website that was launched in Beta form last year. The principle is simple: upload images and let anyone view them. That also makes it very familiar and if that was all the site did, it would be hard to see how it could catch up with the giants of the photo-sharing world like Flickr and PhotoBucket.

Flickr’s center however, is its groups – the places where photographers get together to swap ideas and admire each others’ images.

Start with a Map

Pikeo’s center is its map. Upload an image and you’ll be asked to place tags that answer the questions “Who?” “What?” and “Where?” Enter the place name and immediately, you’ll be offered a map on which you can stick a pin marking the spot. When you log in, a Google-style map is one of the first things you’re offered.

“[Pikeo's] key differential is the ‘geo-tagging’ feature, which allows users to create a visual map of their travels,” Kevin Fitzsimons, a spokesman for the company said. “This is an especially useful tool for travelers.”

Flickr, of course, offers geo-tagging too, but it’s not a feature used by everyone and it feels like an additional option rather than the heart of the site. By placing an emphasis on the map feature, Pikeo is able to position itself as a photography site for people on the move – an image that no doubt satisfies its parent company, France Telecom. Although Pikeo operates independently, it’s no surprise to learn that Pikeo’s members can upload images directly from their mobile phones anywhere in the world.

Pikeo’s market position as a site with an emphasis on travel images is also determined by its promotions. The site is currently running a competition together with Lonely Planet, publishers of travel guides for backpackers. The four winners will get to see their images used on the covers of Lonely Planet’s Encounters guides to London, Paris, Istanbul and Barcelona. Although they won’t be paid for those images, the winners will be able to choose a prize from trips to India, the Serengeti, Morocco or Russia – a reward that could be worth as much as $2,400 depending on where they decide to go.

A stack of runners-up prizes include Lonely Planet guides and photobooks created through Photobox.

No Cheesy Tourist Shots

The competition is free to enter. Entrants need only sign up at Pikeo, join the relevant Lonely Planet Competition group and upload up to five images of the city. With the images required consisting of some of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, it’s no surprise that the judges – representatives of Pikeo, Lonely Planet Images and the British Association of Photographers – are going to have to look at an awful lot of photos.

“We’ve received thousands of submissions and expect to receive thousands more in the final days of the competition,” Kevin told us. “It’s been incredibly popular.”

The competition site includes tips from Lonely Planet for taking a winning image, which suggest shooting from a street perspective, using “iconic sights or architecture in everyday context,” and interestingly, “always have a person or people within frame.” Clichés and “cheesy tourist shots” are out – which will probably cut a large number of submissions.

Perhaps the best approach to take when considering which photos to submit is to look not just at the text on the tip sheet but the sample covers. All of them make the viewer feel as though he or she is in the city. (And although they all contain people, none of those people is recognizable, avoiding the difficulty of trying to land model releases.)

Obviously, entrants have to own the copyright to the images they submit and while Pikeo and Lonely Planet make no rights claims over submissions, the four winning images will be licensed exclusively to Lonely Planet for publication “subject to an agreement reached between the winning photographers and Lonely Planet.”

The competition closes on September 8 which means you’ll have to move fast to get your images in in time (although entering only takes a few minutes.) Even if you don’t win though, it’s still worth looking at how Pikeo operates to see how you too can give yourself a unique market position by placing an emphasis on just one of your services.

Photography: Behrooz Nobakht

It seemed like a good idea at the time. We liked it. Judging by the level of activity on the site,  lots of photographers liked it. And seeing as they were the ones who poured their money into the plan, 8020 Publishing, producers of JPG Magazine, liked it too.

The only people who didn’t like it, it seems, were customers.

After just four issues of the travel magazine that took submissions from the public and paid $100 for every published photo, Everywhere is shutting down.

“At the end of the day, we just aren’t where we need to be, business-wise, with the website or magazine,” the company said in an email to the site’s registered members. “Suspending publication of Everywhere will enable 8020 Publishing to focus on improving the community platform behind JPG Magazine, 8020′s other title. That, in turn, will benefit all the future titles 8020 plans to produce.”

It’s an unfortunate move for photographers who were hoping to earn a little extra money from their travel photos, and it’s clearly a blow for 8020. But Everywhere Magazine isn’t the first project to fail nor even the first photography project to fail this year. This spring also saw the fall of LuckyOliver, a microstock site that failed to keep up with its nimbler competitors.

Standing on Different Legs

Failure, of course, is as much a part of doing business as paying bills, training employees and buying new equipment. It might be something that no entrepreneur wants to contemplate, but it’s always a possibility. The Small Business Association claims that half of all small firms close in their first year, and 95 percent are gone by the end of year five. (Although the Census bureau suggests many of those were sold, incorporated or closed when the owner retired rather than forced into bankruptcy.)

Whatever the odds though, it always pays to be prepared should the worst happen.

The best way to guard against a sudden collapse is to have multiple revenue streams. For photographers, that’s relatively easy. There are a number of different ways of selling the same image to different markets. A stock image is likely to be bought by companies; a print by relatively well-off homeowners; and a postcard by people with small budgets looking for an impulse buy. Ensuring that your photography business spreads the opportunities around will reduce the pain should one market suddenly shut its wallet.

When stock prices started to fall, for example, Josh McCulloch, a professional outdoors photographer, was ready with his new postcard collection which, after commissions, soon became his second highest earner.

“Diversification seems to be key these days, and the cards are another good stream of revenue for me,” he told us.

8020 Publishing itself also provides a useful example of how to cope with the possibility of an unexpected revenue crunch. The company itself isn’t shutting up shop; according to its message, it plans to focus on JPG Magazine and use that publication as a launch pad for the future titles it plans to bring out.

One Door Closes…

The fact that those projects are already thought of can also make the possibility of failure easier to contemplate. Ideas don’t just pop up before a new business is started; they happen all the time. But when work is busy and everything is running well, it’s often hard to find the energy or the time put those ideas into practice. The collapse of one revenue stream then might create a loss of revenue but it can free up time and deliver a whole new opportunity. It will be interesting to see what 8020 come up with next.

But perhaps the best way to prepare for failure is not to take too many risks at the beginning. We often like to point out that there’s a big difference between earning money from a photography hobby and relying on your photography to earn money, but the fact that you can earn even before you’ve given up your day job is a huge advantage. It means that you can test the market, discover whether you have the talent and the inclination to be a photographer and build up some experience. It means that if you did want to go professional – and obviously, not everyone does – you’d be beginning with a customer base already established.

That wouldn’t completely remove the possibility that it will all go wrong but it would improve the chances that it won’t.