Is it really possible to earn $1,000 an hour as a photographer? A regular photographer. Not the kind of high-end fashion photographer or Vogue cover-shooter that requires a lifetime of career achievement and first-name terms with media moguls. The kind of photography for which there’s constant demand, whose buyers are average Joes and which can still deliver the kinds of rates that even lawyers would be frightened to demand.

When we first asked this question back in 2007, the post became one of our most controversial. But what surprised us most about the dozens of comments we’ve received since publishing the article was the number of people who came out in support. “Yes,” they said. “It is possible to make $1,000 an hour as a photographer — and more. I’ve done it.”

The original claim had come from Chris Wunder, a photographer with more than 30 years’ experience who now sells workshops with the claim that it’s possible to make $8,000 a day doing school photography. The key, he says, is the number of portrait jobs available in schools and the speed with which photographers can get through them.

“Experienced photographers with an assistant can do a great job in only 30-40 seconds per student,” he explained to us then. “I normally budget about 90 students per camera per hour.”

Mall Photography on Steroids

That doesn’t leave any room for creativity; it’s mall photography on steroids. Students sit, smile, wait for the snap then make way for the next in line. According to Wunder though, the portraits sell for $24-$25 each with a typical take up rate by parents of between 70 and 80 percent. Ninety students an hour over eight hours is 720 portraits a day. If 70 percent of those portraits sell for $24 then total revenue for the day would be $12,096. Divided by eight hours that works out at revenues of $1,512 per hour — 50 percent higher than even the eyebrow-raising sums claimed in Chris Wunder’s marketing material.

And yet, some photographers greeted those figures not with a scoff but a shrug.

“Jon,” a glassblower who had worked as a school photographer for six years, reported that he had generated over $70,000 a week, shooting 30 weeks a year for a company called “Quality color GMBH.”

“Being 19 I had no idea what a cush job I had,” he said.

His description didn’t make the work sound very cushy. After spending a day shooting 700-900 “bratty kids” in a day (a rate in line with Chris Wunder’s estimate), he would then photograph their baby siblings after school for three times the amount. Shooting would finish at 9pm, after which he would drive to the next location, reaching the hotel around midnight. Often, the hotel would have given away his room by then and he would have to sleep in the van.

At the end of the week, he would head back to the lab so that the “Saturday lab woman” could print the images ready for shipping on Monday. The income from each enrolled child was $18.70 and the median package was $23.95.

“That means that if there were 1,500 kids enrolled in your school we could expect to bring in $28,000 in the 2 days I was at your school,” ‘Jon’ commented. “Plus there would be 50-60 babies out of that 1,500 kids and each of those were worth $50.”

Too Good to Be True

“Jon” wasn’t the only one endorsing Chris Wunder’s figures. Rick Poole of HyperFoto Photography in Seattle had been in the event and school photography business for eleven years. He commented that he was generating $3 million a year.

It all sounds wonderful… and too good to be true, as many other commenters were quick to point. The biggest problem was that the figures that Chris Wunder — and others — quoted were revenues, not profits. The costs would cut into those figures deeply. Processing the image can be done quickly, especially if the photographer is able to get the portrait right in camera, but would add some time to the 30-40 seconds needed to photograph the student. Printing costs money, as does travel to the school, and accommodation if the photographer is traveling a long way and doesn’t want to sleep in a van. Schools charge their own fees, a kickback that Chris Wunder himself notes starts at 10 percent of revenues in the Midwest, rising to as much as 40-50 percent in the southeast.

Add on the price of equipment and throw in the cost of staff — school photographers need to shoot in teams to keep the children organized and the shoot flowing smoothly; even Chris Wunder talks of having an assistant — and it’s no wonder that even “Jon” was seeing only $1,000-$2,000 a week of the $50,000-$70,000 he was generating for his company.

And if $8,000 a month sounds good, bear in mind that to earn that money “Jon” would have to spend long periods away from home, sleeping in a van and working twelve-hour shifts. Nor would he work the whole year. If he worked 30 weeks out of 52, he would still have made only $60,000. While that might be respectable and give him time to add to his income, few photographers with families would want to work those kinds of hours for long.

The answer to the question of whether it’s possible to make $1,000 an hour shooting something as simple as school photography is that it is possible. It is possible to generate that amount in revenues but if you’re shooting for a company, you’ll be paid a relatively low salary while the firm takes whatever is left of the profits after deducting other costs. And if you’re doing it for yourself, you’ll struggle hard to get your foot in the door and you’ll have to make do with whatever is left after you’ve fed the school and paid for your assistants.

Whenever you’re faced with giant revenue claims, it pays to be skeptical, especially if they’re coming from someone selling a course. But it doesn’t pay to dismiss them. There is (still) a lot of money in school photography and while your profits might not $1,000 an hour, the reason that school photography still exists is that photographers can make money out of it.

Photography: Shannon Karczewski

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

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

Portrait of photographer Shannon Karczewski

For Shannon Karczewski the popularity of photography for stay-at-home moms is understandable. A mother of three children, aged  12, 4 and 3, she’s been shooting professionally for about a year and now has a steady flow of paying clients.

“Prior to that I was just a shutter happy mom with a camera always in hand,” she says.

Shannon learned her photography from books, tutorials and blogs but she’s also taken a couple of classes and like many other new professionals was dedicated enough to ask other photographers if she could “tag along” on their shoots so that she could learn from them. One of those photographers became a mentor and she still turns to him whenever she needs advice or has questions about her business.

Open Four Afternoons a Week

Photography: Shannon Karczewski

Her photography focuses on weddings, which she restricts to a “limited number” each year to ensure each couple receives the attention they deserve, and portraits of families and high school seniors. It’s the family portraiture, in particular, that forms the core of her work.

“As for families… I love them,” she says. “I relate to the moms, and I have a knack for capturing their kiddos in a way that makes them say ‘that’s exactly him/her!’”

Balancing the needs of family life and the demands of clients isn’t entirely straightforward but it is manageable. Shannon takes care to book her family sessions in late afternoons or early evenings on Tuesdays through Fridays and on Saturday mornings if she’s not shooting a wedding. Ninety percent of her work fits into those time slots. Sunday, she says, is entirely for the family and Monday allows her time to “catch up on loose ends.”

It’s that flexibility that’s the biggest benefit of combining motherhood with professional photography. All jobs, Shannon points out, take people away from their families but photography allows moms to do it on their own terms.

“ I suppose it’s not unlike any other job. There are times when you need to be away from family in order to work your business. That comes with the territory for any job that takes you out of the home,” she says. “[But] as a self-employed photographer, YOU decide what hours you are willing to work, how much business you are willing to take on, and when you want to allot time for vacation. As a mother… that’s huge.”

The downsides, too, are familiar to anyone taking on their first freelance jobs or starting a new business. Shannon described her biggest hurdle as not the difficulty of juggling the needs of motherhood against the needs of clients but the challenge of overcoming her fear: the fear of failure, the fear of rejection and the fear that she might not be able to produce the images that her clients are paying her to create.

So far though, those fears seem to be unfounded. Shannon has a website, a blog and a Facebook page, all of which help to keep her name out there, but most of her work comes from personal recommendations. Clients refer people they know, and the people they know are often young families like her own, allowing her to continue the rapport she feels with the people who hire her. Her business continues to grow.

Photography then sounds like an ideal profession for any mother of small children with a love of photography and a dedication deep enough to learn the business and develop her talent. But that might be an exaggeration. Although Shannon also has to spend time editing images, she’s still only shooting professionally a few hours each week — the times when her husband is available to look after the children. Her portrait fees of $250 for up to an hour-and-a-half of photography and ten retouched images are reasonable but wedding fees of $2,200 shared between two photographers and including an engagement shoot aren’t particularly high. Shooting while raising a young family might be convenient but alone, it’s unlikely to be enough to support that family.

Photographers Have to be Dedicated

That’s part of the choice that photography offers moms who want to build their careers as well as be available to their children. Earning more would mean spending less time with the family but the photographers are free to set their own balance at a level that suits them. But it’s also part of the criticism leveled by professionals against semi-professionals who need outside support in order to maintain their businesses and, in the process, keep the fees low for everyone while producing sub-standard images.

Shannon concedes that some photographers have harmed the industry’s image by selling their services before they were ready. Moms thinking of adding to the family’s income with their cameras need to be dedicated before they state charging, she argues.

“I think there is a somewhat negative stigma out there of moms getting good cameras and going ‘pro,’” says Shannon. “Anyone can do it, but it has to come from some place real. I believe, with my whole heart, that photography, good photography, comes from somewhere deep inside. Not from the desire to make a few dollars. If you have the passion for it, are willing to put in hard work, invest in workshops and mentorships and practice, then it will fall into place.”

Photography: Philip Gostelow

There are two ways to enjoy a high standard of living as a photographer. The first is to create great pictures, sell them for large amounts of money and rent out your services for giant commissions. The second is to charge regular amounts of money for your work but move to a place where the cost of living is lower but where there’s still enough growth and vibrancy to support a photography business and deliver an interesting time.

Shanghai, for example, is China’s most dynamic city. It contains more than 20 million people, has a per capita income of almost $1,000 a month and an annual growth rate of around ten percent. When it comes to the cost of living, residents can take their pick of Western-style two-bedroom apartments for a little over $1,000 or local digs that are equally comfortable for much less. That flexibility, growth and the thrill of living in a city as lively as Shanghai has brought in more than 100,000 foreigners who now call the city home. Some are highly-paid expats living luxury lifestyles but many are independent workers trying their luck in a growing market and a place they can afford whatever their income level. Many of those workers are photographers but even Shanghai, they’re finding, is not immune to the pressures affecting the photography market.

Clients Move on, Photographers Move in

Philip Gostelow is an Australian-born photographer who has spent much of his working life on the road. After starting his career as an architect in Canada, he moved first to Japan then in 2006 to Shanghai. Specializing in portraiture and corporate photography, Gostelow’s clients have included Vogue China, HSBC, Cathay Pacific, Time, Conde Nast Traveler and many others.  His still series on Australia’s 2001 Black Christmas Bush Fires is held by the country’s National Gallery.

Although he was looking for a segue into videomaking when he reached the city, Gostelow initially found that photography work in Shanghai was both easy to come by and reasonably paid. A friend in an architecture firm was able to arrange a long-stay visa for him. Work came in through connections and through local advertising on creative listing services such as SmartShanghai. Corporate jobs, often portraits of local executives and images for annual reports, became a lifeline even though the market appeared to offer two different pay scales. International companies would pay standard international day rates of between $1,500 and $2,000. Local companies who were more concerned with cost than quality would pay much less, often as little as $1,000. Even at those rates though Gostelow found that it was possible to cover half a year’s income with just six weeks of work.

Image courtesy Philip Gostelow

No longer. After a year in San Francisco, Gostelow returned to the city to find that the market had changed. The recession had forced corporate clients to look for cheaper ways of sourcing images than commissioning a professional photographer. Many of his old clients had moved on and many new photographers had moved in. A listing for a professional photographer on SmartShanghai that would once have attracted half a dozen responses would now bring in about 70 replies, many from people with little or no experience who were hoping to build their portfolios as much as make a living out of photography.

“They’re able to undercut prices,” says Gostelow. “It’s not a level playing field any more; it’s more like a rugby field.”

Stock has brought little respite. Although Gostelow has images with Getty, they deliver little more than an occasional check for $150 to $200, a nice unexpected bonus but not something that a photographer can live on.

Young Photographers Know Photoshop

The causes for the market’s change are multiple and aren’t unique to Shanghai. Companies everywhere are looking at expenses and trying to find places to make cuts without harming quality too much. That’s true even in China’s coastal cities that are still enjoying phenomenal growth rates. Low cost equipment has granted easier access to professional markets, a process that Gostelow notes started in the 1950s, when manufacturers produced the first portable SLRs. Gostelow himself started his career with print photography but hasn’t touched his Hasselblad for more than a decade. Many of those new photographers, too, have now grown up in a digital world and are more comfortable with Photoshop and digital editing than photographers who first honed their skills with print. The result is that even in Shanghai there are now more images available from more photographers and at lower prices, and those images can be delivered directly to the client.

“The uniqueness of the image has been downgraded,” says Gostelow. “The client has more choice and direct access to images so he doesn’t have to commission.”

The response of professional photographers has varied too. Some of his colleagues in Australia have turned to workshops as a way of supplementing their income, Gostelow says. Other have added movie-making skills to their repertoire and some have created niches for themselves with images shot in unique styles such as nightlit photography. For Gostelow, whose visa now requires him to leave the country every 60 days, the response will probably be to give Shanghai one more year then head back to Australia while trying to expand into movie-making.

Gostelow’s story, of course, represents the experience of just one photographer trying to build a photography business in a foreign market. Other photographers may be having an easier time. Philippe Roy, for example, another Shanghai-based photographer, is doing well enough to employ a full-time art director. But the pressures that Gostelow feels even in Shanghai are typical of the challenges photographers are facing around the world: the rise of competition, the drop in prices and the squeeze on clients’ budgets. Even being in a city like Shanghai, is no longer enough to escape photography’s problems, says Gostelow, and give a photographer an edge. That requires something much simpler.

“Luck is the edge,” he says. “Meeting someone in a bar who knows someone who needs a photographer.”

That may be no more likely to happen in a bar on Shanghai’s Bund than in a drinking hole in your home town, but at least the beer is likely to be cheaper.

The Internet now contains thousands of stock photography sites, giving editors a huge choice of image sources, and photographers a wide range of outlets for their images. We’ve checked sites and pored over lists to produce our own guide to stock photography.

We’ve broken the sites down into subject categories but it’s likely that many overlap. Certainly, the large sites will also include niche subjects. Not all of the sites accept contributions but many do.

Entries are arranged alphabetically and should not be considered as recommendations. Be sure to read the terms and conditions carefully, and let us know about your experiences with the sites on the list and any that you think we’ve missed.

The Giants

Two stock companies dominate the industry. They’re big enough to set the prices, determine styles and lock in buyers with subscription fees. Many of the sites listed here are now subsidiaries of one of these firms.

Corbis

Getty

General

Both Corbis and Getty accept images of every topic imaginable. Lots of other sites offer general images too.

Acclaim Images

AGE Foto Stock

AGPix

Alamy

Big Shot Stock

First Light

if images

imagestate

Jupiter Images

Masterfile

Plain Picture

SuperStock

YouWorkForThem

Unique Payment Models

Stock companies generally license images on a royalty-free basis or a rights-managed basis, taking a (large) commission for themselves. Some stock companies though are pushing back against that model with payment plans of their own.

fotoLibra

Photographer’s Direct

PhotoShelter

News

News and editorial images generally need to be delivered quickly to reach markets and generate sells.

AP Images

Atlas Press Photo

Black Star

Citizenside

Contact Press

Magnum Photos

NewsCom

Polaris Images

Redux Pictures

Retna

Reuters

Rex

The Image Works

World Picture News

Zuma Press

Regional News

Local news services, even national rather than international ones, may offer targeted sources for buyers and contributors.

Agence VU

All Canada Photos

Invisu

Kyodo News

Laif

Landov

Oculi

Oeil Public

SIPA

Tass Photo

The Canadian Press

Top Foto

Celebrity

Some of the highest paying editorial images are shots of celebrities. Paparazzi images in particular have to be sent in very quickly.

August Image

Contour Photos

Headpress

JBG Photo

Lickerish

Lime Foto

MrPaparazzi

Vistalux

Microstock

Microstock companies accept images from everyone but charge and pay small amounts on a royalty-free basis.

123rf

Big Stock Photo

Can Stock Photo

Citizen Image

Crestock

Cutcaster

Deposit Photos

Dreamstime

FeaturePics

Fotolia

Gimmestock

ImageVortex

iStockphoto

MicrostockPhoto

MostPhotos

Photaki

Photocase

Pixmac

ShutterFarm

Shutterstock

StockFresh

Stockphoto

StockPhotoMedia

Vivozoom

Webshots

YayMicro

Zoonar

Artistic
Art rarely makes the best stock, which needs to functional rather than artistic. Some stock companies though do specialize in art images.

Aperture

Arcangel Images

Art and Commerce

Bransch

F-Stop Images

Gallery Stock

Glass House Images

Independent Photography Network

Lens Modern

Panos Pictures

Redux Pictures

Stock That Doesn’t Suck

Trunk Archive

Environmental

Images of the environment have become more important as interest in climate change has grown.

Aurora Photos

Eco Photo Explorers

Ecopics

Global Warming Images

Green Stock Media

Science

Science images, including astronomy, can have strong demand but they often require access to laboratories and specialist tools.

Custom Medical Stock Photo

Oxford Scientific

Photo Researchers

Science Photo

Visuals Unlimited

Nature
With the right agency, it’s even possible license your shots of landscape, nature and animals.

Animals Animals

DRK Photo

EarthWater

Mangelsen: Images of Nature

Minden Pictures

Nature Picture Library

NHPA

Picture-Nature

Seapics

Tidal Stock

Terra Galleria

Sports

Sports photography can be as topical as news or as general as portraiture. Some sites cover every sport; others focus on just one activity.

A-Frame Photo

Blue Green Pictures

Extreme Sports Photo

Icon Sports Media

International Sports

Kos Sailing

Sports Chrome

Surfing Stock

Travel

Making money out of your vacation photos isn’t easy. Create travel images of exotic locations though and you can license them on specialist stock sites.

Africa Imagery

BeachFeature

FotoTeca

Hedgehog House

Lonely Planet

Odyssey Productions

Photo-Africa-Stock.com

Picturesque

Scandinavian Stock Photo

Tropical Pix

Travel Library

US Regions

The United States is big and varied enough for images of different regions to have their own outlets.

Accent Alaska

Alaska Stock

Idaho Stock Images

Pacific Stock Photography

Photo Resource Hawaii

Photohouston

Salmon River

International

Photographers in countries around the world can try to sell their images through sites that use the country or region as a brand.

4 Corners

All Canada Photos

Anzenberger Webgate

OnAsia

Axiom Photo

Euro Stock

Europe Stock Images

Greek Stock Photos

Imagine China

Cubo Images

Mauritius Images

Photo New Zealand

Folio

Switzerland Photos

Terra Brasil Imagens

Music

Images of musicians, instruments and performance can make a particularly valuable niche.

Lebrecht

Music Pictures

RedFerns

Industry

Images of industry and transport can be both valuable and difficult to produce. If you can arrange access, some specialist sites will be happy to take your targeted, quality images.

Alvey and Towers

Construction Photography

Energy Images

Mining Photo

Traffic Stock Photos

Transtock

Food

Food pictures might need the help of a professional food stylist but they can make for a useful niche.

Fabfoodpix

Food-image

Stock Food

Aerial Photography

Aerial photography requires some special equipment and is usually commissioned. Some stock companies though do sell images shot from a height.

Airphotona

Aerolist Photographers

Aeronautic Pictures

AirView Online

Ireland Aerial Photography

Add Yours here, in the comments.  Include the category.

Photography:© Susan Carr

Microstock isn’t the problem. Microstock is a symptom of the problem. The problem’s cure, the solution that will reinvigorate creativity, deliver paid work to photographers and help them to build secure businesses, is art.

That’s the optimistic message contained in Susan Carr’s new book The Art and Business of Photography. A professional photographer based in Chicago, Susan Carr is a former president of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and currently serves as the organization’s Education Director. Her book, which came out last month, is intended to help struggling photographers understand the changes affecting the industry and to provide a guide to the artistic and business elements that they’ll need to develop successful careers.

The most important change to hit the photography industry, she argues, has been the speed with which photographers can now create images and publish them immediately online. That’s clear enough but less clear is the way that speed of production and market placement has affected not just photographers but their clients in the advertising industry.

If the Advertising Industry Can’t Deliver, It Can’t Demand

Drawing on the ideas of Seth Godin, an author and entrepreneur who is said to have formulated “permission marketing,” Carr points out that in a period in which consumers have a wide range of choices, advertising companies can no longer guarantee that a bigger spend will produce bigger returns for their clients. It’s now harder for products to stand out, harder for advertising to make an impact — and harder for photographers to demand more money for broader usage of images that can’t always deliver results.

“That is why the market changed for advertising and then photographers,” she told us by email on the way to the ASMP Strictly Business 3 conference in Philadelphia. “There was no guaranteed return for the investor (our client), so the money was harder to justify spending.”

Part of the solution for advertisers has come in the form of low-cost stock images that allow them to reduce expenses to meet their clients’ demand for lower risk, but at prices with which independent photographers can’t compete. It was a development that Carr saw in her own business. By 1996, she recalls, clients were only hiring her to shoot images of specific people, products or places. For shots with generic elements, they were turning to the stock industry.

At the same time the demand for specific images was shrinking too. Companies were merging and consolidating, creating fewer marketing departments, fewer advertisers and two giant stock companies with the power to set market rates.

The solution for photographers hoping to meet the demand that remains, Carr argues, is to compete not on price when there are so many free and nearly-free images available, but to offer the kind of unique, creative service that stock agencies can’t provide. Personal projects, she says, don’t just help photographers grow as artists, they’re also an essential part of a successful photography business.

“If we are not creating genuine and meaningful work, we won’t find clients. The product has to be special and unique or buyers will simply use the readily available cheap or free options for imagery.”

It’s something we’ve heard before from commissioning editors as they look for photographers. The personal work in an online portfolio provides an idea of the style and look the photographer is likely to bring back when left to themselves on a shoot, they’ve told us. The tearsheets and samples will demonstrate technical skill but it’s the personal stuff that shows how the photographer thinks and how they’re going to use the resources at their disposal. It’s the part of the portfolio that delivers the strongest sense of trust.

The Cost of Being Creative

The idea that forgetting commercial pressures and shooting whatever you want can be good for your business as well as your soul is certainly encouraging. But it’s not a solution that comes without cost. Carr works with a business partner who can cover for her when she’s working on her own projects, but other photographers have to find their own way to schedule personal shooting time. That could involve setting aside an hour a day, a day a week or a couple of weeks every few months. However it’s scheduled though, it will mean taking time away from either work that brings in guaranteed pay or marketing that brings in new clients.

Fortunately, just as the changes in the photography industry have made distribution easier, they’ve also made the marketing simpler. Those personal portfolios can be placed on websites, email marketing costs next to nothing, and you don’t need a large advertising budget to use social media.

Intriguingly though, while Carr argues that the availability of free and low-cost imagery should force photographers to compete on quality, she also recommends the use of Creative Commons licenses as a channel for photographers to distribute their work. Photographers need to think about copyright in a new way, she suggests, demanding compensation for commercial use but giving consent for non-commercial use and broader use packages for paying clients:

“[O]pening up some uses of your work will hold more benefits for you and your business than being overly restrictive,” she writes in the book.

It’s all a reassuring idea. Whether the rise of low-stock imagery is a response to changes in the advertising industry or whether the lowering of financial barriers against entry into commercial photography has driven prices down, there’s no question that photographers have to battle harder now to make a living. There’s less demand, less work and greater pressure for relaxed usage licenses. If being more creative and more artistic, rather than harder-nosed and more commercial, is the solution then the photographers who survive should find that even if they’re not making more money, they are enjoying their careers even more.

“Our product (our photographs, service, creative solutions) are the most important thing,” Carr says. “If we do not deliver an exceptional product, we are sunk. “

Photography: illustir

Anyone looking at the banks of professional photographers snapping celebrities attending the BAFTA award ceremony in London recently might have assumed they were seeing technology nerds rather than camera geeks. In addition to the Nikons and Canons dangling from the photographers’ necks, there was also a steady line of Macbook Pros hanging from the press barriers. It’s a testament to one of the biggest changes that digital imagery has brought to photography. While a professional photographer would once have had to press his film rolls into the hands of a waiting courier to get his images back to the office as quickly as possible, he’s now expected to load his shots into his computer and ftp them from the location ready to run online even as the event he’s shooting is still taking place.

With the passing of Polaroid, the end of development labs and the rise of digital platforms, it’s tempting for anyone hoping to sell images to think only of file sizes and licenses. Buyers aren’t interested in touching an image, holding it or hanging it; they only want to display it on a monitor — or upload it to a website so that others can see it on their screens.

In fact though, the print market isn’t just alive and kicking; it’s flourishing and growing in a range of different directions, opening up all sorts of new opportunities for savvy photographers.

Photobook Sales Reach 1.2 Million in a Single Year

The clearest evidence of the continued interest in printed images is the rapid growth of Blurb. In 2010, the photobook company’s three-year growth rate of 4,829.6 percent put it 47^th on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. In 2009 alone, just four years after its launch, Blurb created and shipped more than 1.2 million books, generating sales of $45 million from people who wanted to look at their images on paper rather than through glass.

It’s an opportunity that other print companies haven’t missed. EZPrints, which now provides the printing services to SmugMug and a number of other photo-sharing sites, used to cater primarily to professionals who wanted to create large, professional-grade prints and fine art rather than photo products. That original interest remains, says Evan Kramer, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, but the demand for printed images has now expanded into new products, even among professionals.

“Many pros find that their customers want to create more than just prints of their wedding photos or family portraits. They want to create photo books or canvas prints of their pro shots,” he said. “So pros have had to adapt to changing trends and offer their customers innovative photo display packages.”

Canvas prints and mounted prints are popular home décor products, Kramer says, and personalized stationery in the form of flat and folded cards sell well too. Last year saw a trend for magnet packs, especially for Save the Date announcements that foreshadow formal wedding invitations. And photobooks too have proved to be a valuable element of EZPrint’s range, with different sizes, options and designs appealing to a wide audience.

Individual photographers hoping to cash in on the demand for printed images can make use of a number of solutions. EZPrints styles itself “The Power Behind the Print Button” because it services so many of the print orders on websites, but choosing your own printing company can be complex and demand a fair amount of research.

While a lab that’s reputable, trusted and recommended by other photographers is likely to be safe, says Kramer, photographers should also know what kind of premium products or substrates they offer, whether they have specialized packaging services for large format prints, how frequently they balance and calibrate their printers (professional labs calibrate to a single color target daily and balance the printers hourly to maintain color consistency), and whether the staff is knowledgeable enough to answer specific questions when placing a print order.

The Challenge of Marketing Prints

And that’s just the printing. The real challenge will be winning the orders. If wedding photographers are finding that there’s a demand for large format prints of their best shots, then they’re either going to have to push those prints as upsells during the negotiations or include them in their packages to make their offers more attractive.

If there’s still a demand for Save the Date magnets, then photographers will need to figure out which designs customers are most likely to order. (A picture of the couple might be appropriate but how many people would want a friend’s engagement photo on their fridge door forever? When the magnet carries the name and contact details of the photographer that opportunity to stay visible to a new lead is an important consideration.)

And if stationery sells as well as Evan Kramer suggests then photographers will have to get the pricing, the images and the promotional platforms right to make those sales. Flowers are said to be popular themes on Zazzle but photographers selling online tend to do best when they have a clear creative line that allows them to be distinctive and memorable. That’s easier to do with a subject that requires expertise and props that are hard to find than one as ubiquitous as flowers.

The simplest solution is to head to a product site like Zazzle or a photo-sharing site like SmugMug and rely on the company’s own printing service to fulfill the orders while you worry about the photography and the marketing. But you’d still have to market those services yourself. Even the top-selling books in Blurb’s bookstore tend to have sales figures that are numbered in the dozens rather than the thousands. Most sales appear to be made by professionals on behalf of clients or enthusiasts who want to handle their own images in book form.

It’s an easy solution but one that requires some difficult selling and working with a printing lab does deliver a couple more benefits: it lets you feel like a traditional photographer again — and you too can get to hold the photo before it’s delivered to the customer.

For photographers, the image is the product. But photographers also have knowledge and that information is an asset that can be sold too. Here are five ways that photographers can turn their photography knowledge into new revenue streams.

1. Workshops

When Paul Van Hoy moved to Rochester, New York in 2005, it didn’t take long for the young photographer to form a friendship with local photographer Brady Dillsworth. Van Hoy’s work had already won him a write-up in Professional Photographer Magazine, both photographers were working on their own books, and shooting at the high end of wedding photography, they both found that clients would speak to each of them before making their choice.

And both wanted to help other photographers build their studios. The pair have now expanded their businesses to include jointly-held wedding photography workshops.

They’re not the only ones. Denis Reggie, the founder of wedding photojournalism, organizes regular workshops with photographer Joe Buissink that cost from $699 each.

The format of a workshop can range from a few hours in a classroom to a weekend retreat with models and formal poses. They’ll require a bit of marketing and plenty of organization but they can be an enjoyable way to turn knowledge into income without selling pictures.

2. Blogging

A workshop will take some hands-on effort and personal interaction but blogging you can do from home.

You won’t make $699 from each reader in that way that you can sell tickets to your workshops for large sums, and you’ll have to work pretty hard to bring in users and monetize them. Despite the hype surrounding the money-making opportunities available to professional bloggers, when AdSense ads deliver clickthroughs of around 2 percent and revenues of $1 to $1.50 for every thousand users, even a relatively successful blog with 10,000 monthly users is only going to make $10-$15 a month. For every Strobist, there are thousands of  photography blogs that do little more than help a site’s SEO.

It’s one more revenue stream but unless you’re willing to put in the promotional work needed to hit the big time, don’t bank on a blog doing much more than supporting your other photography services.

3. Outsourcing

Workshops and blogging sell your knowledge of taking great pictures. But building a successful photography business also means developing an understanding of marketing, client relationships, leadership and management. Those are also skills that can earn revenue.

Kathleen Ferry spent ten years in advertising before taking some photography classes and opening her own photography business. Many of the clients that her Firefly Photography studio now wins though aren’t serviced by her personally. Instead, her skills bring in the business which she then outsources to part-time photographers who shoot the weddings on her behalf.

It’s a different kind of photography business, one that turns the photographer into a manager rather than a hands-on image-maker. It still requires an understanding of photography and a photographic eye — the company will only be as strong as the skills of the photographers you hire — but it’s one that puts the emphasis on the business side of photography rather than on its creative aspect.

The advantage is the business’s scalability. A wedding photographer who works alone or with a single assistant is limited by the number of hours in a week and the number of weddings they’re prepared to shoot in that time. Bring in additional photographers and you can dominate your market by taking on more photographers to meet additional demand.

The downside though is that few photographers enter the industry because they’re inspired by the idea of building a successful business. Most are inspired by the idea of creating beautiful pictures; the management, marketing and selling are just the process they have to go through to win the opportunities and make revenues. Photography is also so artistic that a studio’s brand tends to be closely tied to the photographer him or herself. Clients usually want to hire a particular photographer and receive that photographer’s style rather than the work of an impersonal studio.

The scalability of an outsourcing studio is horizontal, not vertical. Selling your business skills might build you a bigger and more profitable studio but it won’t improve your photography or deliver the satisfaction that comes from shooting the very best images. But again, it’s another way of turning your professional knowledge into a revenue stream — and there’s no reason you can’t both outsource and charge a premium to shoot the images yourself.

4. Non-Profits

Volunteering for a non-profit won’t create a new income stream directly. You’ll be shooting for free and supplying pictures for nothing. But it will open a new niche and give you a new area of specialized knowledge. Whether you’re shooting animals in shelters (as leading pet photographer Grace Chon did to kick start her photography business) or helping out on a campaign, you’ll pick up both contacts and an understanding of one new subject that can help you develop your business.

It’s a way of picking up knowledge and leads that can generate revenue later.

5. Your own exhibitions

And one way to convert that specialized knowledge into cash is to put on your own exhibition. Mounting exhibitions in galleries is always difficult but there’s no reason you can’t show your work yourself, either in your own venue or in a café, an increasingly popular option.

Instead of focusing on artistic shots though, a topic that will only attract photography lovers, you can focus on a particular subject, using your knowledge of urban degradation, local wildlife or sewers to bring in people who want to see not just good pictures, but images of a topic in which they have an interest.

While it’s an approach that relies on the images themselves (and the accompanying catalog) to generate revenue, the sales are as dependent on your expertise in the subject as they are on your ability to communicate that knowledge through imagery.

For the most part, you’re going to be generating revenue by selling pictures. But with those sales difficult to make, hard to depend on and dropping in value, any other asset that you can use to support your photography can only be a benefit.

Photography: Daniel.d.slee

It was changing trends in the world of photography that made it possible for enthusiasts to earn income from their images. Digital SLRs became cheap enough for anyone to produce professional quality photographs. The growth of the Web created a whole new market for low-cost imagery, and the rise of microstock produced one channel that enabled enthusiasts to meet that demand. Other changes have followed, from the growth of Flickr and its relationship with Getty, to social media as way of staying in touch with clients, turning them from one-off customers into long-term buyers.

But changes haven’t stopped because enthusiasts have started making use of them. Here are three trends happening now in the photography world that can have a dramatic effect on your earnings:

Microstock is Demanding More from Buyers, Giving Less to Sellers

When iStockPhoto launched in 2000, the images weren’t cheap. They were free. Prices rose gradually from 25 cents for a download to 50 cents and eventually the stereotypical dollar-an-image. For buyers though, that minimal one-dollar price tag always felt more ideal than real. The lowest prices only delivered the smallest images, sizes too small for all but the most basic online usage. Higher quality images were soon siphoned off into special collections such as Vetta or the new Agency Collection, a combination of microstock and traditional stock. While iStockPhoto’s home page still boasts of images that cost as little as 95 cents, the only way for a buyer to purchase licenses for less than a dollar is to pay $19,000 in advance for 20,000 credits, then use them to buy the lowest quality photos in the smallest possible size.

A typical image supplied through the Agency Collection, however, starts at 55 credits and requires 100 credits for a large size. iStockPhoto also places restriction on usage, demanding more credits for print runs over 499,999 and for resale items.

On iStockPhoto at least, the trend is towards payment and usage models that more closely match those of traditional stock, at least for the best images.

Sadly though, those higher prices aren’t being translated into higher payments for all photographers. iStockPhoto’s recent royalty change is likely to mean lower payouts for many contributors, particularly those who upload infrequently. In 2007, the company paid out 29 percent of revenues to photographers. Don’t expect to see that figure trending upwards.

Image Tracking Gets Easier

When Chris Barton, owner of Photographers Direct and an advocate of fair trade photography, wrote a blog post last March showing how the same microstock image had appeared in multiple locations across the Web, his point was about the ubiquity of low-cost images. Microstock, he was arguing, had to sell in large numbers but those frequent uses made them less useful for “reputable companies.”

It wasn’t a point well made. As one commenter noted, not all firms care about how an image has been used previously, particularly small businesses who don’t have the budget to commission a photographer or pay for Rights Managed photos.

But the post did show how easy it has now become for photographers to track usage of their own photos, and identify unauthorized use. Chris Barton used TinEye, a reverse image search engine that allows photographers to upload an image, enter a URL or even, with a Firefox plugin, just right click an image to see where else it has appeared on the Web. It’s not an entirely new service. Companies like PicScout have long allowed photographers to track their images, and even provided ways for them to contact unauthorized users to demand payment.

This is a facility that’s only going to grow both in popularity and ease of use. Photographers will be able to rely less on friends who are familiar with their photos spotting their images on the Web, and make occasional searches of their best photos themselves.

Piracy isn’t going to go away but better searching should help to make it a lot harder for thieves to get away with their copyright infringement.

Facebook Offers a New Advertising Channel

Facebook’s profile redesign has raised both plaudits and hackles from social users. Some experts though have suggested that the new look was intended to persuade members to share more information about themselves, enabling better ad targeting, while PCWorld has noted that the new layout gives more space to advertising units. Photos are certainly more prominent in the new design, and now appear at the top of the page.

But Facebook isn’t a photography marketing site so those differences may not look significant from the point of view of either photographers or enthusiasts looking to earn a little extra cash.

In fact, they are.

The first case study in Facebook’s advertising section describes the success enjoyed by wedding photographer Chris Meyer. His $600 spend, the site claims, generated $40,000 in revenues in the space of a year. That figure has since risen to more than $100,000 from a spend of less than $1,000, Chris has told us, powered by an ability to target ads precisely to engaged women in his market area.

And it’s not just the advertising that brings in work. Facebook’s ability to “push” pictures to friends creates an opportunity for natural word-of-mouth marketing. For any business with a website, the last decade or so  has been about optimizing for search engines and winning attention from Google. That’s still going to be  important but the rise of Facebook, whose ad revenues are expected to reach $4 billion in 2011, means that the social media site is going to become an increasingly important marketing channel for businesses including photographers.

Microstock then remains unstable. iStockPhoto with the support of its parent company Getty, continues to try to set the terms for the industry but it’s notable that other microstock companies haven’t followed suit by adjusting their own royalties. The trends there seem to change constantly, and that’s before you consider which kinds of pictures are selling. But technology is still making at least some things easier for photographers, and the rise of a valuable new marketing channel could be good news for enthusiasts, part-timers and professionals looking to grow their businesses.

Photography: alice popkorn

As the Christmas countdown continues, stores and businesses are moving into high gear to cash in on the shopping spree. For photographers too, the holiday represents an important opportunity not just to fill stockings with new lenses, light meters and other gifted gear but to produce images that match the demand of the season.

The most obvious opportunity lies in cards and calendars. According to Calendars.com, a site that specializes in the niche, about 52 million calendars are sold each year, generating almost half a billion dollars in revenue. And, of course, most of those sales happen towards the end of the year as the current calendar runs out of pages.

While calendars and cards do represent an opportunity for photographers though, it’s not an easy one to make the most of. Large publishers such as Andrews McMeel, which used to produce the top selling The Far Side calendar until Glen Larson stopped licensing it in 2008, make clear that they focus on calendars

“related to best-selling books, popular cartoonists, well-known columnists, and highly rated television shows. Calendars that do not have this type of ‘built-in appeal’ often have a difficult time competing with our other calendars at retail…”

It’s a fair warning. While producing a set of twelve images on a niche subject such as dogs, cats or Corvettes, is simple enough for a photographer with a focused interest, getting them into stores will always be difficult, and selling them will be harder still.

Skipping the Stores

There are alternative strategies though. Sites like Etsy, Zazzle and Cafepress let photographers skip the retail stores and sell directly to the public. But even here, you’re likely to find yourself competing with the cute and the copyrighted as well as calendars that are just plain cruddy. Print-on-demand services like these do allow photographers to create calendars with minimal risk, but the chances of making meaningful sales are low without plenty of advanced marketing. Retail stores can pick up custom from passers-by who spot them on the shelves; online sellers however, need to tell people that they’re there, something that requires both effort and expense.

A simpler option is to use the calendars and cards not as retail products but as marketing tools. Instead of hoping to recoup the time spent on production through sales, create a smaller production run, send the cards and calendars to clients, and remind previous buyers that you’re still around. The calendars will sit on the desk through the year keeping you at the top of a client’s mind when they need to head back to the studio or whenever someone asks them for a recommendation.

The rewards won’t come right away, as they might when you try to sell calendars, but without investing in heavy marketing they’re likely to pull in more income over the year as a whole.

The choice of subject though is going to be crucial. A wedding photographer might be hoping to keep the referrals flowing, but few people will want to put up a calendar that shows images from someone else’s nuptials — or even their own. The calendar shouldn’t necessarily be a piece of advertising so much as a gift that also delivers a marketing punch. A collection of floral images, landscape photos or even the traditional cats and dogs can work provided it keeps the calendar on the desk and the name of the photographer at the top of the client’s mind.

Calendars and cards might be big business at the end of the year but they’re not the only products that buyers are snapping up in the holiday season. Retailers, media companies, even websites need images with seasonal themes.

It’s More Than Just a Bauble

For many of the biggest publishing companies, Christmas pictures are already old hat in early December. Seasonal images have been in demand for a couple of months already as they prepare the adverts and creative material that they’d need for the holiday season. Even little more than two weeks before Christmas Day itself though, seasonal images are still dominating the download charts at microstock sites, suggesting that some buyers at least have left their Christmas shopping late in the day.

The problem with producing seasonal images though is that they have a short period of popularity before they lie dormant until the next season. A search on PicNiche for the popularity of the keyword “Christmas” shows a sharp spike in demand from around November then a vertical drop at the end of the year. The annual sales opportunity for seasonal images can be measured in weeks as much as in dollars. More worryingly, PicNiche’s data also shows that the competition for Christmas pictures is intense. Even though demand is still reasonably high in December, PicNiche can only deliver a rating of 0.09, where anything less than 10 is considered to represent a “bad” chance of making a sale.

Selling Christmas-themed stock can be a good strategy then, but it’s probably best to fold the images into a naturally growing inventory, deliver them early to make the most of the relatively short period available each year, look for profits in future years — and make sure that they’re good enough to stand out from a massive crowd looking for quick sales. Decorations that can function as backgrounds can work well. The two highest selling Christmas images on iStock at the moment both show baubles and leave plenty of room to add copy. They’ve managed to deliver more than 12,600 downloads between them, although both have been on the site for more than three years. Traditional snowy scenes can work well too, of course.

Creating images for Christmas then can bring in revenues. But it’s not easy and it might not happen in time to pay for the presents. On the other hand, you could just skip the whole thing, enjoy playing with your new accessories and start thinking about all the valuable images you’re going to create in time for Valentine’s Day.

Photography: graceish

Everyone makes mistakes, and that includes photographers.  For most of those mistakes, there’s a delete button that removes the missed shots and wipes out the worst pictures, but when it comes to building a photography business, even the smallest error can prove to be expensive.

That’s certainly true of what must be the most common early mistake: pricing. New photographers tend to come into the business with a background in shooting for fun. While they might have spent a great deal of money on equipment and travel in order to take great pictures and hone their skills, those expenses were usually written off as the price of a passion rather than the cost of doing business.

They neither know how much it really costs to produce a picture, nor do they care a great deal.

When you’re starting to charge clients, however, and when you plan to live off the income those sales generate, failing to calculate and include all of the costs involved in photography means that you will, inevitably, be dipping into savings.

The good news is that it’s not a mistake that photographers make too often, and when it does happen, it tends to occur before turning professional. Early bookings might not cover all of the costs involved in travel, time and printing but they do deliver valuable experience and a portfolio of shots. Even cheap one-off print sales or low-cost stock licensing that benefit the buyer more than the photographer teach the seller a useful — if painful — lesson about the true costs of printing, mailing, framing and usage. Those early pricing mistakes are avoidable with a little care, but they’re not fatal and as long as the lessons are learned, they can help to build the foundations of a successful photography business.

It’s a Mistake Not to Market

Failure to market is more serious. This is something that photographers do all too frequently, usually because it’s just so difficult, slow and time-consuming. Photographers would much rather be behind the lens posing the model or instructing the couple than sitting at a computer writing metatags for search engine optimization.

But it’s still essential. It’s essential to have an attractive, effective website. It’s essential to market that website, to use Facebook to push images and stay in touch with clients, to encourage referrals and recommendations, to send out press releases that maintain the profile of the business, to advertise in the places you know clients are likely to be looking, and to invest time, effort and even money in marketing copy that builds trust and converts leads.

Jasmine Star, an award-winning wedding photographer in Orange County, California, listed failing to build a website as one of her top five photography mistakes. It didn’t kill her business but it is likely to have cost her a lot of valuable work until her — now very impressive — site was up.

Errors in pricing and marketing can hit your bank balance or retard your growth but they aren’t fatal to a photography career. That’s not true of all photography mistakes though.

Theft is a Career-Killing Mistake

Two months ago, Dana Dawes, of Dana Dawes Photography, an Atlanta photography business, posted an ad on Groupon that offered a one-hour shoot, a DVD, a free print, and a 20 percent discount off additional prints for just $65.

That might have been a mistake in itself. The price was so low that the ad quickly picked up orders and responses, including a note from one commenter who speculated that it would have been impossible for a single photographer to complete all the bookings the offer would bring in, “even working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

The real trouble though began the following day when “SP” added a comment that began:

“Groupon, you are dealing with a thief here. This photographer does not own all the photos on her website.”

Describing himself as a professional photographer, “SP” explained that he had become suspicious about the lighting and conversions in the pictures on Dawes’ portfolio. He took one of the images off the website, un-distorted it, ran it through image recognition software and discovered that the image actually belonged to a photographer called Morgaine Owens. Additional stolen images were identified, and Dana Dawes was even accused of copying her About page from another photographer’s website.

Despite claiming that she owned the rights to all the photos on her site, Dawes quickly deleted the pictures — a move which had all the effect of a signed confession. Groupon eventually refunded everyone who had bought her Groupon but not before Dana Dawes’ reputation took an enormous beating.

She’s still offering photography services, but anyone Googling Dana Dawes’ name is likely to come in for a nasty surprise, and while the shots in her portfolio are now likely to be hers, they’re also poor enough to turn away most leads with an eye for an image.

Plagiarism is never excusable, especially when you’re using stolen images to win work, but the lack of a broad portfolio can be a real problem. New photographers who want to demonstrate their ability to shoot weddings need to work as an assistant or offer their services to friends and family for free in order to build a collection of images that show off their talent. Looking for an unethical shortcut is an error of career-killing proportions.

That mistake is unusual, although not unique. There is one other mistake thought that is no less dangerous and far more common: having unrealistic expectations. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median income for a professional photographer in 2009 was just $29,770. A quarter of photographers earned less than $21,150 and only 10 percent picked up more than $62,340.

Believing that you’ll be happy as a photographer is a reasonable expectation. Believing that you can build a business, pay your bills and enjoy your work is reasonable too. But believing that you’ll get rich from photography? That’s probably a mistake that experience will quickly correct.

Photography: Arty Smokes

Whether Getty’s new deal with Flickr turns out to be a damp squib, hampered by low commissions and missing model releases, or a raging success in which photography enthusiasts earn market rates for their images, Getty has shown rare faith in an even rarer opportunity. It’s decided that there’s a market for the  kinds of pictures that photographers most want to shoot.

Of course, photography is usually fun but there’s a difference between shooting the kinds of images that a client needs and taking photos that satisfy the photographer’s soul. Making money from microstock, for example, tends to mean shooting happy-looking models against green grass and blue skies. Commercial photography requires professional photographers to put their talent to work photographing products such as shampoo bottles and cans of beans. Even portrait photographers have to shoot pictures that are flattering even when the subject would produce a more interesting photograph shot more honestly. Making your images available for sale on Flickr provides at least a chance that your favorite photographs will also have a commercial use. So how else could you earn income and still shoot the pictures you love?

One option is to turn not to general stock sites but to specific niche services. Mark Maziarz, for example, is a stock photographer with a number of different niched stock sites. His local site offers pictures shot in Park City, Utah and his sports photography site lets him make money out of the pictures he takes of athletic activities. It’s possible that in each case Mark will be taking pictures with one eye on the user, leaving room for the designer to insert copy and focusing on the kinds of shots that buyers like, but he’s still photographing a subject that he finds interesting.

That’s one approach. Take pictures to be used for textbooks rather than advertising and you should find that you hardly have to think about the end user at all. Images of astronomy or attractive macro shots of flowers can have stock uses too, especially when the pictures come with detailed descriptions. The markets for these kinds of images might be smaller than those for general stock but the pictures should also be more fun to shoot.

Creative Wedding Photography

Wedding photography is all about pleasing the client. When a couple is paying a photographer several thousand dollars to take a picture of the most important day of their lives, they’re not really interested in whether the photographer is enjoying himself. They want to make sure that they’re enjoying themselves — and the photographer wants to make sure that he delivers the pictures the client has hired him to create.

But the most successful wedding photographers don’t just create mementoes. They take pictures that have style and creativity, that reflect who they are and the way see the world while still documenting the couple’s wedding.

It’s an approach that wedding photojournalism has opened for photographers who have the talent to make the most of it. Instead of lining families up for formals, wedding photojournalists attempt to capture unguarded moments and natural emotions. Their images reflect the day as they saw it and as the couple experienced it, not just the way the clients expected a wedding to feel and appear. The result can be a collection of pictures that are as rewarding for the photographer to shoot as they are treasured by the client.

Sell Your Aesthetics

Even wedding photojournalists though still have to please their couples. They might be pleasing themselves at the same time but given a free choice, a photographer might not choose to shoot nuptials, especially when they’ve already done it 20 times that year. Art photographers though get to shoot exactly the pictures they want in exactly the way they want. It’s the most enjoyable and rewarding kind of photography and one that grants the photographer the most freedom, so it’s no surprise that it’s also about the hardest to sell. Susan Kirchman of the Kirchman Gallery in Johnson City, Texas isn’t unusual in accepting only about three of the 50 or so photographers who pluck up the courage show her their work each year. While the satisfaction can be enormous, the odds are against most photographers experiencing it.

But galleries aren’t the only way to sell creative pictures either. Photography books and products such as calendars, cards and posters can also feature the kinds of images that photographers most want to shoot. Whether they’ll sell will depend on where you’re hoping to sell them and who you’re hoping to sell them to. The kinds of calendars that appear in stores, for example, tend to be mass-produced and have to appeal to the broadest range of buyers. They tend to do that by featuring cuddly puppies and furball cats or scenic views of the best-known and most iconic locations. Landing spots in those stores means fighting off the competition from professional photographers with strong portfolios and even stronger contacts.

But there’s no reason why you can’t sell them yourself. When travel photographer Jeremy Mason McGraw began playing with photography, he was working on a cruise ship. His first step towards professional photography happened when he persuaded a number of souvenir stores to stock his photos in the form of postcards. On a small scale, with images in only a handful of outlets, it’s not a strategy that’s going to bring in piles of cash but it might just bring in some revenue from pictures of locations that you love to visit and photograph. Small-run calendars and photography books too can sell when you shoot them on a narrow subject with a dedicated audience, and even when you find a uniquely interesting niche.

Selling the pictures you love is the ultimate photographic goal, proof that your sense of aesthetic is shared by others and evidence that you have the technical skill to create beautiful works that others will treasure. It’s not the way photography is usually sold and it’s not something that you can rely on selling when you’re hoping to make some income from your photography. But it is possible, and Getty is not the only way to make it happen.

Photographers might be a varied bunch but there’s one thing they can all agree on: prices are dropping. Times seem to be getting harder for photographers who want to sell their pictures, and they’re hardest of all for those who have been making a living licensing their images. It’s a feeling with some foundation.

FotoQuote, an industry-standard program that uses sales records to track prices and suggest usage fees, was launched in 1993. Since then US inflation has amounted to just over 50 percent but according to Cradoc Bagshaw, a professional photographer and the program’s creator, usage prices have not generally kept up. Some advertising categories may have risen by half over that period and prices are higher for non-editorial use with low circulations and small print runs, but higher end usage has seen a sharp falling off and most usage categories have suffered cuts once the effect of inflation is taken into account.

Publishers Aren’t Supposed to Be Talking

And it’s not just the prices that are being squeezed. Clients are also pushing for looser licenses, demanding more usage while paying less money. Those changes to the pricing model may have an even greater effect on a photographer’s bottom line than the amounts paid, argues Cradoc.

Textbook publishers, for example, began demanding that image licenses be extended to five years; they’re now asking for ten years without offering to pay additional fees. Photographers would also demand additional payments if a book that included their image was revised. Publishers began expecting the original price to include those revisions if less than 10 percent of the content was changed; in the last year or so, they have upped those demands to 25 percent, and refusal is seen as a deal breaker.

“These publishers, who aren’t supposed to be talking to each other, seemed to come up with the idea at the same time,” says Cradoc. “Rarely are books revised more than 25 percent.”

Photographers are certainly feeling these changes in their pockets but they’re also feeling them in their relationships with buyers. Larry Ulrich, a photographer with almost 40 years’ experience and the owner of a small stock company representing the work of eighteen photographers, reports that clients were easy to work with when photographers could dictate the prices based on experience and industry standards. Now sellers have to work within the budgets of their buyers.

For Cradoc Bagshaw, the pressure on pricing and usage is coming primarily from the market’s two main suppliers: Corbis and Getty. A cartel of agencies large enough to define the market, he says, is preventing prices from rising with inflation and in some cases pushing them below the cost of production.

“Much of this is possibly caused by the business practices of Getty,” says Cradoc. “They are setting much of the model that photographers have to compete with when they are pricing images, but they aren’t constrained by the same costs in producing the images that the photographers have to deal with.”

It’s Enthusiasts’ Fault

Larry Ulrich places the blame elsewhere, on new photographers who are more interested in seeing their names in print than in receiving payment for their talent. Major stock companies, he argues, offer small percentages because of the increased supply of low-priced images from photographers who don’t consider the cost of production or the need to make ends meet.

“So many of these individuals have come into our profession after success in other professions where they adhered to their own industry standards for pricing,” says Larry. “But once here, how much money they make isn’t a necessary goal.”

It’s hard though to estimate the effect that enthusiasts are having on pricing, even indirectly. Cradoc Bagshaw notes that buyers are using images wherever they find them, even placing microstock pictures on the cover of Time. Getty’s Flickr collection is growing daily too, introducing the market to part-time photographers with real talent. That increased demand will affect certain kinds of uses. But professionals, he notes, are still selling stock, often by taking advantages of the new technologies. Larry’s own agency has remained competitive by cutting costs, increasing productivity, and by no longer sending film to buyers. He also helps his customers save time by supplying them with high quality, highly targeted images, a benefit with real value in a crowded market. Model releases supplied by professionals are also likely to be safer than those supplied by amateurs, says Cradoc.

And the new technology is opening new opportunities too. The latest edition of fotoQuote contains 86 new pricing categories, bringing the total to 304. Of those new categories, 35 are for video stock footage, an area that Cradoc predicts will be a big part in photographers’ future income opportunities. Photographers can use the same equipment that they use for stills, delivering usable video at competitive prices.

“Also there is more protection from the likelihood of the amateur photo hordes producing something usable than there is with stills,” he argues.

That’s good news for photographers, not so great for traditional video producers who may find themselves feeling like stock photographers.

Whether the changes to the photography industry are good or bad for photographers though, and whether they’re caused by small-time enthusiasts, giant photo agencies, or the combined pressure of both, change is happening. Photographers need to learn how to swim in the new waters, making the most of opportunities as they arise. Instead of setting prices, demanding tight usage restrictions and negotiating from a relatively strong position, they have to get used to asking how much the buyer can afford to pay and deciding whether that’s an amount that they can afford to accept, even if that means saying no to a figure that doesn’t take the cost of image production into account.

And reliability and reputation are key too. When the market is filled with supply, shoppers want to buy products that they’re familiar with and from sellers they know and trust. Those are assets that can help generate a feeling that even if prices aren’t rising, at least your own income is holding steady.

Photography: GlacierTim

Start thinking about ways to turn images into cash, and at the top of the minds of most photography enthusiasts will be microstock. With dozens of companies begging for new submissions to keep their inventory fresh and attract buyers, it takes little effort to be in a position to make sales. Just shoot, upload and wait. The cost of that easy market access though is low prices and stiff competition. Stock sites offer millions of pictures, only a small percentage of which actually sell and only a small percentage of those sell a significant number of licenses. While some photographers are making meaningful incomes from microstock, they’ve usually chosen to work at it full-time and make a point of shooting the kinds of pictures the market demands rather than the sorts of images they most love to create. There are however a number of other fields which, although not as easy to enter as microstock, do offer real opportunities even for non-professional photographers.

Dance Classes

School photography is big business. According to Chris Wunder, a professional photographer who offers workshops on school photography, the field is one of the few that offers the opportunity to generate $1,000 a day in revenues (although the profits are significantly smaller). It’s also one, he says, that’s becoming increasingly open to smaller studios.

“The tables are turning away from the large, inflexible companies,” he told us. “Plus, other markets photographers have traditionally depended upon (weddings, seniors, children’s photography, etc) have become more competitive, so they are wanting to reach out to new opportunities to fill that void.”

In practice though, photographers looking to break into the school market will struggle to persuade the schools to give up their current suppliers for an untried photographer, especially one with little experience in handling large groups of children. School photography might be a lucrative opportunity, but it’s not an easy one to exploit.

But learning doesn’t stop when the school bell rings. After-school classes provide a different kind of opportunity for photographers. The number of images will be smaller — you’ll be shooting dozens of children, rather than hundreds — but that just makes the logistics easier and there’s a good chance that you’ll be shooting them more often. School shoots take place once a year; dance classes put on performances every few months, and parents are more likely to want to order prints of their little ones jumping and pirouetting than sitting on a stool in the kind of characterless pose that they can create themselves.

The relatively small size of the market means that dance classes aren’t going to be a replacement for professional school photographers. But occasional photographers — especially those with children who take dance classes — can find that offering to shoot and sell pictures of dance performances can bring in some useful extra income without having to compete against large professional companies.

Pro Bono Photography

You’re not going to make any money shooting for free but offering your skills to a good cause can produce something else of value: it can give you contacts — and those contacts can give you income. Top pet photographer Grace Chon, for example, started her photography career while working in an ad firm. In her spare time, she shot free portraits of homeless dogs for a charity. The shoots gave her the opportunity to practice photographing animals and put her in touch with pet owners. Grace now charges as much as $1,150 for a session.

Clearly, not all photographers are going to follow that route. Much depends on the organizations to which you want to donate your images, your ability to network and the willingness of the organizations to use your photos in their material, spreading your name and building your portfolio.

But the way in is simple enough. Choose a cause you want to support and start volunteering. Let people know that you’re a talent behind the lens and start shooting for free. Then let that internship guide you towards a specialization — even a part-time one — in a field of photography that’s important to you.

Textbooks

Blurb has made it easy for photographers to create photography books, but it hasn’t given people a good reason to buy them. Although the company’s online store is filled with books on topics from weddings to the Wade Family’s Visit with President George W. Bush, few of those books ever sell more than a handful of copies. Creating photography books is now simple. Creating books that people want to buy — and marketing them so that those people know about them — is still a struggle.

One kind of book that does have both a steady demand from buyers and a constant need for images is textbooks. Publishers of college books, whether they’re intended to teach budding physicists or produce young sociologists, tend to have stricter image demands than other image buyers do. It’s not enough to know that the picture in the stock inventory is a flower. The publisher of a biology textbook will want to know what kind of flower it is and where it was photographed. They’re more likely to find those sorts of details on specialist science image banks like PhotoResearchers and PhotoTake.

Not all of these images are easy to create. Shots of cells and medical procedures require a level of access that most members of the public lack — which is why stock companies like these often depend on doctors to do the shooting (and why there’s always a demand for them) — but if you have connections that can get your foot in a hospital door or into a university laboratory, you’ll be in a position to create (and keyword) some very sellable images.

When it comes to making money from photography, there are no easy opportunities. There are however, openings that are easier to make the most of than others, or that offer less competition than others, or that are more enjoyable to exploit than others even if they take longer to fulfill. Some paths to selling images might be well-known but there’s no shortage of narrower routes that are no less fruitful.

Choosing your rates is one of the hardest challenges for any photographer, professional or enthusiast. But wrong prices can be corrected. The challenge isn’t just to choose the right amount though; it’s to pick the right moment to make the change.

The worst time to demand more money is also the most tempting. As photographers build up experience they also build their confidence. The danger comes when that confidence spills over into a form of arrogance. They become aware that their pictures are beautiful, impressive, moving and technically correct but they’re not aware just how many other photographers are equally capable of creating images that beautiful, impressive, moving and technically correct. Believing that they’re in the top one percent of photographic talent, some photographers believe that their prices should be in the top one percent too.

“I find some photographers start to get an attitude about themselves and quote very high-end prices,” says Teri Bloom, a professional photographer in New York. “Very often, their pricing is more about their ego than about the quality of their work.”

While having the confidence to charge for work is essential, the moment when you start to feel that you’re better than almost every other photographer isn’t a good time to raise your prices. It’s a good time to buy a photography book and remember what other talented photographers can produce.

Let Your Competitors Take the Risk

Similarly the sight of a competitor adding some figures to his rate page isn’t a reason to adjust your prices upwards either — at least not immediately. Other photographers have no greater feel for what the market will bear than you do. They’re also no less prone to wishful thinking. If they’re right about market rates, then they’ll stay in business and will have earned a little more money than you for the few months it takes to test the new pricing. If they’re wrong though, they’ll lose jobs and see their income fall until they decide to adjust their prices down again.

When you see competitors changing rates then, rather than jump right in behind them, watch to see what happens. Let the competitor take the risk and only follow suit if you see that they’re keeping the prices at the new higher level. That’s a sign that the market has shifted. The price it will have cost you to discover that new level is the difference between your old prices and your new fees during the time you waited.

So if you shouldn’t raise your prices immediately after you find that you’re shooting consistently beautiful images or even the moment your competitors increase their fees, when is the best time to ask for more cash?

There are at least a couple of clear signs that your prices are too low. The first — and the most serious — is when you’re not meeting your expenses. It’s not unusual for part-time photographers to accept an offer from a buyer for a picture that they shot for fun, only later to calculate the true cost of the production and realize the buyer didn’t actually pay anything for the talent and creativity. The fee barely covered the costs of printing, framing and shipping, let alone travel to the location, time in post-production or buying the equipment used to create the picture.

When you realize that you’re shooting for nothing, that’s always a good time to put up your prices.

Losing Photography Clients? Charge More.

Oddly though, losing customers can also be a sign that you’re not charging enough. While charging too much will price you out of the market, charging too little suggests a lack of experience and knowledge. You might want to charge less than competitors in order to buy your first clients, but buyers who are willing to pay the market rate will believe a low price will deliver a budget service. Photographers who have pitched low prices in the hope of making their first moves into professional photography as quick as possible have found that their rates slowed their progress by scaring off buyers.

Another good time to consider raising your prices then is when you see that a client who rejected you has hired a competitor with higher fees. Compare your images to see if those clients are receiving more creative images for those bigger checks, but if you find that your photography is comparable and that the only difference is experience, then try matching their rates and see what happens.

That’s not easy to do though. Comparing images requires a subjectivity that’s hard for a photographer to bring to his or her own images, and it will always be tempting to buy market share with lower rates than to hide inexperience with mid-range prices. But there is another fail-safe time when it always pays to put up your rates.

When your schedule is full and you’re having to reject bookings, that’s a sure sign that you could be earning more money. Just as it doesn’t pay to turn down low-cost work when you’ve got empty hours, so it does pay to swap your budget clients for buyers with deeper pockets. You might want to keep returning customers who supply a regular source of income, but new customers will have to win the remaining slots in your book by outbidding each other. Put up your prices as you see your schedule closing up and you should find that while you’re holding fewer consultations, you’re still completing the same number of shoots, turning away fewer leads, and earning more income.

In general, a recession might not be the best time to think about raising your prices, but if you’ve been charging too little for your photography then even a crunch can be a good moment to ask for more money from new clients. Just make sure that that your schedule is full enough to handle lower demand from budget buyers, that you’re not stepping too far ahead of your competitors — and that your new prices match the quality of your images, and not what you’d like to think about your images.

Decide that you want to make some money from photography and whether you’re setting up as a professional or just hoping to earn a little extra cash at the weekends, you’re going to be spoiled for choice. You could become a wedding photographer, a specialization with plenty of demand, high prices… and lots of competition. You could aim at portrait photography, a field with a fair amount of creativity, some enjoyable personal interaction… and also, lots of competition. Or you could decide that you want to be a landscape photographer, an area that’s going to bring satisfaction with every image, an occasional sale… and lots of competition.

Or you could aim for something more esoteric and position yourself as a car photographer, an equine photographer or an expert on photographing orchids. While you’ll still have to do the marketing, you wouldn’t just be selling the quality of your pictures, you’ll also be pitching your knowledge of a narrow topic, an asset that few other photographers possess.

And you can even choose to specialize in a particular style, letting the uniqueness of the look of your photos help you to stand out from the crowd and build a brand.

Shoot your Hobby

There are two ways to choose a specialization. The first, and probably the most common, is to shoot what you love. Grace Chon, a pet photographer in Los Angeles, began taking pictures of animals while working as an advertising art director. Her roommate had two dogs and Grace would constantly take pictures of them.

“I even had their photos at work, which coworkers were always asking questions about — like ‘How did you take those?’ or ‘What camera did you use?’” she recalled. “I was just using a little Canon Elph point and shoot at the time, but it was really cool to get such positive feedback.”

Eventually, Grace upgraded to a DSLR, began taking head shots of homeless dogs for a rescue center, and encouraged by the compliments she received from people who saw her pictures, turned her hobby into a side business. Today, Grace is an award-winning pet photographer whose images are used on the cover of magazines. She’s invited to judge photography competitions — and she charges up to $1,150 for a shoot.

Grace isn’t the only pet photographer in Los Angeles but she is now the first photographer that many people in the city turn to when they want photographs of their animals.

For Grace, a love of photographing pets has given her a career and a reputation in one particular field of photography. Jerry Lodriguss also moved into photography as a result of an interest in a particular field. For Jerry, a love of astronomy led him to buy a camera to put on the end of his telescope back in 1971. He still makes money from his astrophotography, writing books and selling stock images, but he’s best known as a sports photographer, a job he’s been doing for more than 25 years.

Both Grace and Jerry began with a clear interest in their subject and only later moved into a photography, but other photographers have been known to move in the opposite direction. Matt Adcock and Sol Tomargo both had successful wedding photography businesses before they met through mutual clients. Having teamed up, their joint photography business is now best known not for  its wedding photography in general but specifically for its Trash the Dress photography, a style in which the bride is shot in her wedding dress in unusual locations. She might be photographed floating in the sea or, Del Sol’s particular specialty, standing in cenotes, water-filled caves in Mexico. It’s a style rather than a subject, but one which has won Del Sol a shelf full of awards and media attention around the world.

Although the effect is the same — Del Sol is now branded as a Trash the Dress photography studio and known for its specialization in the same way that Grace Chon is known as a pet photographer  — the method of choosing the specialty is very different.

How Big is Your Niche Market?

But either approach can work. It’s possible to choose a niche based on a hobby and build a photography business around that expertise, and it’s possible too to push an established business in a narrow direction.

Established businesses though will always have an advantage. They’ll know the market and the size of the competition.

That’s always going to be vital. Start shooting something you love and you’ll soon amass a pile of attractive images on a topic you find interesting. You’ll pick up expertise in a particular field so that you’ll know your way around the star system, for example, and which part of the sky to point your camera. And you’ll know how to photograph those subjects, understanding the importance of polishing a car’s paintwork so that it looks good in the image, for example. But you’ll still have to figure out how to put those images in front of buyers.

For new photographers, even that marketing knowledge should come naturally. As you attend events related to your field and share your pictures, your name will spread. For car photographer Andreas Reinhold, a side-career shooting for magazines around his day job as an engineer developed after meeting an editor at an auto show. That might have been a chance encounter but it happened because Andreas was so interested in cars that he was prepared to spend his spare time attending related events.

And that’s the most important factor in choosing a new niche. The ability to create the pictures is going to be important. The size of the market is going to be a factor in your success too, as will your ability to reach buyers. But to really master a niche, you will need to have the dedication required to fully understand it and want to keep learning about it.

That’s as true of pet photography and astrophotography as it is of car photography and particular styles of wedding photography.

It takes effort to land a photography client. You have to make sure that your website is seen and persuasive, that your images are attractive and inviting, and that your prices are pitched at the right level. You have to talk the lead into hiring you, and you have to build up the experience that generates the referrals and recommendations. It takes time, and every time you succeed, you have to start again. Only staff photographers have the luxury of a regular salary. For freelancers and studio owners, keeping the money coming in means keeping the leads coming in — and keeping those leads converting.

If you’ve already persuaded someone to hire you for a shoot though, whether that’s a wedding, a catalog or a portrait, then they should be willing to come back to you next time they need photographs. But that means letting them know that you’re still around, giving them a nudge about the need for new images, and reminding them that when they do need new pictures you’re still available. And it has to be done through all of the months and even years when they don’t need a photographer without bothering them.

It’s a particularly big challenge for wedding photographers looking to convert their clients into maternity and children’s photography clients. That process should be natural and could lead right through to the children’s weddings, so that an engagement job becomes the first in a series of bookings with a lifelong client. But each job is separated by years when the clients don’t even think about photography. Commercial photographers too have to struggle with the need to balance staying on the client’s radar with the disruptions that cause the client to break the connection.

Put Your Studio in Your Clients’ Pockets

Tim Gertz offers one way to solve the problem with his photographer’s iPhone app. For $299, studios can put their pictures and updates in their clients’ pockets, pushing pictures to them every day and targeting discounts to client categories and individuals. At least one studio, he says, was able to make back the cost of the app within days by encouraging his mailing list to download it, then offering them a discount on a new portrait shoot.

But an app can only be used by those clients who happen to have iPhones and it demands that they open it to see the updates. The client has to remain interested enough in photography to keep checking and they have to come to the photographer — or at least to his or her app. They might check it the first time they download and use a discount offered the first time they open it, but for how long will they continue to open the app?

In general, photographers looking to maintain a relationship with a former client will need to be a little pushier and put their messages where their clients are likely to see them. Wayne Wallace, a commercial and portrait photographer in Vegas, is just one photographer who provides a newsletter that delivers “news, announcements and special discount offers” directly to subscriber inboxes. Readers don’t have to act on every offer or order a shoot every month. As long as they stay subscribed, they’ll see it. And as long as they see it, they’re being reminded that they have a photographer when they need one.

Email newsletters though, can be treated like spam. By law, publishers have to supply an unsubscribe link that makes it easy for readers to stop receiving them. And they’re not interactive. The relationship between the reader of a photography newsletter and the photographer who sent it consists of a monthly look that last no more than a few seconds. Social media though, is interactive, and allows photographers to maintain a friendly relationship with clients. That’s easier to do on Facebook than on Twitter, where it’s not always easy to find clients. Facebook’s larger audience — and members’ use of real names — means that studios can set up fan pages, invite clients to follow them and push out messages on a regular basis. Those messages can then receive comments and replies, turning a quick note into a brief conversation — an interaction that’s more likely to keep the relationship close. Breaking the connection too, feels a little rude. Unfriending someone on Facebook is a serious business.

Talk About The Client, Not About You

How a photographer stays in touch with clients is only part of the story. What you say is important too. On Facebook, photographers frequently feed in their blog posts, which leads to lots of images and little text, content that’s more likely to please other photographers than clients. Wayne Wallace’s decision to include “special discount offers” in his newsletter together with his own news is a better idea. Readers aren’t very interested in whether a photographer they used a year ago has bought a new camera or just completed a shoot in a beautiful location. They want to know whether can get some more prints cheaply, where they can find a nice frame or whether the photographer has some recommendations for fancy albums.

Newsletter writers have long understood that if they want to keep readers, they have to make their content about the reader and not about the sender. It’s a valuable lesson that’s worth keeping in mind as you’re trying to maintain a long-term relationship with a client.

If all of that though sounds like a challenge too tough though, it is worth remembering that there is one more easy way to stay in touch with clients over the years. A large portion of the clients that many photographers pick up come by way of referrals. Those referrals are a connection to previous buyers. Wedding photographers in particular will find themselves running into past clients when they come to shoot their friends’ weddings, and children’s photographers will find themselves shooting the classmates of previous subjects. Sometimes all you have to do to stay in your clients’ minds is ask how they’re doing — and ask the client to pass on your regards.

And, of course, when you shoot pictures that your referred clients will want to show, you won’t just be reminding your old clients who you are, you’ll also be reminding them what you can do.

Courtesy: Emily Horne and Joey Comeau

Photographers, especially photojournalists, are often told that their pictures should tell a story. A number of photographers though, are using their pictures to create entire storylines, as well as jokes and books, adding text and speech bubbles to turn their images into comic strips. Posted online, these webcomics are attracting large fan bases, and for some photographers even the kind of living that creative types dream about.

Photography-based comics, known as fumetti, aren’t new but it was largely with the rise of webcomics — strips posted online — that they began to take off in the United States. Dedicated webcomic hosting services have now made publishing almost as simple as photo-sharing, allowing creators to put the strips together, place words over their characters’ mouths, and build an audience. Most importantly, it’s also enabled people who want to create cartoons but can’t draw to still be able to turn their ideas into working publications.

“I’d long wanted to make comics of my own,” explained David Morgan-Mar, a physicist and creator of Irregular Webcomic. “I know my drawing isn’t brilliant, so that held me back. Until I got a webcam, and could take cheap digital photos. Suddenly I had everything I needed to make comics for the Web.”

David now produces a new strip every day, using Lego figures and role-playing game miniatures to create the scenes for his multiple storylines. The writing is done on the train during his half-hour commute to work, and the week’s scenes are photographed in one batch at the weekend.

“This is the most labor-intensive part of the process, as it involves setting up sets and character figures,” he says.

A Labor of Love

The sets are lit with a bright desk lamp, diffused to eliminate harsh shadows, and shot with the lens about five to ten centimeters from the figures. David will then add the backgrounds in Photoshop, using his photos of cities or landscapes, or mining public domain and creative commons images online if he doesn’t have a suitable picture of his own. The process takes about half an hour for each strip.

Courtesy: David Morgan-Mar

For David, Irregular Webcomic is a labor of love. All his strips are published under creative commons licenses, he asks that fans who want to donate contribute to charity instead, and he doesn’t provide any way for people to buy his strips. In part, that’s due to concerns about licensing issues — Lego is known for its willingness to sue — but it’s also because the comics are only created at screen resolution and would be “pixellated and ugly” if they were printed in book form, he says. Publishing his strips offline would mean re-creating more than 2,000 scenes. It’s a choice about which David insists he has only “minor” regrets.

“I never had expectations of getting fame or money out of it, and that’s the way I still treat it.”

It’s not a problem however faced by Emily Horne, co-creator with Joey Comeau of A Softer World. For more than five years following the creation of the strip in an all-night photocopy shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2003, Emily created the images for the comic in her spare time while working in the heritage field and in museums. For the last year and a half though, she’s been one of a small group of webcomic publishers able to earn a living from what used to be a hobby.

There’s No Link Between the Photo and the Text

While David Morgan-Mar poses toys to create his strips, Emily’s images often contain real people and none are posed. The viewer feels that they’ve caught the subject in the middle of something, she explains, a feeling enhanced by the strip’s grainy look — created by shooting largely on film — which has also become one of its hallmarks.

Emily and Joey’s working methods have changed over the years as the pair have moved around. When they were living in different cities, collaboration took place over online chat, a practice they continued even when they were both in Halifax again. For most of the strips, Emily would shoot a series of images, divide them into three frames and crop or enlarge them to create drama. Joey would then add the text. Recently, they’ve switched places: Joey will send Emily the text and she’ll find suitable pictures that suggest action or thought, before the two of them fine-tune the writing and the photo choice.

“Often though, there is no literal link between the photo and the text,” Emily says. “Instead Joey and I try to match them up by mood.”

It’s a system that works. A Softer World’s Facebook page, which is used in part to promote new merchandise now has more than 9,000 fans. The strip was picked up for a while by The Guardian, a UK national daily newspaper, and Emily and Joey are able to sell t-shirts, prints and books based on the strip’s popularity. Some of those sales are made through TopatoCo, a company that specializes in artistic merchandise, but comics conventions are also great places to release new merchandise, Emily says.

Creating comic strips has become a lot easier over the last few years. Strips such as David Morgan-Mar’s have shown that it’s possible to produce them without models, without costumes and without any cartooning skills. Emily Horne and Joey Comeau have proved that it’s even possible to make a living combining images with text.

But to be that successful they have to be good. Emily puts the success of A Softer World down to the uniqueness of  its dark sensibility, something they’ve tried to maintain while avoiding stagnation — perhaps the biggest danger of creating a photocomic that’s capable of building a fan base and even generating revenue. The writing is difficult and it’s even harder to keep it going.

“I want to keep the strip fresh, with new and unexpected storylines and jokes, but honestly that just seems to get harder as time goes by,” says David Morgan-Mar. “It makes you realize that turning out a daily gag is really hard work, and the people who do it well for a long time deserve credit for it.”

Photography: Joe Thorn

One of the things that makes photography special is that it’s an activity that many people pay to do and some people are paid to do. It’s a business and an industry, as well as a passion, a hobby and a pastime. Usually, those two elements don’t mix. Photographers who shoot stock might enjoy their shoots but they’re rarely taking the kinds of pictures that they’d create for fun. They’re taking pictures that sell. The same is true of event photographers, commercial photographers and even editorial photographers. Services like Microstock and especially Flickr  have narrowed the gap a little in the last few years, enabling enthusiasts to sell images that were taken for fun but there are a few other areas where business meets photography in surprising ways.

Flickr’s Business Potential

Bookstore shelves now groan under the weight of books promising to teach entrepreneurs how to market with social media, and conferences are packed with speakers who can’t wait to explain how tweeting, Facebooking or being active on LinkedIn can bring sales and boost profits. But no one ever talks about one of the most effective and long-standing of social media sites: Flickr. While photographers and buyers have been quick to pick up on the value of the kinds of creative images posted on the site, businesses have been slower to make use of a resource that allows them to share pictures of their product, their venue, their conference activity and the people behind the logo.

And Flickr even offers businesses much more than most social media sites. The site has just brought back referrer data to stats, allowing Pro members to see who’s viewing their submissions — and businesses to do some smart, targeted marketing. That’s not something you’ll find on Twitter.

For more information, read the new Flickr Marketing ebook.

Microstock Gets Moving

Although microstock sites will accept images shot for fun and which might have some business use, most photographers find that the biggest profits come when they shoot photos specifically for sale. The kind of business-oriented images that Yuri Arcurs shoots for example, are clearly professional rather than images that he created in his spare time. But while microstock photos clearly have a use for businesses, it does appear that microstock companies are now looking for other ways in which entrepreneurs can use their images.

In February 2010, for example, Fotolia launched Flixtime, a free resource that allows anyone to turn their still pictures into a short promotional video, complete with backing music. A quick look at rival site animoto, which charges $249 a year, gives a clue to the direction Fotolia is moving: towards turning still photographers into creators of images for promotional videography.

For more information, read the new microstock photography ebook.

Kodak Turns Pets’ Eyes

Kodak, perhaps one of the biggest victims of the move away from print photography, has had to change its photography-related business but it has managed to adapt. The company’s Picture Kiosks now boast social connectivity so that users of Facebook, Kodak Gallery and Picasa can access their images and  print them, even on greeting cards, DVDs and calendars. Its Video Snapshots feature does the opposite of Flixtime, allowing owners of videos to print stills. But its most surprising new offering is Pet Eye Retouch.

While features that beat human redeye have now become standard on even the simplest digital cameras, Kodak’s new offering ensures that cats, dogs and other animals can now look their best on film.

That might sound like a waste of effort but according to Kodak’s own market research, the US alone has about 71 million pet households, and pets rank in the top four of all captured images. The company has also found that 65 percent of consumers would use a feature that turned their animals’ eyes the right color, and over a quarter would go to another printer to get it.

Pets might be as much fun as photography but they certainly affect business too, even the business of photography.

For more information, read the new pet photography ebook.

Photoshop Goes Mobile

iFart Mobile might be the most (in)famous app to hit the iPhone charts but while the app store’s electronic whoopee cushion has been making all the noise, a better-known product has been quietly blowing it out of the water. According to Techcrunch, in the six months since Photoshop.com Mobile was put in the app store, the free photography app has been downloaded more than 6 million times. The app gives users access to 2 gigabytes of images stored on Photoshop.com’s servers, allowing them to do simple editing. Layering and other complexities might kill an iPhone, but the app does allow cropping, rotating, effects and borders. Photographers then can shoot pictures on their iPhones, upload them to Photoshop.com and start editing.

Although the app itself is a simple enough tool that anyone can use to improve the look of their photos, the familiarity that it brings to non-professionals who may then graduate to the full version of Photoshop is clearly invaluable to Adobe. It could also have an effect on the photography business as a whole. At the moment, photographer’s assistants can charge a little more if they bring technical skills to a studio in addition to the ability to carry heavy lighting gear, and time that a photographer might have spent in a development lab is now often spent in front of a monitor.

With 6 million people playing around with Photoshop, many for the first time, it’s just possible that those skills will become more commonplace, allowing photographers to focus on the shooting while assistants do the cropping. That’s certainly Adobe’s hope anyway.

Photography might be both a passion and a profession and those two aspects of image-making might meet in some familiar ways. But if you can spot places where the love of photography coincides with a business opportunity, you can increase your ability to generate more revenue from your pastime.

For more information, read the new photoshop ebook.

Photopreneur’s new range of ebooks are now available from Scribd. Covering Flickr for businesses, pet photography, microstock photography, and Photoshop, the ebooks contain explanations and case studies to help anyone understand the opportunities available in those photography-related fields.

Photography: Mike Stimpson

When Toyota hired Rebekka Gudsleifdottir to shoot a series of billboard ads for the Prius in 2006, it was an idea they were after. Rebecca, then an art student in Iceland, had already gathered a large following on Flickr by creating a series of self-portraits in which she appeared twice. That double-appearance, Toyota’s advertising company felt, reflected the hybrid car’s two power sources. These days, they might want to avoid photographers whose careers appear to be as unstoppable as Rebekka’s (her work this month will be exhibited in New York) but that commission – remarkable for a non-professional — does show how sometimes a good idea, combined with the right execution, can be enough to win paid work. Rebekka though isn’t the only photographer whose creativity has helped to fill her order book. Here are five others:

Kevin Bauman’s 100 Abandoned Houses

Kevin Bauman’s idea was perhaps the simplest. A resident of Michigan, he became fascinated by the abandoned houses he saw in and around Detroit as industry closed and people moved away. He began taking pictures of the properties, shooting them front-on, so that as his collection grew the individual houses became part of a crowd, describing both the beauty of the decaying architecture and the spread of that decay. When he put those pictures up on a website, the result was phenomenal. The site was Dugg and StumbledUpon, and featured on ABC. A report about  Kevin’s work appeared in The New York Times and sent him about 8,000 unique visitors.

It also delivered 70 print sales at $35 a time, $10 of which were donated to Habitat for Humanity and the Greening of Detroit.

The images themselves aren’t particularly complex, but the idea struck a nerve at a time when Detroit was in the news. Matching the political zeitgeist with charitable donations, a clear way of shooting a subject, and a way to buy the pictures, helped Kevin turn his idea into cash.

Beth Dow Takes a Platinum Idea into the Garden

For Kevin’s photos the creativity is in the concept. For Beth Dow, it’s in the execution as well. In 2008, her Blurb book In The Garden, a collection of images shot in English and Italian country gardens, won the Photography.Book.Now competition. Unlike most landscape photos the images were made from platinum prints, a hand-made “slow art” process that Beth said she found seductive.

“I drew compulsively when I was growing up, and I filled stacks of sketchbooks with pencil drawings of twisted trees and anything else that would stay still for me,” she told us then. “I still love the subtlety of graphite, and platinum is the closest photographic medium I can think of.”

The result was a set of photos that Beth describes as “meditative” and “spiritual.” It was also a set that, despite also being exhibited at the Katherine Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota, was tailor-made for a book, Beth’s format of choice.

“I’m seduced by the “thingness” of books – the smell and feel of them, and this notion of the book as artifact is echoed in a platinum print.”

It helps too that books are easier to buy than prints, allowing Beth to turn her idea into more sales.

Vanessa Dualib Plays with Her Food

While Beth Dow’s style is serious and atmospheric, Vanessa Dualib is able to earn income through play. Her decision to start posing food items came when confined to her home while recovering from an illness. It started as a joke, she said, a way to avoid boredom and to combine her three great passions: photography, food and humor.

When she put the pictures of animal eggplants and skating carrots on Flickr though, like Rebekka, she found herself developing a following. And like Rebekka, that following attracted the attention of the professional world. Getty, which was then starting to build its Flickr collection, invited her to submit her photos. Put off by their licensing requirements, she kept most back but offered four, each of which sold licenses in the first four months on the market. She’s also put all of the images in a Blurb book.

For Vanessa, sales come from a mixture of fun, creativity, Flickr’s support network and, most importantly, the concept.

“If you got an idea but you’re a bit shy of trying it out because you don’t think you have the right technical skills or equipment to do it, my advice would be to just really give it a try,” she says. “The real important thing here is just to actually have the right idea. Have fun, do your thing and enjoy!”

Mike Stimpson Builds Sales out of Lego

Playing seems to be a good way to come up with valuable, creative ideas. It worked too for video games programmer Mike Stimpson. After taking up photography, Mike became interested in the history of the subject and decided to re-create classic early images… using Lego characters. The photos were spotted again by Diggers, who in turn were spotted by the BBC. The Sun, the UK’s highest-selling tabloid wrote an article about Mike’s work, including the link to his page on RedBubble.

The newspaper’s publicity generated sales of more than 150 cards and about 30 print sales. The BBC gave those revenues another boost.

For Mike, as for Vanessa Dualib, it was the idea that was key — and the lack of fear about doing something new, fun and imaginative.

Vlad Gerasimov’s Siberian Houses

Kevin Bauman isn’t the only photographer to recognize the beauty — and the earning potential — of old homes. Vlad Gerasimov’s series of wooden Siberian houses are shot in a very different style, filled with color and texture. They’re also sold in a different way too. While Kevin Bauman relies on print sales to generate revenue, Vlad’s following on product sites like Zazzle has enabled him to create subscription models that let him sell his unique pictures as computer and mobile phone wallpaper.

Sometimes, creativity can extend beyond the picture into the sales channel too.

One of the biggest challenges for photographers is the conservatism of buyers. Customers tend to buy what they know they — and sometimes their clients — like. Being creative then can mean sticking your neck out, but it can also be fun, rewarding and remunerative too.

One of the biggest problems for photography studios is amnesia. Clients book a shoot, pick up their pictures… then forget who took them. They might show the pictures to friends occasionally but for the most part, the images stay in the album and the direct connection to the photographer – together with the potential for referrals, repeat sales and additional sales — is lost. That’s a problem that two portrait studio owners are trying to solve by allowing photographers to put not just pictures, but their entire studio in clients’ pockets.

Tim and Joy Vertz are co-owners of Shoot the Moon Photography, a Milwaukee photography studio that specializes in portraits and weddings. Together with developer Jason Kelley, they have created an iPhone app that aims to help photographers maintain a permanent link with their clients.

The app has five features. “MyDailyPic” delivers a new image each day through the app to the client; “News” lets studios offer promotions, bargains and other announcements; “Social” links the client to the studio’s Facebook and Twitter presence, and also allows them to send the app to a friend; “About” provides a space for the studio to talk about itself; and “For You” lets the studio create personalized benefits for each group of clients.

Get in Touch with Just One Touch

The idea for the app came just over a year ago, when Shoot the Moon was looking for some creative marketing ideas.

“We’re always looking for ways we can differentiate ourselves in the marketplace as well as finding ways for our loyal clients to help build our brand,” says Tim Vertz. “At first, we looked into just writing an iPhone app for our own studio – but then we felt we had something that would be extremely compelling to photographers and studio owners worldwide.

It’s all about a studio differentiating themselves and giving their clients the tools so they will want to help spread the word as to why their portrait studio is such a great place to have portraits done.”

Studios can create a new name for their app, add their own icon and show off their best images, social media information and promotions, delivering them directly to a device used by their clients every day. The benefits to the studio, Tim argues, can take a number of different forms. The presence of the app on their phones is likely to remind clients to call for an appointment and the app itself allows them to do so with one touch through the telephone, email or SMS. More powerfully, the app’s “For You” feature allows the studio owner to put together a selection of preview images and deliver them to the phone as a preview, generating anticipation before the sales appointment.

Photographers can also use the feature to develop and deliver incentive packages, offering a free online gallery after spending a set sum on prints, for example. And by delivering fresh images every day, the client has an incentive to pull out the phone and show off their new photos, spreading the name of the studio without having to remember where they had the pictures taken.

“Every time the client shows family, friends, co-workers, etc. their iPhone-only images – they have to go to their iPhone app – and naturally everyone will ask how where they had their portraits done.  The viral marketing effect for a studio will be huge!” says Tim.

Looking at Someone Else’s Portraits

Or they would be huge as long as the clients have a reason to download the app. While the benefits to a photography studio of putting an app in a client’s pocket are clear, the advantages to the client are less obvious. Asked why a client would want to download the app, Tim focused on the DailyPic, a feature that allows the studio to push a new picture to the client’s phone each day.

“The studio decides if these are complimentary images, paid images, how many, etc.  The studio has the control to determine exactly what is shared, what the price is, etc.  The client benefits in having this technology without unauthorized scanning.”

But clients are unlikely to want to hand over control of their viewing to the studio nor will they want to look at a portrait of someone they don’t know, however beautifully shot. And once they have their own photos, they can add them all to the phone’s photo album and look at them whenever they want. That the studio hasn’t “authorized” their scanning isn’t likely to motivate clients to download an app that delivers one picture they didn’t really want every day.

Curiosity might motivate them though, especially when they’re waiting for their prints or after they’ve made their booking. Tim described how one studio in Australia had sent out an email blast announcing its app and saw heavy use within 24 hours. The studio then offered a special promotion exclusively for app users. Within a few hours, the studio had booked a number of new sessions.

In that instance, Tim claim, the app paid for itself within a matter of hours – no small feat considering that while the app is free for clients to download, it costs the studio $249 to buy. Making the app pay then will depend on having a large client base already connected to the studio, perhaps through email newsletters, a Facebook page or a Twitter account, and ready to adopt it. Mentioning the app repeatedly will remind people to look at it – and see the promotions – and encourage new followers to download it too. And those promotions will need to be regularly updated too, together with the new daily images. In short, the app will need to be promoted if its promotional power is to be effective.

None of that though means the app can’t be helpful to photography studios. It can keep a studio on a client’s mind… but only if the studio remembers to use it.

Photography: toastyKen

One of the biggest changes to hit the business world — including the photography world — during the last few years has been globalization. When you can pay someone on the other side of the planet half the fees charged by a local service provider and receive the same quality, the difference in time zones doesn’t look too awkward. For photographers, it’s created real challenges — and real opportunities too. Now that any photographer anywhere can offer their photos to any buyer, competition has multiplied. Reuters, for example, prides itself not on its ability to fly seasoned photographers from its head office to trouble spots around the world but on its army of local stringers already in place. That’s made it harder than ever for photojournalists with dreams of foreign assignments to get a foot in the door, but it has created plenty of opportunity for Iraqi photography students, Iranians with cameras and Afghans who know their Nikons. If photographers are now competing with peers everywhere, the flip-side is that markets everywhere are now available to any photographer.

That could be even more important than it sounds. While the US publishing industry continues its decline, the media in the developing world is growing at a cracking rate. According to a report published by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the newspaper and magazine industry in the sub-continent is now worth $3.2 billion a year, making it the third biggest English-language market in the world. By 2011, boosted by lower cover prices, growing literacy and rising incomes, that revenue is estimated to reach $5.8 billion. So what can you do to take a share of that cash and get your images bought by buyers in foreign markets?

Make the Subjects Match the Market

In theory, you don’t need to do much. Because images on stock sites can already be seen by anyone, simply uploading your photos to a microstock company is enough to make them available for sale. But whether they sell depends on the types of photos you’re offering. While a photo of a lemon or a tree is universal, it’s pictures of people that sell best. But people look different the world over and are moved most by images that contain faces that are similar to their own. Only 5 percent of current stock images however show the people who produce 65 percent of world’s gross domestic product — and who own 40 percent of the world’s purchasing power. It was that realization that led to the formation of Gogo Images, an agency that specializes in offering pictures of minorities to marketers and design agencies whose clients operate in different continents.

“While the company’s actual product photography can be used everywhere, their websites and sales materials need to be regionalized for every country in which they are engaged,” explains Jennifer Hurshell, the company’s Chief Creative Officer and co-founder. “And believe me, the General Manager of the company’s Brazil subsidiary is going to insist on having his marketing tools reflect images of Brazilians.”

One way to increase the chances of winning foreign sales then is to take pictures of foreigners. For Gogo’s photographers, that might mean “street casting” or using a model agency. More usually though, it means turning to friends and family who, conveniently, are also the type least likely to demand payment or refuse to sign model releases.

Gogo’s submissions requirements tend to be fairly stringent. The company only accepts images of 12 megapixels and above, but shooting pictures of minorities and uploading them to microstock sites or picture libraries will also put you in the running for one type of easy sale.

Microstock companies though have the disadvantage of paying very little, a downside that’s actually a problem in general when pitching to foreign markets. Even rights managed photos can cost less when the market in which they’re being used is outside North America. And we’ve seen before how some publishers in the developing world have the kind of purchasing budgets that would embarrass a student newspaper — even when those publishers are giant Western companies. In countries where the cost of living is relatively low, there’s always the temptation to pay the photographer peanuts.

Become World-Renowned

Perhaps the best option then is to treat global markets in the same way you treat local markets. While you can’t usually expect to live in the US and shoot the odd wedding job in France, you can send emails to publishers around the world and pitch your images directly. Local publications like the German magazine Visuell can point out good places to look in that specific market but  you’ll always have an advantage if you can speak the language, write a persuasive email, be able to follow up and, most importantly, have images that appeal to the publication. That’s the sort of thing that usually comes from reading it regularly and being familiar with its style.

The exception of course is if you’re an internationally known photographer. That might not be as hard as it sounds if you can find a niche small enough. The photographers at Del Sol Photography who specialize in Trash the Dress photography have been able to shoot weddings in six different countries. Because they’re among the leaders in their field, clients get to hear about them and are prepared to hire them even when the distances are enormous. While pitching to foreign clients should be one goal, a better goal is for foreign clients to want to pitch for your services.

Photography used to be an industry in which “international” meant heading out on assignment to exotic locations to shoot models in the surf or marines on beaches. It meant packing film into courier bags and spending too much time on planes. Today, the Internet allows photo editors anywhere to go online, search for photos and buy the images they need. They don’t care where the images come from or what kind of passport the photographer owns. They just want to know whether the picture tells the story they want. When the entire world has become a market, it’s up to you take your share of it.

Photographers just want to shoot pictures. They want to be on the set, arranging the lights, telling the model how to stand, and looking for the killer composition. They want to be busy creating the perfect image that makes the client gasp and which gives them a belly full of warm fuzzies. They don’t want to be marketing. They don’t want to be interviewing assistants. And they certainly don’t want to be listing everything they’re going to need for a shoot and trying to figure out how much they’re going to have to charge for each item. But however large a headache invoicing and bidding might be, it’s an essential part of paid photography.

Lou Lesko, however, is trying to make it easier, less time-consuming and more efficient at providing buyers with the information they need to consider a photographer’s bid. A fashion photographer with experience of photojournalism, Lou moved into videography and in 1999, began directing commercials. As the work came in, he started looking for a way to spend more time behind the camera creating and earning, and less time in front of the monitor creating inventory lists for clients. The search wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be:

“As I was directing more, I had less time to do my own photography bids,” he told us, “so my producer and I went on the hunt to find easy-to-use software.  There really wasn’t any available.”

Rather than continue preparing his bids and invoices by hand, Lou created his own software program. He produced a design for a workflow and asked a programmer he knew to create a custom database. After working with it for a few months, he realized he had a product that other photographers might find useful.

BlinkBid Means You Don’t Forget the Talent

BlinkBid allows photographers to click and choose their way through a huge range of different options, making creating invoices and detailed bids simple and automatic. The program has already been used by thousands of creative professionals who work in four different languages and is particularly popular in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and New Zealand. In India, it’s used by videographers and it’s now taking off in Sri Lanka as well. At $229 it’s not cheap, but you wouldn’t need to save too many hours working with your own invoicing system to ensure that it pays for itself.

And it’s not just time that a proper billing and bidding system can save. BlinkBid also makes sure that any bid you submit is comprehensive and accurate.

“The biggest issue I had [before creating BlinkBid] was remembering everything I needed for a shoot,” explains Lou. “I was notorious for forgetting things like food and talent and — back in the day — Polaroid.  Also, I had no idea what a usage license was or how that all worked.”

Those details might seem small but they are important. Any creative professional knows the feeling of mission creep, when the client continually asks for just a little more and the professional ends up supplying a much bigger service than the quote originally included.

For creative types like photographers, it’s a real problem, says Lou, and one that can have a serious affect on your income even beyond the costs involved in completing one particular job. The more you do beyond your original agreement, the more you dilute your value as an artist, he explains. But when you’re faced with an interesting project, one that you’re actually going to enjoy shooting, it’s tempting to forget about the money and agree to everything.

“In a creative industry, especially when you’re providing service for money, you must have an agreement indicating what the expectations are for your talent, otherwise you’ll get cheated,” he says. “Paradoxically, creative people aren’t usually inclined for all this paperwork, because all we really want to do is create – whether we’re getting paid or not….

[T]here are times when I was jonesing so bad to be on a set anywhere, that I had to bite my tongue during negotiations to keep from saying, ‘Screw it, I’ll pay you, let’s just go shoot this thing.’”

Notoriety Affects Photography Prices

That’s also why BlinkBid won’t create the prices. It’s possible that the software simply isn’t set up to provide the kind of complex pricing information supplied by fotoQuote – data that involves thousands of different variables and needs to be constantly updated – but according to Lou, the lack of automated pricing is deliberate. The market value of a photographer, he says, depends on more than the product. Notoriety and reputation also have a huge effect on the price a photographer can charge; a photographer who is known for creating the kind of bold, innovative images that buyers are looking for will always be able to charge more than a less creative competitor even if both are bidding for the same job.

It might be best then to think of fotoQuote as a useful tool for pricing off-the-shelf stock images but BlinkBid as a method for assignment photographers to organize their invoicing and bidding, and ensure that their copyrights are protected.

For professional photographers struggling to create the kind of comprehensive bids that are clear, comprehensive and which avoid conflict with clients in the future, BlinkBid looks like a useful solution. But it also represents a model of untapped opportunity for photographers. Lou Lesko isn’t a programmer. He’s not a software designer and he’s not a coder. He’s a professional photographer who was struggling with one aspect of his photography business. When he created a solution to deal with that problem, he realized that he had a product for other photographers too.

If you’re struggling with some of your photography business then – whether it’s cataloguing, pitching, sharing your portfolio or preparing for art fairs – look for a way to automate the solution. You might just have found another way to make money with photography.

Photography: Matthew Fang

When it comes to winning sales, photographers have a huge advantage. Not only do they own one of the most powerful marketing tools a business can use, but they’re also experts at operating it. A camera – and the images the camera creates – is always a great way to engage leads and communicate your talent. But there’s one feature on a digital camera that has a marketing power all of its own, and it’s one that few photographers bother to make the most of. Shoot video as well as stills and the result can be a whole new way of talking to customers, winning trust and telling people what they can expect once they’ve hired you.

The footage you create can be given away as promotional DVDs, uploaded to a blog to give an insight into the way you work that can’t be communicated through a portfolio, and it can include still samples from the shoot to create an additional distribution channel for your portfolio shots. Altogether, shifting the function button from shooting to videoing can give you a whole new way of promoting your work.

Are You a Photographer or a Videographer?

Two photographers who do make use of videography are Lan and Bu Vui, brothers who together run a successful photography business. After finding that they were busy enough to give up their day jobs, they turned professional two years ago, and now offer headshots, wedding photography, commercial images and fashion shoots, dividing the work between them. In addition to their still photography services though, the brothers also offer videography, shooting ads for businesses and creating video-based electronic press kits as well as profile videos, live-streaming event services and Web shows.

“Our photographer friends see us as the video guys and our video and new media friends see us as photographers,” says Lan.

The move into video work began with an interest in video blogging. The Bui brothers were among the founders of the Yahoo! Videoblogging group, and in 2008 produced the The [b] School Blog, a daily educational videoblog for photographers. They were also the official photographers for the Streamys, The International Academy of Web Television awards. As they started shooting and uploading, each clip, they decided, needed to be better than the last. Although they often shoot on equipment no more complex than a point-and-shoot camera on video mode, and occasionally even a mobile phone, they soon found themselves winning commercial work.

Their background as photographers helps. According to Lan, his knowledge of photography has a strong influence on the way he shoots movies, enabling him, for example, to reduce equipment costs. As a natural light photographer, Lan says, he’s usually able to skip the tons of lighting equipment often used by film crews, and can even avoid using a reflector.

Lan and Vu’s knowledge of film-making has given them an additional revenue stream (and they now sell DVDs that teach others how to make DVDs) but it’s also helped them to promote their photography business. By placing behind-the-scenes clips taken at their shoots to their blogs, they’re able to talk directly to potential clients, show how they work and win the trust that leads to sales.

“Our videos really have done a lot for us that I don’t think a blog post or just some photos could ever do,” Lan says. “From a marketing point, I can’t think of a better way we can connect with our potential clients… and that is where we get hired… not from great work… not from a killer sales team… but by connecting with our viewer.”

At just over a minute, the videos are neither long nor outrageously sophisticated. Still images from the shoot are combined with comment aimed at the video camera, background music and questions and answers with the model to create an understanding of how the brothers conduct their photography. They’re entertaining and fun to watch, but they still broadcast a strong marketing message.

A Behind-the-Scenes Movie Should Be Part of the Shoot

Nor does creating the clips have to mean adding a great deal of work on top of the usual workload involved in shooting and processing the still images. According to Lan, a short behind-the-scenes promotional video should be considered as part of the shoot itself. Creating the footage can be as simple as holding up your iPhone and talking to the lens — something that Lan does often in his shoots — and while the clip might demand some editing, post-production work and uploading, photographers need to accept the fact that a clip will never be perfect. In fact, says Lan, a casual approach is actually the best way to go about creating a promotional behind-the-scenes video.

“[T]he most important thing to do is to talk to the camera and be yourself,” he advises. “Too often I see photographers post behind the scenes videos that are just music videos showing them holding a camera to their face… how can a client connect with you through that?”

Or better still, he advises, point the camera at the client and ask him or her to talk to the lens. Hearing you talk about the great pictures you’re going to produce has some marketing power, but hearing a client talk about the great pictures you’ve produced in the past for them makes for a fantastic video testimonial.

Photographers and videographers often have an ambiguous relationship, with each side sometimes seeing the other as a kind of creative rival. One of the responses to Flickr’s decision to allow members to upload files that are “like a photo but it moves” was the establishment of a group called “No Video on Flickr” which now has over 11,000 members. The “We Say Yes to Videos on Flickr” group has just 877 members. But videographers and photographers work together on weddings and the skills needed to do one job overlap with the skills needed to do the other.

Put the two together, add some new skills and you should find that you have more to offer and a better way of offering it.

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.”

Wouldn’t it be great if selling your photographs was a great deal easier? Wouldn’t life be so much smoother if you didn’t have to deal with the printers, handle the packing and mailing or even collect your customers’ credit card details?

You could just shoot the pictures you want, put them on the Web and let some automated system sort out the headache of taking the orders, managing the prints, and processing the payments and shipping.

Of course, you can do that now. Put your images on Flickr, Imagekind  or even Zazzle, and thos sites will deal with all the fiddly bits of the purchase themselves, leaving you free to shoot and upload.

But none of those sites is yours. Their buyers are looking for photographs, not your photographs. You get little reward from a new buyer at Zazzle for having a reputation for creating outstanding pictures and you don’t get to show your images in the same way or with the same freedom that you can on your own website. And if you want to sell the same photo in a number of different ways, you usually have to spread them out over a number of different sites, each with their own specialty.

“There is a problem with the existing solutions for photographers to  sell their photos,” explains Ahmad Khariostami, co-founder of Fotomoto, a new photography fulfillment service. “First of all, if photographers want to sell  photos, they have to upload their photos to ‘photo supermarkets’ and  create a store there, and they have no control or a very limited  control over the presentation of their photos.

“And then, for different products, they have to go to different ‘supermarkets.’ For example, to sell prints they have to create a  store on ImageKind, and to sell licenses they have to send photos to  iStockPhoto, and for postcards or calendars they have to go to CafePress. We wanted to offer all this in one place, the right place, which is the photographers’ own website!”

Let Javascript Sell Your Images

Fotomoto aims to make that possible with a few lines of Javascript. Placed on a website, the script ignores graphic ads and images that are part of the site’s design, but adds a “purchase this print” button and an email link to the photographer’s marketable photos. When buyers press the purchase button, they’re offered a range of different size options, and a choice of paper types. Photographers are free to set their own prices for the images, with Fotomoto taking a 15 percent commission in return for processing the order.

The service has only been live for a couple of months, and is still in closed beta. But Fotomoto sends out around 50-60 invitations a week, and has already signed up about 300 photographers who together offer some 35,000 photographs. Prices for the images tend to start at $20 and rise to several hundred dollars. Sales, says Ahmad, are in “lower three-digit numbers at this point.”

David Nightingale, a professional photographer and photography trainer, is one of the people who has contributed to those sales. David was contacted  by Fotomoto in late 2008, but only implemented the code on his website, Chromasia.com, a month ago. Most of the images on his site are now available as prints through Fotomoto, and he has, he says, “made a small number of sales.”

“Previously, people would need to email us, then make a manual payment. Once we received the payment we would need to order the print, check it, mail it to the client, and so on. With Fotomoto all we need to do is upload the high res’ image when a new print is ordered,” David told us. “[W]e’re definitely satisfied and would recommend the service. It’s very well implemented, the print quality is high, and it’s a relatively painless way of providing a service to our clients.”

For David though, the benefit of Fotomoto isn’t necessarily the extra sales — he was selling prints anyway — it’s the time and effort saved by having someone else handle the logistics even as he continues to sell from his own website.

Print Sales Are Rare

But in practice, those sales are going to be relatively few (even with the discount coupons and analytics that Fotomoto provides). While prints might be the most attractive items for photographers to sell, they’re also among the hardest photography items to promote. Stock buyers need new images every time they release a new article or bring out a new brochure. Art buyers tend not to buy more photos once their walls are full. Josh McCulloch, a professional outdoors photographer, notes that while Fotomoto’s service looks interesting and might appeal to hobbyists and advanced amateurs who can integrate it easily into their sites without being limited to a template, it’s not something he would be using himself.

“I prefer seeing each and every print that goes to a client to make sure they’re happy,” he says.

Nor does he put much faith in the ability of print sales to make a large difference to a photographer’s income. Dismissing print orders as “few and far between,” Josh is betting on online consumption — rather than online ordering alone — as the main way for images to change hands.

That’s a direction that Fotomoto is moving too. In addition to expanding its range to include calendars and postcards, the company is planning to add usage licenses to the services it wants to offer photographers. It’s even considering creating a separate site where buyers will be able to browse all of the images offered across its contributors.

Of course, that would mean tagging and keywording, as well as uploading. And it would mean too that buyers who want a broad choice of images will no longer be looking at the photographers’ websites.

Selling prints from your own website using an effortless, automated system might be nice. But it would be nicest of all if you could rely on print sales to fund your photography. Not even Fotomoto can make that happen.

Keywording probably has to be the least popular part of any photographer’s workflow. Creating the images is always fun. Even editing and enhancing your pictures requires almost as much creativity as technical skill. But listing the words that a searcher might use to find your photos is about as enjoyable as reading a thesaurus – which, of course, is often part of the process.

It is important though. While stock agencies do provide categories for their image libraries, buyers generally prefer to search rather than browse, typing in the terms that they consider the most important. Miss the words  a searcher might use, and you’ll cut yourself out of the running for a sale. The first problem then isn’t just deciding what your picture portrays but trying to second-guess how other viewers might see it — and then including all of the possible different terms that they might use for the same motif.

“Not only does an interpretation of an image vary from viewer to viewer (add to this cultural differences) but also we have the flexibility of natural language,” explains Liisa Kaakinen, a professional keyworder who also teaches photographers and libraries how to categorize their images. “‘Pool’ can refer to a body of water, billiards game, swimming pool etc., and Wellington boots can be called ‘Wellies’,’ Rubber boots,’ ‘Galoshes,’ ‘Gum boots’ etc. Even with rigid and solid keywording rules in place keywording is always changing – language changes as do the market demands.”

And those changing demands don’t just come from buyers. They can also be found across different agencies. There is no one standard set of keywording rules that can be applied universally, so photographers need to know the rules for each agency to which they’re submitting.

The Key Difference between Getty and Corbis

Some companies are more helpful than others. Alamy requires photographers to include all variants, synonyms and even misspellings but Getty and Corbis both employ thesauruses on their sites so photographers need only include the most specific terms. The sites then add the synonyms and lexical variants, such as plurals, themselves. Getty also asks customers to clarify search terms with more than one meaning to ensure that the site turns up useful results.

But even for those two companies, the giants of the stock industry, the differences in their use of controlled vocabulary — set terms with pre-defined meanings — can lead to some head-scratching for both photographers and customers. Getty, for example, defines a “mid-adult” as aged 30-39; Corbis uses the same term to refer to someone aged 25-45.

“My favorite one is the keyword ‘Looking at camera,’” says Liisa. “At Getty this means the model is looking directly into the photographer’s lens, i.e. the viewer, whereas at Corbis this means looking at the device shown in the image. Corbis uses ‘Eye contact’ when the model is looking at the photographer’s camera.”

Keyworders then need to use a little creativity themselves to ensure that the buyer gets to see their photos. Sara Woodmansee, Senior Editor at iofoto.com, a part of Ron Chapple Studios, says that she tries to get around the age problem by using multiple age ranges for models whose appearance might allow them to fall into more than one category. Models, she points out, can often look younger or older than they really are.

And to enable buyers to find pictures of models looking directly at the cameras, she uses the phrase “Looking at viewer” which she hopes can be understood on any site.

“The question is if I use ‘looking at viewer,’ and a site’s ‘normal’ accepted phrase is ‘looking at camera’ will the site ignore my phrase?” she asks.“Hopefully not, if they have a good synonym system in place.”

Sara’s approach also increases the risk of employing too many keywords. She tends to use anywhere from 20 terms to as many as 40 or 50 for a particularly complex photo, using a base list that covers ethnicity; age range; gender; number of people; emotion; nouns; actions; concepts; description; indoors/outdoors; format; and sometimes location. While the numbers can be flexible though — and depend on the nature of the image — relevance is key. According to Liisa Kaakinen, nothing deters buyers more than irrelevant search results, and some agencies even penalize photographers who use unrelated terms.

One Photo, Five Minutes

Bearing all that in mind, says Liisa, and after some serious training, you can expect to be able to process around 80 images in a day — about one photo every five minutes — a figure confirmed by Sara Woodmansee.

“It does depend on the subject matter, of course.  Images of ‘people in action’ take more thought, obviously, whereas landscapes or still-life are easier,” she says.

One option then is to skip the whole thing and automate the process. ImageKeyworder is a program that automatically adds synonyms and variants to images. It even has templates to add similar sets of keyword to similar photos, and now has a dedicated Alamy mode to combat that site’s special demands. But even ImageKeyworder won’t usually shorten the time spent adding the phrases, Yvan Cohen, director at OnAsia, the program’s creators, told us. While you could get through up to 150 editorial images a day with ImageKeyworder, conceptual photos will take much longer. The service largely optimizes the workflow, making it more comprehensive and efficient by drawing on a structured and managed thesaurus.

Perhaps the best solution to the difficulties created by keywording then is to think ahead. Grab as much information as possible during the shoot so that whoever is doing the keywording knows exactly what the picture is about, what it shows and where it was taken.

“I have known keyworders who get images and have no earthly idea what they are looking at,” says Sara. “Then they spend a lot of time researching the photo when they could be keywording…. [I]f I was photographing a welder working, I should ask and take notes on the equipment the welder is using, and the proper terms for his technique used.”

That a picture speaks a thousand words might be an old cliché, but its description of a photo’s  narrative power is a flattering one too. Until a stock agency asks you to write them all down.

While sharing images on the Internet is as simple as creating a website or uploading to a Flickr stream, earning revenue from the people who look at your pictures has always proved difficult. Writers can embed AdSense ad units into their articles or keyword terms with Kontera but photographers have had to hope for the occasional print sale, usage license or commission to make money from their online galleries. Even Google struggles to match ad inventory with images, and the sight of a beautiful picture in the middle of a screen is always going to distract viewers from the ads on the side of the page.

That might be about to change though if a new idea pioneered by FlipGloss proves successful. Rather than surround a picture with advertisements, FlipGloss incorporates ads into the images  themselves. Placing the cursor over a picture element highlights that element and allows the viewer to bring up a floating layer with more information. So users interested in fashion can easily learn more about the handbag carried by the celebrity in the picture or the dress worn by the model. They can learn who the designer is, see thumbnails of similar designs and click through to stores where they can make a purchase, and all without taking their eyes off the picture.

By using large, high-quality images, the ads become content in the same manner as the full-page spreads in glossy magazines like Vogue and GQ.

The site was created by Kerry Trainor, Mike Randall, Robyn VanTol and Christopher Shattuck, the team that had previously founded Launch.com, a digital music service later sold to Yahoo! According to Kerry Trainor, glossy print publishing represents a similar opportunity for digitalization that music represented in the 1990s.

“The print publishing industry is a huge part of the traditional media world, that consumers and advertisers love, that has yet to be translated well online,” he told us. “We are inspired by the unique environment and consumer passion for beautiful, photo-driven print experiences and finding a way to bring their impact online while adding exciting digital features like search, sharing, recommendations and, ultimately, personalization.”

Looking and Clicking at the Image

The photos are displayed against a black background that makes them the focus of the page and are larger even than the flickthrough galleries used on news sites, a welcome degree of respect for a photographer’s work. The question though is whether the advertising model will  hold up and how far it can extend. The site has only just launched in Beta so it may be too early to tell how clickthroughs on these ads compare with traditional advertising responses. Advertisers however are charged on a combined CPM (cost-per-mille) basis, which pays a set rate for every thousand impressions, as well as on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis, which pays for each click on an ad link.

That combination is likely to be necessary. At the moment, FlipGloss focuses on beauty and fashion, the same types of images found in popular glossies. But ads in those magazines are intended as branding tools. While lots of people may want to look at professionally shot images of models in designer clothes, few will click through to a designer’s site with an intention to buy a Versace dress or a Martin Katz diamond necklace. Charging on a CPM basis ensures that the site can also earn from the bulk of people who simply want to flip through the images as they would do in a magazine. The attractiveness and large size of the images may also allow FlipGloss to demand a higher price than usual for the ads.

“Our display ads will carry a significant premium because they are ‘full page’, and presented right in the content stream (not tucked around the sides of the page as most display ads are today),” Kerry said. “When you offer brands truly integrated marketing solutions that compliment the user experience, they will pay a premium for it.”

As FlipGloss expands into other categories, including travel and lifestyle, it will be interesting to see how the figures work out and whether advertisers are willing to pay serious amounts for the branding value of the images or prefer to pay more for clicks.

Photographers Wanted

Interestingly, that expansion is being helped in part by photography enthusiasts rather than professionals. FlipGloss has created a Flickr group to accept contributions from photographers and currently works with about a dozen contributors. That may be as much as the site’s small team can handle at the moment, but there are plans to allow photographers to contribute to the site directly, like a photo-sharing site, with the aim of displaying their images supported by embedded advertising.

That sounds like it could be a valuable opportunity but for  now at least, the site isn’t paying. According to Kerry, the only reward on offer to photographers during the Beta stage is the thrill of publication but, he assures us, that will change as the site grows.

“[B]uilding a real revenue stream for photo contributors is one of the central goals of FlipGloss. Everybody loves the power of the Web, but one area in which it still fails the creative community is compensation for quality work,” he said. “We plan to share the revenue opportunity fairly with the creators and publishers who contribute content to the experience in the future. We will be announcing some of our first advertiser relationships soon, and opportunities for creators to share in that soon after.”

FlipGloss may yet turn out to be a nice idea that just didn’t work. But it could also represent a new model for ad-supported content and one that benefits photographers by displaying their images online in the size and quality they deserve while still providing an effective way for them to earn from those images. If that does happen though, it could create another problem. Online advertising rates tend to be a fraction of those paid to print magazines. If FlipGloss allows advertisers to move online without losing their branding power, it could be left to photographers who contribute to glossies to worry about ways to generate revenue.

There’s only one thing worse than creating images that no one buys: seeing other photographers creating images that people do buy. Now that it’s possible for anyone with a camera to put their photos in front of image users, talented photographers should expect to pick up sales. If that’s not happening to you, there’s probably a good reason.

Or rather, there could be one of several reasons.

The first – and least pleasant to admit – is that your images just aren’t good enough, at least not yet. With such a huge choice of photos now available, buyers are only going to pick the best, and those shots are going to be very good indeed. Your best image might be excellent in comparison those you’ve created before but it also needs to be excellent in comparison to everyone else’s to win a sale. The lighting has to be perfect, the composition exactly right, and the amount of noise at a level suitable for use. A photographer’s justifiable pride in a good image can get in the way of an objective assessment of the photo’s quality. Place similar compositions from other photographers side-by-side and ask someone else which photo they prefer. If they don’t point to yours, you’ll know why your picture isn’t selling – and what you need to do to improve.

Your Images Need to be Good – and Usable

Good though isn’t the same as usable. Stock sites are filled with wonderful pictures of sunsets, flowers and beaches. Buyers need images that can match sales messages, have room to add text or which can illustrate stories. While many photography websites allow viewers to order prints, selling artistic pictures online is notoriously difficult. You’ll always find it much easier to make those sorts of sales on a site like Etsy, possibly on eBay and far more likely away from the Internet at an art fair where browsers are in a mood to buy and you’ll be able to talk to them directly. When you’re looking to make sales online, it’s important to make sure that at least some of them are the sort of pictures that don’t just look good but which a designer can use as easily the top stock images too.

There are though plenty of both excellent and usable images on the Web that could win sales and never do. One reason that can happen is that buyers don’t know they can buy them. Photographer Chris Lupetti reminds viewers on Flickr that his photographs are not available for free use by repeatedly stating that they’re copyrighted. But he also invites buyers to contact him by email if they’re interested in licensing them. He places a message under the image and even tags the copyright message on the photo itself with his website address and an invitation to contact him for creative commissions. That doesn’t just tell buyers how to make an offer. It also tells them that he’s used to doing professional work and available for hire.

Buyers browsing Chris’s images are left in no doubt that they can make contact and pitch him an offer for his photos. That makes it much more likely that they will.

And the fact that they know how to do it is important too. With a million-and-one images to look at and the next good photo just a click away, buyers won’t want to waste too much time hunting around for contact details, an email address or a purchase form.

One reason you’re not selling your pictures could be that buyers simply don’t know how to buy them. Alongside each of your images, include a call to action telling buyers where to go if they’re interested in using the photo. You’ll be helping them to make the offer and helping yourself to land the sale.

You’ve Got to Push to Sell Pictures

Of course, for that call-to-action to be effective, potential buyers will need to see it, and that’s probably the most common reason that good photographers fail to make sales: they’re bad at marketing.

This is a challenge for every creative entrepreneur. The kind of skills and the drive necessary to create good photos are rarely the same as those needed to be a good salesperson. Most photographers would rather be out with their camera, lining up shots and playing with the lighting than optimizing their website for search engines, researching competitors’ packages or pitching to editors and buyers.

For too many photographers, marketing means keywording, tagging and hoping.

But there are a number of small, simple things that any photographer can do and which can have a dramatic effect on the chances of making a sale.

Networking on Flickr, for example – joining groups and talking to other photographers – can be both fun and educational, and raise your profile high enough to be spotted by a buyer. It was her popularity, after all, that attracted a Toyota executive to Rebekka Gudsleifdottir.

An act as simple as sending an email to a photo editor can be enough to persuade them to look at your images and — if they’re good enough — license some.

And even search engine optimization doesn’t have to be too big a drag, especially if you’re prepared to pay someone to do it for you.

Marketing might not be the reason you picked up a camera, but it is something you have to do if you want to make sales.

And there is one more reason that you might not be making sales: the numbers are against you. There are already millions of images available for sale on the Web and while demand for older images can fade away, some sites are adding new images at a rate of almost half a million a month. Oleg Tscheltzoff, founder of Fotolia, once estimated the demand for business images at around two billion a year, but he was probably being optimistic. Photography remains horribly competitive. If your images are good enough, if you tell people how they can buy them  and if your marketing is strong enough, you should make sales. But you’ll still have to push hard to do it.

Photography: milky.way

Successful photography is as much about what’s in the mind as what’s in the camera. While taking great images will always be essential to making money from photography, there are plenty of talented, skilled photographers with hard drives full of fantastic photos who aren’t making a dime. And as a quick look at any microstock site will tell you there’s also no shortage of photographers with mediocre talent who are making sale after sale.

The difference lies in the way that photographers who make money out of their talent think about their images. They understand that photography is a business – even if it’s not the business that pays their mortgage. The production, sales and customer service all have to be conducted professionally. The images don’t have to be fantastic; they just have to serve a purpose. And the operations have to completed with the recognition that when someone is paying for something, they expect that something to do exactly what they’re paying for.

That begins with the hardest step of all…

Thinking of Photos as Products

For photographers who rely on their cameras to pay their bills, regarding photos as products is a step that happens naturally and out of necessity. But for enthusiasts who shoot primarily for the pleasure of taking a great picture, it is something that requires a different way of thinking.

A beautiful photograph is a work of art. The composition, the subject, the story the image tells and the way it tells it all incorporate an artist’s creativity. The success with which it achieves its goals reflects the photographer’s grasp of his or her craft.

But none of that means a thing commercially if an image is too avant-garde to be displayed in a home or a collection, and too artistic to be used in a commercial or alongside content.

When shooting art, entrepreneurs think “Would anyone buy this?” And when shooting stock, they think “How could someone use this?”

For an entrepreneurial photographer, it’s not just the image that counts but the way the image will be used… and whether it’s capable of being used at all.

Preparation and Marketing are as Important as Shooting

Enthusiastic photographers also assume that the work ends when the shooting is complete. Entrepreneurial photographers recognize, even if they’re not happy about it, that the hard work is about to begin.

They have to refine and sell the image.

Established professionals regard this part of their business as essential but something that they can leave to experts who can do it better than they can. Both stock photographer Ron Chapple and microstock photographer Yuri Arcurs employ people whose job is to prepare the products they’ve created for market and tag them appropriately.

“Our studio is a team effort,” Ron Chapple told us. “There’s two photographers shooting full-time, plus our digital artists also create illustrations… We’ve learned that shooting is only a small part of the overall process — editing, color-correction, retouching and adding keywords is the lion’s share of the workflow.”

Together with placing the images on websites and marketing those sites, the editing and keywording is unlikely to be the most enjoyable part of photography. But it is essential. It’s just fortunate that entrepreneurs also understand the value of delegation.

They outsource the work that others can do better than them, allowing them to focus on the most valuable part of their business.

The Buyer Always Knows Best

Browse the comments  under the images on Flickr, and you might be mistaken for thinking that everyone on the site has the eye of Man Ray and the technique of Ansel Adams. Every shot is a “great capture” and every upload a “beautiful photo.”

There are lots of wonderful pictures on the site, of course, but by definition, there are also very few works of genius. While enthusiastic photographers allow themselves to be affected by praise from other hobbyists, entrepreneurial photographers pay attention only to the voice that really matters: that of the buyer.

The only test that shows if an image is good enough to be sold is whether it sells. And the only criterion that an entrepreneurial photographer has to meet is the requirements of the market.

But that means more than just producing images that editors, designers and collectors want to buy. It also means treating them not as admirers but as customers. Thinking like an entrepreneur involves keeping track of who buys the most images and which kind of photos they want. It means keeping them informed when you release a new subject range, producing discounts and incentives, and handling complaints quickly.

It means seeing a photo that generates a hundred positive comments as less successful than a photo that generates one check.

Sales are to be Expected, Not Celebrated

Perhaps the biggest difference in the way that entrepreneurs and the enthusiasts think though is in their expectations. Professionals and entrepreneurs expect to make sales. They understand that a product that doesn’t sell, however beautiful and well-made it may be, is a failure.

When they produce a photo, they assume that it’s good enough to sell, and that it will sell enough to make a profit.

That’s not just one of the hardest shifts in thinking to make though, it’s also one of the most important because it usually has a strong effect on pricing. For enthusiasts, the thrill of a sale may be reward enough so they’re often willing to lower the price, keen to take the opportunity when it arises. Entrepreneurs though, believe that there’s another sale and another buyer just around the corner so they stick to their guns, demanding the price that they know the market demands – and they also know what the market demands.

Photography is an unusual business. It relies on artistry and creativity as well as the kind of physics-related technical skills that would frighten many free-thinking art school types. To be financially successful at photography though, to produce the kind of pictures that sell and to use talent to build even a small photographic business, requires thinking in a particular way. You can still think like an artist and be a photographer. But to make money, you also need to think like an entrepreneur.

Photography: superk8nyc

It’s one of the toughest challenges a photographer ever has to face. You’ve handled poor light, mad models, bawling brides and portrait subjects who just can’t smile. And you’ve still managed to produce pictures good enough to sell.

So good in fact, that a buyer is now asking how much you’d charge to let him use your image on his website, in his book or on his company’s office wall.

And that’s where the trouble begins.

What’s the most a buyer would be willing to pay? How do you put a price on your art? What should you consider as you tot up the figures…and what should you ignore?

The range of factors seems almost endless. FotoLibra, an open access picture library, starts by looking at “medium, print run, size and territory”…  then considers scores of other options to produce one of the 1,447 different prices that it might charge a buyer.

For professional photographers handling the negotiations themselves, the issues can actually turn out to be simpler than they appear. Expenses are one factor that have to be included in the price, and people who shoot for a living can measure the amount of time involved in creating an image and the costs involved in traveling to the location, hiring the models or buying the props. They might not expect to cover all of those costs in their first license (stock photographer Ron Chapple has talked of images taking a year or two to pay for themselves) but they know that taking bottom dollar to close a sale just isn’t worth it.

When you know how much you’ve spent to create the product — and when experience has shown that there are buyers willing to pay a fair price – there’s little reason to accept amounts that, if repeated, would take decades to make an image profitable.

The Kelly Blue Book of Photography Pricing

The price charged by the competition is vital too. Industry pricing software such as Cradock’s fotoQuote can provide a guide to the amount that other photographers are charging, and – no less importantly – stand as an objective foundation on which to base quotes without pricing yourself out of the market. You can think of it – and use it – as a kind of Kelly Blue Book for photographers.

Even if you choose not to charge exactly the amount that fotoQuote recommends, it can provide a useful starting point for direct usage negotiations. And even enthusiasts who only make the occasional sale – and who don’t generally use the software – can still benefit from it. Photoshelter incorporates fotoQuote into its service, allowing anyone to search the site for images similar to theirs and enter the purchase details to receive a professional quote. The service doesn’t always work quite as smoothly as you might like; many of the images on Photoshelter are only available as JPEGs so you can’t always find quotes for print magazines, for example, or for book covers. But when understanding the competition is so important, it is worth investing the time in searching around to discover exactly how much you could be charging.

It’s when you begin to move away from fotoQuote’s baseline that things can start to get a little more complex. There are factors involved in setting a price that are much harder to quantify than a magazine’s circulation or the difference between a trade magazine and a consumer publication.

The most common is probably pride. For enthusiasts who shoot for pleasure, the idea that someone is prepared to pay for one of their images is a huge endorsement. Receiving a positive comment on Flickr is nice; receiving a request for purchase is proof that you know how to shoot professional-grade pictures.

Those bragging rights may even feel more valuable than the fee itself and are often considered as a factor when setting the price.

They shouldn’t do. You might be willing to allow a blogger or a small website to use your image for nothing in return for credit and a return link (the competition in situations like these will be dollar microstock images or free Creative Commons pictures) but if a commercial user likes your photo enough to use it, he should like it enough to pay for it too.

The Real Value of a Big Portfolio

And he should like it enough to pay the full price. Accept less and in effect, you’re paying for the right to publish your picture in his publication – and the right for him to make money out of it.

The pride that comes from being published might feel like an important reward when considering the price of an image – and the desire to close the deal can often lead enthusiasts to demand less than the image deserves – but the level of admiration you receive from other photographers is actually connected directly to the amount the buyer is willing to pay.

If you’ve agreed to accept a lower price in return for the thrill of publication, how can you be sure that the buyer wants your picture because it’s the best he can find… or because you were the only person willing to supply it at that bargain rate?

Bragging rights might be fun but they aren’t worth enough to be factored into the price of an image. Neither is promotional value. Far too many buyers quote a padded portfolio as the only reward they’re offering.

Being able to show potential buyers that you’ve been published in reputable magazines is useful but unless you know that one job will definitely lead to another, higher value sale, then you’re giving away real money in return for the small chance of making a similar amount in the future.

If one buyer has been impressed enough to make an offer on the basis of your current portfolio, you can expect other buyers to do the same thing without giving your images away for less than the right amount.

It’s that fair price then that’s the most important factor to consider when you’re asked for a quote. If someone is making money out of your picture, you should be making money out of your picture.

And if persuading them of that is a challenge, then you should be waiting for a better buyer.

Photography: linyijen

The toughest challenge for photography enthusiasts isn’t shooting beautiful pictures or improving skills. Those things are always tough, but they’re the reason we reach for our cameras.

It’s finding the buyers. That’s something that requires knowledge and skill, and worst of all, time – time that could be much more enjoyably spent shooting.

And the reason it’s tough is that few photography enthusiasts know any buyers. Photographers tend to hang out with other photographers not photo editors, gallery owners or collectors. And that’s if they hang out with picture types at all. More likely, they’re going to be spending time with old friends and colleagues, people with no connection to photography and little apparent need for your photos.

In fact though, those connections can bring in paid work. Many event photographers begin their careers with an invitation to bring their camera to a friend’s wedding, and recommendations from friends to their friends have been known to launch the businesses of children and pet photographers.

But perhaps the biggest untapped opportunity for photography enthusiasts lies in their colleagues. Microstock, after all, was created to supply the image needs of small firms, the kind of companies that need images for their marketing and publicity material but which don’t have the budgets that make a subscription to Getty worthwhile. According to Oleg Tscheltzoff, founder of Fotolia, each small or medium-sized business needs around 50 images a year for their newsletters, websites, blogs and marketing material.

Decorate the Office Walls with your Photos

If those firms can source their photos from employees with an eye for an image instead of from merchants, they’ll be able to pick up some customized photography while giving the employee a chance to get his photos seen, cement his place in the company and perhaps land himself a nice bonus too.

Andreas Reinhold, for example, is an engineer who shoots car photography in his spare time, selling his photos occasionally to specialist magazines. He has also presented framed prints to his firm which hangs them on the office walls and leaves a copy of his photo book in the reception area so that clients can flick through it while they wait. Although neither of those methods brings him direct revenue, they do promote his photography for little cost, give him a unique role in the company and they put his photographs in front of people.

Some companies though have relatively large and consistent image needs and that presents a whole new opportunity, one that some organizations are meeting in very special ways.

The BBC’s picture editors, for example, have to find images to illustrate 3,000 hours of broadcasting every week. Some of that imagery is sourced by commissioning professional photographers, some photos come from the organization’s archive and photo agencies supply some of the pictures too.

The BBC Asks Employees to be Photographers

Since October 2008 though, the BBC has been using a Flickr group to allow the organization’s employees to submit images to be used on the iPlayer and programme sites. Only about 100 photos have been uploaded by the group’s 86 members in that time but some of them have then been used on the BBC homepage, putting pictures shot by amateurs in front of millions of people.

“The BBC still has an ongoing commitment to commissioning professional photographers to illustrate its output and that will never change,” explained Ashley Stewart-Noble, the BBC’s Senior Content producer who manages the organization’s central team of picture editors and is the group’s administrator.“However, digital cameras and the internet have created a new generation of amateur photographers and the Flickr group is one way for us to enhance our professional offering and give people the chance to engage with the BBC.”

That chance is limited to members of the BBC though, at least as far as the Flickr group is concerned. Ashley runs the group by himself and the number of images submitted would be unmanageable if he opened it to the public, he indicated. More importantly though, the BBC has to be certain that the photos it uses belong to the person who submitted it and do not breach copyright. The group’s members then, have to supply their real names so that they can be reached easily if a copyright issue does crop  up.

Nonetheless, Ashley says he does sometimes use photos sent in by members of the public.

“BBC News has an established history of encouraging users to submit their photos for the site. Everyone who does agrees to their terms (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2780295.stm#yourpics) which cover copyright concerns. I sometimes use these images to illustrate promotions on the bbc.co.uk homepage,” he says.

The attraction of Flickr to a content manager like Ashley is likely to be the ease with which he can issue calls for particular images (such as this one for photos of Clapham, London) and reach contributors he would otherwise have difficulty contacting, and the fact that he is able to review submissions quickly. It’s among the reasons that companies like Ford run photography contests through the site instead of using their own.

But a group like this also presents a model that other companies can follow. A photography enthusiast working at a software firm for example, might suggest that their company’s art director use a Flickr group as one way to source the images that they use, creating a channel through which the employees can supply their own photos. To encourage participation, contributors could be given credit (which the BBC’s group doesn’t supply) and perhaps a bonus for each image used too.

You might not want to administrate the group yourself but suggesting that the company should create one would show that you’re looking to help the company and provide an outlet for your images and impressive content for your portfolio.

Your friends might not be collectors and your colleagues may be teachers or programmers rather than art buyers or editors, but if someone in your workplace needs pictures, then there are ways to put your images in their hands.

It happens every time there’s a major news event. While journalists scrabble around for their passports and photojournalists curse the weight of their equipment, citizens at the scene start telling the world what’s happening.

During the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it was Twitter that came of age as tech-savvy Mumbaikers reported on the gunmen’s progress and the commandos’ response. During the London bombings, it was the photos snapped on mobile phones from inside Underground tunnels as passengers abandoned trains that captured the mood of the moment.

Each time, bloggers rave about the power of citizen journalism and editors point out the importance of checking sources, sorting through the material and having trained professionals on the scene to ask the important questions and gather all of the information necessary to understand what’s happening.

Citizen News Photos are Invaluable

But those same editors then buy citizen images because they understand that while it’s impossible to have photojournalists at every site all the time, everyone now has a camera on their phone. The images might not be as perfectly framed as those shot by professionals, the focus might be off and the quality lower than they’d like but as a first impression, photos captured in the initial minutes of an event are invaluable – and therefore worth buying.

It’s why Getty bought Scoopt, a service that channels camera phone images to the media, and it’s why Turi Munthe, a journalist and author, and Jonathan Tepper, a former finance executive, have launched Demotix. Not for the money, of course, but to promote global communications and fill the information gap left by shrinking foreign news desks.

“Demotix was founded on the basis of promoting freedom of speech and freedom of expression,” Jonathan told us by email. “Demotix is also global in scale. We have photographers and visitors to the website from every corner of the globe. We won’t turn down photos of a drunk Lindsay Lohan, but that isn’t why we’re running Demotix.”

Perhaps not, but it’s the financial value of the images that will most motivate people to submit them and it’s also why photo editors will be buying them. After all, to claim in an age of blogging that the mainstream media has a monopoly on free speech is to miss the point of citizen journalism. Anyone now can get information – and images — to the public. But only the mainstream media can supply a large audience and large payments too.

The site works in the usual way. Anyone can register and upload their photos. The images themselves don’t have to meet any specific quality requirements. Camera phone snaps are as acceptable as 12 megapixel monsters; they just might be harder to sell. And images on any topic are welcome.

“Demotix is looking for every kind of pictures — Politics, Economics, Sports, Arts, etc.,” says Jonathan. “The kind we are most interested in are striking pictures that tell a story. There is always demand and a market for good reportage.”

He seems to be right. Demotix quietly launched a beta in December and has since collected a thousand photographers and “a few thousand pictures.” It’s also racked up a number of sales to major outlets. The UK’s Daily Telegraph, for which Turi writes a blog, bought this image of North Korea, and the BBC used this video footage from Demotix of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg who was killed in Mumbai.

The More Common the Image, the Better it Needs to Be

The differences between those two sales though are telling. The subject of each was rare but while the video footage looked like a home movie, the shot of North Korea – which was less rare – looked as artistic as it was photojournalistic. The more common the subject of the image, the better it needs to be.

The prices for images vary too. Demotix charges media companies the same sorts of prices that they would expect to pay editorial photo agencies and takes 50 percent of the sales price. Basic editorial print usage ranges from $150 to $500 depending on the exact use; exclusive photos are a matter of negotiation.

“[W]here there is a market for it, the sky is the limit,” Jonathan said.

Demotix states explicitly that it’s not just not a microstock service, but is “the opposite of microstock in that we look to get the best deal possible when licensing images.” In addition to making its inventory available for buyers to browse, the company’s sellers also hit the phones to known buyers when a particularly good image comes in. That means images might do more than sit around waiting for buyers, and when they do sell, they’ll go for more than a buck.

But citizen agencies like Demotix are also the opposite of microstock in a couple of other important ways. For one, a smaller percentage of the images submitted are going to sell. (Oleg Tscheltzoff, CEO of Fotolia once told us that microstock has 40 million potential buyers. Editorial images have a much smaller market.)

And for another, images that don’t sell right away are unlikely to sell at all.

“Editorial images are perishable and editors need images when they need them,” explained Jonathan. “[T]hey don’t have time to sift through the Web and find two-penny images with cheap photostock agencies.”

That means a large inventory of old editorial images isn’t going to be worth a great deal. But it also means that the supply of sellable images shrinks as quickly as it grows, avoiding the fall in prices that has hit the stock industry.

Selling a news image is always going to be a hit-and-miss affair. Asked for examples of images that have sold to the mainstream media, of the “few thousand” images in its inventory, Demotix only pointed to two, and one was a video. (Although Jonathan did indicate there were others.) If you happen to be in the right place at the right time, then sending your photo to Demotix – or Scoopt for that matter – might be a good place to start. But if it hasn’t sold quickly, then you should probably be looking at other ways to monetize the image… like placing it on your own ad-supported news blog.

Photography: tarotastic

We’re spoiled for choice these days and that’s no good thing. If you want to create a website to promote your photography, you can take your pick of templates, tools and portfolio sites.

If you want to learn how to shoot better pictures, you could (if you’re not selective) lose an entire month browsing the back posts of Strobist and Digital Photography School, and that’s before you’ve even started looking for the most interesting groups on Flickr.

And if you want to make money from your images, there’s a whole raft of different ways to do it, from postcards and posters to Rights-Managed and Royalty-Free licenses and prints.

Actually, that choice is a little easier. While you’ll only need one website to show off  your images, you’ll want to sell your pictures in as many different ways as possible. When it comes to choosing sales channels, the best choice is to choose them all.

You’ll want a balance of stock sales, products and prints – and if you can get it, assignment photography too. That’s just standard business practice. Rely on just one revenue stream and if prices fall – as they have done in stock over the last few years – you’ll be in trouble. Keep the money flowing in a range of different ways and if one stream gets clogged you won’t be left completely in the lurch.

Sell your Stock Photography Everywhere

But even though the benefits of diversification might be clear, how to diversify isn’t. Choosing where to license your images, for example, means picking between a dozen or so different microstock sites, and that’s before you’ve even looked at higher-priced open source sellers such as fotoLibra and Farm Boy Fine Arts. The broad choice leaves plenty of room for mistakes, especially when tempting new ideas are regularly popping up and promising easier sales of images that have proved hard to move.

Pitcha, for example, aims to make selling through Flickr simpler – a much-needed service considering the frequency with which buyers contact photographers on the site and the difficulties of negotiating through it. But the site demands exclusivity, introducing an opportunity cost through not being able to sell the image anywhere else. That cost could be quite high as the site is “working with a $0 budget,” founder Dan Steel told us, and relies on word-of-mouth marketing to bring in buyers. Put your images in Pitcha then and they could sit there unsold for a while.

Put them on Clustershot though and you can still sell them elsewhere while uploading automatically from Flickr, setting your own rate and taking home 88 percent of the sale price. It’s still early days for both sites but it’s hard to see how Pitcha’s roughly 100 contributors won’t find that they’ve made a mistake.

In practice, most microstock sellers tend to spread their images as widely as possible by selling through a number of different sites. Until recently, that was always to maximize revenue. Although stock sites offer higher percentages in return for exclusivity, higher sales figures from a larger number of channels tended to be the smarter option.

“I would lose money if I went exclusive and besides I feel more secure by having my work in many sites around the world,” top microstock seller Andres Rodriguez told us once.

That security is likely to be even more important following the collapse of LuckyOliver and DigitalRailroad, which left some sellers racing to take back their images before databases were deleted.

So when it comes to selling stock, the question is less likely to be which services you should use but which services you shouldn’t. In general, uploading to five or so of the most dominant – iStock, Dreamstime, Fotolia, Shutterstock and 123rf — should be a fairly safe bet that doesn’t swallow too much time uploading.

Four Ways to Sell Photography Products

Sell your images as products and your choices are going to be smaller but harder. There are four main services that allow photographers to offer their pictures on items that range from t-shirts and caps to mouse pads and even shoes: Cafepress, Zazzle, Red Bubble and Etsy.

Each of those service is slightly different. Cafepress is the granddaddy of print-on-demand sales and also owns Imagekind; Zazzle has a wider range of products and also stocks plenty of corporate-branded items; Red Bubble is the artsiest of the four; and Etsy, which focuses on craft, demands a subscription fee from sellers.

Although some contributors use more than one channel (wallpaper seller Vlad Gerasimov, for example, uses both Zazzle and Etsy to promote some of his product range) not every site matches the items on offer. More importantly, while stock sites do much of the promotional work on behalf of photographers, product sites leave the sales work to the photographer.

Choose lots of sites then and you won’t just be spending a great deal of time managing your accounts, you’ll also be losing hours driving traffic. Picking the one most suitable service then might be your best bet.

There is another way to extend your sales channels though and it’s one that only a small number of photographers make use of. Instead of selling your images, you can sell your image-making knowledge. The traditional way has always been for photographers to teach in local universities or community colleges – a useful way for grizzled old pros to develop at least one regular revenue stream. More recently though, a number of tools have popped up that means any photographer can now teach and even choose between teaching online or offline.

SchoolofEverything.com, for example, is a new UK-based service that aims to bring together local teachers with people keen to learn in their area. It costs nothing to use and currently has around 35 teachers offering photography classes – and 58 students who have expressed an interest in learning. Interestingly, a search for Photoshop turns up 44 teachers, many of whom are also photography teachers.

“If you make a living as a freelance teacher, you can use it to advertise for free and find work,” co-founder Dougald Hine says. ” The site is big with music teachers and driving instructors, but we also get a lot of interest around things like languages, photography and practical skills like gardening, cooking, knitting and sewing — basically, subjects where there’s more room for informal learning.”

Photography might seem like the sort of thing that needs to be taught in person – and it’s probably more fun that way – but BetterPhoto.com has found a way to teach image-making across the Web and offers a range of different classes. Creating your own one-person, virtual photography school is likely to take some effort but if it’s a choice you want to make, your next decision will be how to find the time to put all your revenue streams into action.

Photography: Arty Smokes

The idea behind Photopreneur was always very simple. Digital photography had lowered the barriers that prevented talented enthusiasts from making money out of their images and we wanted to help them over what was left of the fence. We aimed to do that by providing not so much as a leg-up to imaging riches as a roadmap to all of the interesting new markets that have been popping up.

And, of course, we wanted to explain what to do when you reach them.

We hoped that photographers with skill and dedication would be able to use this information to get published and, more importantly, paid. We didn’t really expect anyone to toss in the day job and take up photography professionally – it’s not easy to make a living as a professional – but we did hope that it would help professionals find their way around the new environment and amateurs add a useful second income to their main salary.

These days though it feels good just to have a salary. That might change things a little. If photography earnings were once best regarded as the icing on the cake – a chance to add a little extra to the month’s take – now it’s also possible to see them as a standby salary: money that can help to pay the bills after the severance pay runs out and before you find a new permanent position.

That’s not as much fun as what we had in mind, but it is a lot more useful.

So if your workplace looks like it could shrivel as the economic climate gets colder, how can you use photography to get ready for the hard times ahead?

Raid Your Photography Hard Drive

You can start by looking at the images you already have.

Whenever we talk to a business that’s looking to help photographers sell images, one of the first things we want to know is what sort of images they want their photographers to shoot.

In fact though, there’s always a good chance that a photographer who wants to contribute to a  new licensing company won’t actually have to shoot anything because he already has a hard drive stuffed full of saleable photos.

To start making money, you might not have to do anything more than pick your best photos and upload them. Your computer could have its own little safe stuffed with valuable goodies ready to have a For Sale sign stuck in front of them.

But first you have to dig out the saleable photos from the images that are just nice to look at. So do it now.

Instead of waiting until the day after the chat with the boss when you’ll be feeling low, desperate and convinced that the shot of your big toe is worth thousands, take the time to go over your hard drive and separate the photos that really could be worth money from the brave attempts at playing with light. Create a folder for shots that could be sold as stock and another for artistic images that you could try selling on eBay.

You don’t have to actually start selling them yet if you don’t want to – although it wouldn’t hurt to try – but just realizing that your talent has already produced valuable work can be very reassuring.

Become a Photography Assistant

You could also use this time to become even more familiar with photography by lending a pair of hands to a professional photographer. Most professionals use assistants at various times and pay a small amount – and sometimes nothing but an education – in return for help with lighting and perhaps some post-production.

Making those connections now won’t just teach you about equipment, posing and all of the other things that professionals do to capture the image. They’ll also help you take commissions and start booking the occasional event client should you be left with more free time than you’d like.

At the very least, they’ll give you the connections that could help you to work as a stand-in for other wedding photographers in your area. As a stand-in job, it’s not a bad way keep money rolling in as you head out for interviews.

Play with Products

Stock can make one useful revenue stream and the odd commission can make another. But it always pays to have as many different ways of generating income as possible.

Many photographers try to supplement their licensing and commission-based incomes with print sales (that are hard to land) and postcards (which take a lot of initial selling and may have even smaller profit margins than microstock.)

An alternative is to sell photography-based products on sites like Cafepress and Zazzle.

On the one hand, these should be an easier sale. More people buy t-shirts and coffee mugs each year than pay out for photography prints. But you will have to do the marketing yourself and the competition can be very intense. Sales often depend as much – and perhaps more – on creating a community around your work and your style than on the quality of the images themselves.

It certainly takes time, so again, it’s a good idea to start now.

As you’re looking through the images on your hard drive, try to identify photos that could look good on a product – and even more importantly, look for a series of images with a theme that will give you a distinct identity and let you build a community around them.

You could even begin building your online store. The building itself doesn’t take time; it’s the selling that can drag on so if you really do need it one day, you’ll want to get started right away.

All of that might sound a little depressing but it really shouldn’t. The economy might be sinking faster than a bottomless ship, but photography enthusiasts at least are in a lucky spot. That’s not just a camera you’re wearing around your neck, it’s also a  lifejacket. You might not want to float around in it for too long but hold onto it, be ready to use it and know how to put it into action, and if you do need it, you might find it keeps you afloat until rescue comes.

And of course, if you find you don’t really need it, you can still have a lot of fun and make a little money playing with it.

Photography: cambodia4kids.org

There’s an old cliché about a picture being able to speak a thousand words, so you’d imagine that having shot a great image, you wouldn’t need to say any more. You could just edit it, make it available for sale and let the eloquence of its colors and composition do the talking.

If only. Images made available for sale online also need a long list of keywords; they help buyers track down the photos they need. While keywording sounds like a chore, in practice, it’s not as hard as it sounds. Andres Rodriguez, a top microstock photographer, describes his process as: typing the first keywords that come to mind; checking his own previous images on similar themes to make sure nothing was forgotten; cross-checking with three or four images from other photographers; then saving his list as a template for the future.

“At first it was difficult especially since English is not my first language,” says Andres who lives in London but is originally from Colombia. “I feel more confident now that I’ve done it 6,000 times.”

For those who don’t want to go through the process though, it’s always possible to automate. Software like Image Keyworder lets photographers outsource the wordplay to a program armed with a thesaurus.

Put your Caption Here

But the writing doesn’t always stop there. Many companies also ask for captions for every photo submitted. That’s usually necessary when the subject of the image is as important as its appearance, and tends to crop up most often on Rights Managed (RM) images. Photo Researchers, for example, supplies scientific photos to clients such as textbook publishers and specialist magazines. The company requires contributors to embed caption information into their images before uploading.

So what sort of information should a caption describe? According to Photo Researchers’ website, the caption:

” should include as much information as possible about the image. For natural history images, for example, it should include the common and scientific names of any organisms pictured, as well as location information, and additional information about what is going on in the image. Other useful information may be included as well if it is relevant.”

That sounds like some demand, but many of the Photo Researchers’ contributors have a good grounding in the science of what they’re shooting. Some are scientists themselves. Others, like Jerry Lodriguss, are enthusiasts with a good knowledge of their specialization.

Photographers who don’t know the Latin names of the flowers in their pictures however, needn’t despair. Glyn Headley, founder and managing director of fotoLibra – an open access photo library which demands both captions and keywords — sums up a good caption as one that “describes precisely what the picture is about.” Keywords, he says, amplify that information.

“Simply answer the following questions in your keywords: who, what, when, where, how, why?”

Helping the Germans

That’s not a bad guideline to follow when composing a caption too. A major difference, of course, will be that keywords will take the form of a list while a caption will be a paragraph or two that tells the buyer what he’s looking at. Glyn actually recommends ditching the descriptive stuff in the keyword list.

“For RM images we need good, accurate, concise data in the keywords; lots of nouns, fewer verbs, adjectives and adverbs,” he told us. “Location is always important. Town, county, country; city, state, country. Never leave out the country. Amazing how few people mention England. But if you’re a German guide book publisher looking for images of England, that’s what you need to know.”

Perhaps the best way to approach both keywording and captioning is to follow a version of Andres Rodriguez’s approach and spend time browsing stock images to see how other people do it first. That’s actually a strategy that Yvan Cohen of Photo Keyworder recommends. He suggests Getty and Corbis as good references. The photos available from those companies can also help photographers decide whether to include conceptual terms or specifics like age groups, ethnic identities or the number of people that can be seen in the image, he says.

Producing lists of words and descriptive paragraphs might not be the sort of work that a photographer has in mind when he or she picks  up a camera and points it at a subject, but it is a part of the job. It’s an important part of the job too – but at least you can do it in a lot fewer than a thousand words.

Amateur and semi-professional photographers may not have the experience of grizzled old pros. They may not have their skills or their portfolios. And they certainly don’t have their client lists.

But they do have something that could be even more valuable.

A degree in computer programming or mechanical engineering. A diploma in design or a license for contracting work. The knowledge to fix a car or an understanding of the rules of cricket.

While professional photographers were busy building up their expertise in lighting and composition, everyone else was out picking up knowledge in fields from flying planes to finding oil deposits.

Sometimes matching those day-job professional skills to an interest in photography can create a whole new opportunity.

What’s This Picture?

That, at least, is what happened for Matt Klosterman, a software developer and photography enthusiast. While working on a project in Seattle for his company, Matt found  himself taking plenty of weekend trips to nearby national parks. He’d pack his camera, fill his memory card with images and like so many other people, when he returned, he’d then try to figure what exactly he had photographed and how he had done it.

“I would take a ton of pictures of wonderful things yet would forget some nuances about where they were taken or exactly what they were of,” Matt told us.

Unlike other people though, Matt then set about creating a solution for the iPhone using Apple’s API. The result is PhotoJot, an iPhone-based note-taking system for photographers. The system allows photographers to enter summaries, text and even voice notes related to their images. They can include shutter, aperture and ISO values, and GPS or cellular-based location information. The latest version also includes depth of field, exposure, flash and sunrise/sunset calculators and a “camera bag” feature that allows the user to associate a note with a particular piece of equipment. Of course, much of this information – particularly the technical stuff – is recorded anyway in the EXIF data, but PhotoJot does provide one central place where photographers can record all of their information.

Perhaps most usefully, the program’s users can also connect that information to a reference photo captured using the iPhone’s camera or pulled from its library so that they know which image the data is supposed to describe.

Matt himself describes his workflow using PhotoJot as a three-step process:

“1) Record short, informative notes and record my location using PhotoJot when I take a set of photos;
2) Use the notes I’ve recorded to properly tag and describe my images inside Lightroom after importing my photographs;
3) Upload my photos to Flickr and/or SmugMug and use the location information that I captured to properly place my photos on a map.”

The last two steps should become easier in future releases as Matt focuses on adding additional exporting and syncing functionalities through myphotojot.com, a website which will be launched together with the latest version of the software.

The result though should be a collection of images that are properly recorded and archived. That’s particularly important on photo-sharing sites where searching is dependent on keywords and sales often rely on providing plenty of useful information in titles and descriptions.

Turning Knowledge into Cash

For Matt, though, it’s not the photography sales that inspire him. With a career, two small children and further education studies, he finds that no longer has the time to conduct the sort of leisurely photo shoots that he would do  in the past – and which are most likely to result in image sales. Instead, his camera tends to be aimed at his family, recording memory-joggers in the  most attractive ways he can, a situation with which many photographers can identify.

And yet, Matt has still been able to turn his photography knowledge into a revenue-generator. His app currently sells for $2.99 but the price will rise to $4.99 as soon as version 1.1 is released, which is likely to happen very soon. Although Matt wouldn’t reveal how many downloads he’s actually sold, he did tell us that he has “been pleased by our sales thus far.”

Nor did the program take a great deal of time to write. A few weekends in front of the computer instead of behind the lens in August and September was all that was needed to produce Photojot, as well as a general, note-keeping sister application called 44 Jots.

It’s possible that Matt might have preferred to spend that time playing with his camera and shooting pictures that could, perhaps, one day, if he’s lucky, end up hanging on a gallery wall. But he’s not a professional photographer. He’s chosen a very different career, one that he enjoys and which leaves him at least some time for his hobbies too.

“I’ve always tried to pursue a career in something I enjoy so much that
I would be doing it anyway,” he says. “In my case I’ve been lucky enough to find an area that I am so passionate about that I enjoy putting in extra hours or tinkering with new ideas on my own time just to satisfy the ‘itch.”

Using non-photography professional skills might not be the traditional way to make money out of photography but it can be both fun and lucrative. And professional photographers can’t do it.

Photography: jpmatth

Not everyone really wants to be a professional photographer. But just about everyone who picks up a camera dreams about it. That dream is more likely to involve being sent by National Geographic to hang out of a helicopter over the Serengeti or running around the Congo for Time shooting images that will move the world to end a war than lining up a wedding party for the formals. Whatever the dream, fantasy seems to come free with every first purchase of a DSLR.

For some enthusiasts though, making the leap from amateur to professional is more than a dream. It’s a career goal, and one that they do realistically hope to achieve.

Few do achieve it, and having tried, many are happy when they decide not to. The life of a professional photographer isn’t always an easy one. Competition is fierce and pay, especially for new professionals, is painfully low. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual earnings for a photographer in 2007 was just $34,010.

If that’s a salary you’re prepared to accept — at least to begin with — and if you’re prepared to put in the work necessary to become a professional then taking the leap from amateur photography isn’t impossible. If professional photography really is your goal, here are four steps you must take to get there faster.

1.    Practice, Practice and Practice Some More

Every enthusiast takes some fantastic pictures sometimes. But every enthusiast also has room for improvement. That improvement only comes with practice, from talking to other photographers – even on Flickr — about why their images aren’t perfect and setting up new challenges that stretch their skills.

That’s harder than it sounds. When you shoot one great picture, it’s tempting to feel that you really do have all the talent and skills that you need to succeed. All of the images that didn’t work were just bad luck.

Professional photographers though can’t pass poor images off to bad luck, rotten weather or an uncooperative model. When the client is paying for the product, the photographer has to be able to deliver that product every time.

The first step to becoming a professional photographer then is to make sure that you can, in fact, shoot like one.

2.    Build Clients

Many wedding photographers find themselves slipping into the business after first shooting events for friends and families. Word spreads, favors are asked, commissions come in and soon you’re filling your weeknights with weddings and your weekends with engagement parties and baptisms.

That’s the right way to start.

Before you tell your boss that you’re hanging up your suit and buying a vest with lots of pockets, you should be as certain as possible that you will have at least some money coming in.

And you can start doing that while still holding down the day job. Grace Chon might be a successful pet photographer with a magazine cover to her name, who takes bookings months in advance and charges up to $2,200 for a shoot, but she still has a first job with an advertising company.

Once you’ve got the skills you need to be a professional photographer, the next step is to start adding the clients.

3.    Add Revenue Streams

These days though, having just one group of clients just isn’t going to be enough. Photographers who were dependent on their stock portfolios for their main source of income have seen their revenues plummet in the last few years as microstock began offering low-cost competition.
To succeed, professional photographers need to have multiple revenue streams that might range from event photography to stock photography, and from postcards to prints.

Again, this is something that can be started while still heading into the office every day. Start submitting to microstock sites on a regular basis, for example, and you could find that you’re generating a four-figure sum that’s only restricted by the time you have available. Coupled with a weekly or monthly wedding and some regular portraits with a company like LookBetterOnline.com, and you’d start to have the basis of a professional photography business.

4.    Check the Figures

And the last step you need to take is probably the least exciting. You have to do the math – and do it properly.

When you’re shooting for fun, expenses aren’t really expenses and costs aren’t really costs. You were going to buy the lens anyway and time spent on post-production was fun, not working hours, so it doesn’t really count.

As a professional, all of these things count. If you have to spend hours fixing images whose light levels weren’t right, that’s going to lower your hourly rate and prevent you taking on more work. If you need to buy backgrounds and lighting equipment, those are costs that will come out of your profits. If you have to drive for three hours to reach a shoot, those are three hours you’re not earning and they need to be accounted for.

Before you take that last step and become a professional photographer, you need to be certain that you’ll have enough money coming in to pay your way – and you have to know how to count that money too.

Every year, thousands of camera-loving enthusiasts try their luck at professional photography. Many of them succeed and go on to have a career that’s rewarding and fulfilling. Whether that will happen to you too – if you want it to – will depend to a large extent on the preparations you make before you step up.

Photography: TW Collins

Photographers could be forgiven for feeling a little schadenfreude these last weeks – or at the very least, enjoying the idea that they reached the party a little early. As the value of Wall Street portfolios plummet, photographers can nod their head and say, “Now you know it’s like when stock prices fall.”

Sure, we might all be talking about different kinds of stock but the result is the same: money that we thought was safe and hoped would provide for us in our old age has shrunk to a size barely capable of keeping us in tartan blankets and Werther’s Originals.

Photographers, of course, have been suffering for a while. That might make us all into experts and capable of teaching others how to cope with tough times, but there are plenty of lessons in the Credit Crunch that can help photographers build a business more stable than a bank’s.

What are your Chances of Success?

The most important perhaps relates to risk. It was the inability to assess risk, the probability of failure and its costs that lie at the heart of the current problems, and those are things that every small business needs to be able to understand… or at the very least be able to cope with.

The easiest way to hedge is to develop multiple revenue streams. That’s something we’ve seen a number of photographers do anyway, often prompted by the decline in the prices of their stock photos. They’ve set up their own one-person stock companies in an attempt to stem the fall and cut out the middle man. They’re pushing harder than ever for commissions. They’re trying to market prints, even though that can be a hard sell. And they’re even branching out into low-price, high-volume products such as postcards, an option that some photographers have reported to be very successful even if putting them in stores can be difficult.

But it’s one thing to create systems for multiple revenue streams, it’s another to make sure they’re actually all operating. Although different streams will always bring different amounts of revenue, often you’ll find that one or two streams make up the bulk of your income while the remainder provide a bonus extra. It’s the photographers’ own version of the 80/20 Rule – that 80 percent of a business’s income will derive from 20 percent of its clients.

As long as the total is enough to supply a decent amount of income, it’s tempting then to ignore the other 20 percent. Tempting, but risky. As stock photographers have found, the collapse of a major revenue stream can come unexpectedly and leave them scrabbling for other sources of funds. It’s much better to prepare in advance so that if the worst does happen, your back-up is ready to hand.

Managing your Debt

Another aspect of the Credit Crunch that has a lesson for photographers is the drying up of capital and the inability – or unwillingness — of homeowners to pay their debts. Creating a photography business, especially a small one, doesn’t require taking out a second mortgage but it does demand a capital outlay. Cameras aren’t cheap and neither are lenses, lighting gear, software and backgrounds.

Professional photographers have to take all of these expenses into account when they provide quotes and calculate estimates. Semi-professionals – enthusiasts who bought the equipment for fun and now find that they’re skilled enough to make the odd sale – tend to neglect them. If incomes become stretched and an expensive hobby less easy to justify, that might change, and that’s no bad thing. Even if you have a day-job, photography prices should reflect the real cost of producing the image – if only because it means that you’re hobby will be self-funding.

And it’s likely that professionals too will need to have a more realistic idea of how much they’re likely to earn and how much debt they can service now that asking nicely is no longer enough to secure a loan. That might mean sacrificing speed of growth for building a secure foundation but again, that’s not a bad thing either.

If there was one piece of schadenfreude that we’ve all been enjoying though, it’s the sight of the banks going cap-in-hand to the government and asking for money – even if it is our money they’re asking for. It’s nice to see arrogance humbled but before we smile too much, it’s also worth asking what has caused the drop in photography stock prices and whether dismissing it out of hand is the best strategy.

The demand for commercial images hasn’t changed – if anything the Web has made it bigger. What has changed is the size of the supply, which has grown so fast that microstock sites are able to offer photographs for around a dollar each. That’s a situation that has caused many professionals to turn up their nose and dismiss those open submissions as both under-priced and low quality.

Other photographers though are taking a different line. Ron Chapple, for example, an experienced stock photographer, also submits some of his images to microstock companies. While the returns for each license might be low, he clearly believes that the generous conditions and the rewards in the long term make it worthwhile. Humility might not be fun but when money’s tight, it might be best to accept that if you can’t beat what’s causing the problem, you may as well join it. After all, no one’s offering photographers a $700 billion bailout.

Build a website for profit and fun, and one of the first things you’ll learn is that it pays to diversify your revenue streams. You’ll want ads that pay per click, banners that pay for impressions and affiliate links that give you commissions. Together, those multiple sources let publishers get the most out of all their users and create a stable income.
Exactly the same is true of a photography business – even one that’s similarly part-time, operated from home and intended to provide no more than supplementary cash to subsidize an expensive hobby.
The more ways you can use your photography to generate revenue, the higher that revenue is likely to be and the more you’ll be able to rely on it to cover your expenses.

Postcards Pay

Josh McCulloch, for example, a professional photographer who specializes in outdoor photography, uses his website to sell his services in multiple ways. His portfolio encourages commissions, his stock images give him royalties, his fine art prints give him high-value sales, and his postcards let him pitch to low-budget buyers.

The result is a business that can still make money even if one of aspect of the market changes — and even if not all of those streams have equal value.

“No question commissioned work provides the most revenue, and is the most profitable,” he told us. “With the relatively recent plunge in stock pricing, it’s a toss-up between that and my new card series for the number two spot.  Prints are a distant last place and only make up about 5 percent of my revenue.”

The relatively low value of prints to Josh’s business though doesn’t necessarily mean that he should drop them. As long as they’re still profitable — and he’s not putting more than 5 percent of his efforts into marketing and managing them – his print sales are still a valuable addition to his business.

But it’s not just the incomes that mark the differences between the different revenue streams. It’s also the effort and the type of work that goes into maintaining them, and of course, the types of income they generate.

Selling stock, for example, requires an initial investment of time. You’ll need to have already built up a large enough supply of images to generate sales and you’ll have to market them too. Josh has a carefully-categorized stock library on his website but he also sells through a number of other outlets, including Firstlight (Toronto), All Canada Photos (Victoria), The Photoshelter Collection, Digital Railroad’s Marketplace, and Alamy (UK).  Again, that’s a good example of diversifying within one income stream. But as Josh points out, stock prices are now falling and for photographers looking to enter through microstock in particular, the photos need to be constantly updated and refreshed to keep the revenues flowing.
The stock images might once have been a reliable source of income but they’re now relatively risky and require some effort to maintain.

Balancing Risk and Reward

Josh’s prints, on the other hand, begin at $95 and draw on the same library of photos that he built for his stock portfolio. That might give him larger profits on each sale but he makes far fewer sales overall. Because the prints are the same as the images offered in his stock library and because the printing and packing are handled by Photoshelter though, there is very little extra effort involved.

Josh’s main goal though is always going to be to bring in more commissions, and most of his work comes in either by word-of-mouth or through optimizing his website for search engines. Again, these are going to be much rarer than stock and postcard sales – even if they are more profitable overall. In terms of the effort required to market them then, commissions can be thought of as a high-risk but high-reward product.

Ultimately, it’s that balance between risk and reward – or effort and income – that any business has to maintain between its different revenue streams. While there might be one stream that brings in occasional large sums, there should also be other streams that deliver regular smaller sums too.
It is noticeable though that Josh is always on the lookout for new streams and in postcards he seems to have found one more way to bring in small but frequent payments.

Of  course, photography rewards in more than one way and there is one more thing you need to consider when looking to create a balanced business: the pleasure you get out of each stream. If you’re putting most of your effort into creating images that you don’t enjoy shooting – even if they make money – that’s a pretty good sign that you’ve got the balance wrong.

Photography: Master Sgt. Rob Wieland, USAF

It’s hard enough figuring out the photography. Professional quality cameras might be affordable these days but they’re still complex tools stuffed with strange features we’re sure we should be using, accessories that come with their own manuals and of course, editing software that demands a whole set of professional skills of its own.

And those are just the tools.

Understanding what makes a great picture and how to create it is a lifetime’s education.

Nor do the demands of photography stop there. Although becoming a skilled and talented image-maker is difficult, the popularity of taking pictures means that there are plenty of people prepared to invest the time, effort and yes, money too, in picking up those abilities.

“It’s a nice way to combine the hobbies.”

One way to stand out from the crowd then – and to win paid work – is to bring some unique, additional knowledge to the market.

Andres Reinhold, for example, has been taking pictures since 2005. Although he works full-time as an engineer, his images appear regularly in magazines which often commission him to conduct shoots. The reason he can make those sales isn’t just that he knows how to take pictures. It’s that even before Andreas picked up a camera, he was keen on cars.

“[I] started to shoot cars on the shows that I visit,” he explained. “I am an aircooled Volkswagen and Cal Look enthusiast, driving a tuned Beetle myself. It’s a nice way to combine the hobbies.”

In fact, it was at one of those auto shows that he met an editor of a car magazine. When the editor’s boss saw him looking at Andreas’ Flickr stream in the office, instead of telling him to get back to work, he told the editor to call Andreas and set up a sample shoot. For the car-loving engineer and part-time photographer, it’s been regular additional work ever since.

But shooting cars is simple enough. Although the subject has its own demands (the body has to be kept completely clean, emphasizes Andreas, reflections are tricky and it helps to have someone to move the car so you can focus on the shooting) the goal is simply to make the vehicle appear as beautiful as possible.

For Greg Epperson, a rock climber who took up photography almost 25 years ago, the challenge is a little different. Clearly, he has to know how to make his way up mountains – even with pockets full of camera equipment – and he needs to know which positions are likely to yield the best shots (and be able to get into them without falling off). But documenting what happens when a group of people clamber up a cliff face isn’t enough, he found. The market, he says, wants images with plenty of action.

“The real thing sells poorly because the clients don’t get it,” Greg says. “The dramatized versions sell because the client can understand it.”

The more you sell, the more you learn.

That’s market knowledge and it comes with experience – and as an addition to the climbing skills that Greg needs to capture his niche. Keep good records of what you’re selling, and the more images you sell, the more you’ll understand what sort of images the market wants to buy. The result should be that you begin naturally building a more commercial portfolio. (Or in the case of Greg Epperson, two portfolios: one full of the sort of dramatic images his stock buyers want; and the other filled with realistic photos that show what rock-climbing is really all about.)

Both of these two types of skills are relatively simple to obtain. Knowledge about your niche should be there at its beginning because you have an interest in it. Knowledge about the market comes with time.

But there’s another type of knowledge that requires special study. Alexander Jason is a law enforcement expert who is often called upon to take pictures of crime scenes. His clients tend to be district attorneys, police departments, defense attorneys and federal authorities, and his subjects tend to be bullet fragments, blood spatter, wounds and bullet holes, as well as the victims themselves. Although Alexander stresses that the most important skill necessary for this sort of work – which only forms part of his job as a forensic analyst – is the ability to take focused, well-lit images even in tight spaces and without disturbing anything, it’s also necessary to understand the legal requirements.

“It is important to understand how photos may be used by lawyers and in court,” he explains. “A simple thing is to keep images ‘clean’ — free from extraneous objects or people that will distract and which may create questions. Forensic photography should be about answering and preventing questions, not creating them.”

In practice, that knowledge too might be relatively straightforward… for anyone willing to invest the time in learning them. Alexander says that getting the photography right is a much tougher challenge, especially when time and access are limited. The best training he says comes by joining the Air Force as a photographer. But just as those basic skills have to be there, for anyone looking for an easier way to generate income from their images than competing with the crowd, other more esoteric skills should be there too.

Photography: Markus Merz
If turning photography into income has a downside, it’s this: it doesn’t always work. You’ll pitch for jobs you won’t get, enter competitions you won’t win and submit images to stock companies who will send them back encouraging you to try again.

Dreamstime, for example, receives an average of 100,000 photo submissions a week and rejects about half of them. Fotolia is even stricter. Of the 300,000 images it receives every month, fully 60 percent are turned away. That could lead to a lot of dispirited photographers. Hobbyists taking their first steps in the professional world, in particular, might take those first refusals as a judgment on their talent rather than the suitability of the particular images they submitted. Instead of trying again, they could be tempted to give up and stick to shooting for fun rather than profit.

While for some photographers that might be the best option – at least until they’ve practiced a little more and honed their techniques – for others, it’s a lost opportunity. Rejection might be as much a part of photography as model releases and memory cards but it’s also a chance to spot weaknesses and make your photography better and certainly more commercial.

“As with any freelance career, rejection is a major part of the game,” reassures Michael Connor of Fotolia. “Think from the point of view of the media buyer — is this something that I would buy, and for what?”

The ability to answer that question – to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer — is always going to be a crucial part of developing into a commercially successful photographer. It might even be one of the reasons that some of the world’s leading microstock contributors – including both Andres Rodriguez and Lise Gagne – began their careers as designers rather than photographers. Fotolia itself was created by the owners of a hosting service who saw a need among Web publishers for low-cost, high quality images.

Technical Faults and Commercial Failures

But if you’ve never been in the position of having to use images — and therefore don’t bring an understanding of buyers’ needs to the job — what can you learn from rejection and how can you pick up the lessons that will help you to deliver the sort of photos that buyers want?

In the case of stock imagery, the first place to look is the rejection itself. Some stock companies will explain why the image didn’t make the grade, providing a solid clue to what needs to be improved in order to make the cut next time. Often, that will be technical, with high noise levels among the leading reasons that photos are turned away from stock sites. Those sorts of problems aren’t too hard to solve. Nor are identifiable faces with no model releases or company logos spotted by eagle-eyed reviewers.

An email telling you that those were the reasons that your photo was rejected can simply help to sharpen your eye so that you can meet the basic submission guidelines in the future.

Much harder to fix are problems with the commercial and compositional aspects of the shot. Stock images in particular tend to look a certain way. They need to be more than just good photographs; they have to be flexible enough to be used on advertisements, marketing material and websites. A rejection doesn’t necessarily mean that the image wasn’t of a high enough quality; it could simply mean that it wasn’t the sort of image that was likely to sell.

The Most Important Lesson is…

Part of the solution to that problem is to spend more time browsing the images on offer as well as those that are in use in magazines, ads and websites. Then it’s a matter of shooting photos that combine your style with the sort of look that stock companies want.

“Stock images have to fit very specific parameters. We take our leads from the marketplace – what images are most likely to be purchased through focus groups, research at conferences and user feedback,” explains Michael Connor.

“[H]one your artistic skills. Be creative with light, composition, angles – find a shot that hasn’t already been taken a number of times. Not only will this increase chances for acceptance — but for licensing as well.”

Stock companies can provide useful feedback. It’s in their interest, after all, to raise the quality of the submissions they receive. For other types of photography, the lessons are a little harder to learn. Show your portfolio to a potential wedding clientand never hear from them again, and you won’t know what it was about your pitch that failed to persuade. Submit a photo to a competition and see the contest won by a photo that you think far worse than yours, and you’ll have no idea what went through the judge’s mind.

On those occasions, the important thing is not to sweat it. While it is possible to learn from rejection, it’s going to happen too often to draw a solid lesson every time. As long as the jobs are still coming in perhaps the most important conclusion you can draw from rejection is that you can’t please everyone all the time.

Photography: cayusa

Moving from enthusiastic photographer to income-generating photographer is now easier than ever. The photography world has a wide selection of open entry points, from microstock sites to Flickr networking and from websites to art fairs.

But while the roads towards professional photography are broad, the room at the top is narrower than ever. Media companies are laying off photojournalists and increased competition is removing the shine – and the profits — from traditional stock sellers.

Of course, the rarity of being a leading photographer just makes the accomplishment even more impressive. It’s why print magazines like JPG can sell copies even though the Web has thousands of pages offering similar content, and it’s why companies like Blurb succeed even though any photographer can show off their works online.

There remains something special about seeing your photography published, in print and in your hands.

Most Books Fail

Part of that cachet comes from the fact that printed photography is carefully selected. Around 70 percent of books fail to generate a profit for the publisher, so editors choose their titles and authors only after a long review. They don’t just want to beat the statistics, they also want to make sure that the 30 percent of authors who do generate profits make up the losses on the rest.

But publication in JPG is marred by its democracy; being voted on by your peers is nice but it’s not as satisfying as being identified by an expert. And Blurb is just a low-risk version of self-publishing. You get to see your photos in book form but you don’t really get to call yourself a published photographer.
Seeing your name on a real photography book then – one produced by a traditional publisher who likes your idea and is prepared to take a risk on it – is still a powerful achievement for any photographer.

“To add a book to their offerings is impressive to say the least,” agrees Kate Neaverth, Sales, Marketing and Promotions Manager at Amherst Media, a publisher of photography books. “It speaks of and illustrates their talent and validates their vision.”

Interestingly, Amherst specializes in a particular kind of publication: instructional photography books. Rather than try to sell books based on the subject of the images or the name of the photographer, the company can market books to enthusiasts and professionals interested in sharpening their skills. The hundred or so titles on its backlist cover a range of technical topics including wedding photography, lighting, digital imaging, posing, business techniques and many more.

While an educational book might not be quite as impressive as a catalog of your greatest shots, as Kate points out, it’s still an accomplishment and it helps any photographer stand out as an expert in their field. After all, if someone else knows more about wedding photography or macrophotography than they do, surely it would be their picture on the cover and their advice in the text. Or at least that’s the way it would seem to the public.

If your Book Doesn’t Sell, Charge More

Even if you didn’t make any more money out of the book than you would have made taking pictures then, the fact that you’re a published author would, at the very least, allow you to raise your fees.

But many of these benefits can also come from a good website. David Hobby, for example, is regarded as a lighting expert due his blog, Strobist,  not because he’s an author. And much of the information you can find in the sort of print publication that Amherst produces can also be dug out online for nothing.

For Kate, that just means there’s more competition and her company has to do the job even better.

“While some might think it hurts our business model having so much information available, we see it as an opportunity to better ourselves and our product and step it up a notch,” she says.

So what does it take to turn your ideas into a book fit to join the list of a publisher like Amherst?

It helps to be at least a little established already. Authors are a mixture of award-winning professional photographers, teachers and photography columnists, but also “digital artists,” a category that could be broad enough to include anyone with the appropriate experience and a good idea. If you have both of those and a clear understanding of what you want your book to teach, you’re welcome to send your proposal to Amherst by email, phone or fax.

The company will then be able to tell you if it’s a good fit, and you might have found a way in to one of the most exclusive of photography ranks: the right to call yourself a genuine published photographer.

If you want to join the ranks of the millionaire photographers, try working in Zimbabwe. With inflation running at 2,200,000 percent, the country has just issued a banknote worth Z$100bn. It buys about two loaves of bread. By comparison, working in an environment in which prices are rising by about 3-4 percent – the level now common in much of Europe and the US – looks relatively painless. It does present challenges however.

When your business and personal expenses increase, how can you put up your prices without losing your customers?

In practice, price rises hit two kinds of buyers. Charging new leads a higher rate is always going to be easier than asking established clients to stump up more cash. The reference point for new customers – the price they’ll compare your fees to — will be the rates charged by your competitors, not the amount they used to pay to you in the past. They won’t feel the increase; they’ll only see the final fee. Closing the deal then will mean ensuring that those leads are comparing your services to images offered by other suppliers at your new price point.

Your Photos are Worth More than Ten Bucks

For photographers, who charge a wide range of different prices, that’s going to take some careful marketing. JC Penney, for example, supplies photographic portraits for less than ten bucks. If you’re charging $120 for a portrait, you’ll need to make sure that your marketing material indicates that your photos are of a much higher quality than those and worth the extra money.

That shouldn’t be too hard, and it’s something that you’re likely to be doing anyway. When you increase your prices, however, you might find that you need to emphasize even more strongly the additional value that your images bring. A portrait photographer who wanted to raise his prices from $120 to $150, for example, would need to make sure that his marketing matched that of other $150 photographers and not the $120 photographers he was competing against in the past.

Charging established clients more money is always much harder: fail to close a lead and your business won’t be able to grow; lose current customers and your business might shrink. That could be even more painful than absorbing the rising cost of expenses.

It’s that fear, of course, that prevents small businesses from putting up their prices. According to the National Federation of Independent Business, only around a third of small firms had raised their fees in June this year, despite the recent increase in costs.

Often though, when suppliers do raise their fees, they’re pleasantly surprised. While some customers are sensitive to price, those that have been loyal to you for some time are likely to remain so, provided of course that the new rate is still reasonable.

Not Raising your Prices Might Not be Sustainable

It helps though to explain why you’re putting up your prices. Your buyers understand that you need to stay in business and will want you to do so. They won’t want to look for another image supplier unless they really have to, so being up front is often the best policy.

Point out that rising petrol prices means that the cost of traveling to and from location shoots is now higher than before, for example, and they’ll sympathize. More importantly, they’ll also assume that other photographers are feeling the same pressure. If those photographers are not raising their prices too, their businesses won’t be sustainable and they won’t be reliable suppliers.

Simply announce an across-the-board 25 percent price rise however, and buyers are likely to look at what other photographers are doing, and check that your prices are still competitive.

Of course, if some of your customers are price-sensitive, there is a risk that your announcement will highlight the extra costs and drive them away.

The alternative then is to raise prices subtly. You can do this by reassessing or eliminating your discounts and by upselling high-value, low cost items such as framed prints and larger size images. Or you can charge different prices to different markets. Airlines are experts at this. The person sitting next to you on a flight might well have paid a different price for the same type of seat. The difference is charged because they might have needed to buy it at shorter notice or with the possibility of changing the dates. Similarly, it makes little difference to a photographer whether he’s shooting an executive portrait or a headshot for a dating site but the executive is likely to be willing to pay more so trying to sell more of those types of commissions should raise your income without noticeably raising your prices.

However you do it, charging extra is always a little scary. Bear in mind though that a small increase in rates can have a large effect on your profits. And that having set their new price, many suppliers wonder why they didn’t do it earlier.

Photography: sfadden

Marketing is a neverending business. As soon as you win one client, you know it won’t be long before you need to pick up another. That’s why it makes sense to ensure that your marketing plan contains streams that are set up to bring in repeat business.

One of the best ways to do that is by partnering with someone who has a constant need for photography services.

In the past, we’ve suggested teaming up with Realtors. Photographers can do a much better job of photographing homes than they can, and when a property is sold for a six- or seven-figure sum – delivering a handy commission to the Realtor – it’s in the agent’s interest to make sure that the marketing material looks professional. That’s a steady stream of demand for photographers who are in a position to make the most of it. Every time a Realtor has a new property to sell, you’d have a new job.

Realtors Sell, Photographers Shoot

We’re not the only one pointing out the advantages of this sort of teamwork though. Some real estate experts are telling their colleagues that they should be making more use of professional photography too.

“Many Realtors take their own photos of their listings instead of letting a professional photographer take them. In my opinion, this is a mistake.” property expert Adam Waldman wrote on the real estate network Active Rain. ” [T]here may be a number of Realtors out there that take outstanding photos.  Generally speaking though, this is not the case.”

In his article, Adam provides two examples of properties which were being offered with amateur photos. The offers had expired from real estate’s Multiple Listing Service so Adam had the properties re-shot using a professional photographer who made the rooms appear bigger and the appearance of the homes more attractive. He ended up selling both properties for near the asking price.

According to Adam, this is not a strategy that should be limited to high-value real estate.

“All properties can benefit from professional photography as long as the people will de-clutter the home, and make it show-ready,” Adam told us. “Professional photos show a room in a way that most Realtors can’t capture, regardless of whether the home is a starter home or a mansion.”

So if the benefits of professional photography to all real estate professionals are so clear, why aren’t more of them making use of it? Adam suggests that cost is one factor and control another. Realtors feel that they’re capable of taking the pictures themselves and they know what sort of images they want.

It’ll Cost you a Bagel

The challenge for photographers then is to persuade them that they can take images that are much more effective than any the Realtor can shoot. Adam suggests that offering a free trial or a discounted introductory rate can help, but food could be a good way to get your foot in the door too.

“If possible, [photographers] should see if they can present their services in meetings at local real estate offices,” Adam said. “Usually when a guest presents their services, they will bring in breakfast for the agents (bagels, pastries, juice, coffee, etc.).  Those with a limited budget may want to visit agents during an open house to start to build a relationship.”

For any talented photographer, showing images that impress shouldn’t be a problem. Much harder will be to produce a quote that is competitive and clearly cost-effective. The budget for small properties will clearly be more limited than that for larger homes so Adam recommends a rate based on the number of rooms. In his article though, he also points out that the amount that he paid for a shoot came to less than a two-day listing in a newspaper – and that included the fee for the photographer converting the images into a virtual tour.

While you might not want to pitch that low, alternative marketing methods used by Realtors could provide useful points of comparison. While the Realtors are chewing on your breakfast bagels, for example, you could point out that the cost of your shoot would come to less than the price of an online listing – or the celebratory dinner after the contract is signed. The profits might not be huge but the work would be regular and could also provide opportunities for upselling other services to real estate companies – such as executive portraits or flyers – and to the homeowners too.

Of course, these days, those celebratory dinners are rarer than ever. With home prices and sales tumbling, real estate professionals are likely to be watching their pennies. But that just means that it’s more important than ever for them to market their homes professionally and close as many deals as possible for as high a price as possible – an argument a canny photographer should use.

“In my opinion, it is an excellent time for photographers to be marketing their services,” Adam said. ” Of course, in a slower economy, some agents may think of a professional photographer as a luxury, whereas I see them as a necessity.”

[tags] real estate photography [/tags]

Even during the last economic boom, times have been hard recently for professional photographers. The price of digital equipment might have fallen, cutting expenses, but with high-end cameras now within reach of amateurs the result has been an increase in the supply of photographers and of images too. At the same time, the Internet has created new distribution channels available to anyone with a memory card, and cut into the sales of print publications, a major revenue source for pros.

Magazines and newspapers have responded by hiring fewer photographers and even passing out video cameras to the photographers they do use. Media organizations as large as the BBC and The Economist have turned to Flickr as one source of free images.

And just when professionals thought it couldn’t get any worse the economy has dived, taking a bite out of everyone’s income, not to mention the value of our assets.

One solution is to give up. Toss out the camera, uninstall Photoshop and head for an industry with more certain growth potential such as nuclear arms-making or with better job security, such as Middle East peace negotiating.

But once you start, photography isn’t the sort of thing that’s easy to walk away from. A photographer can put down a camera but it won’t be long before they’re picking it up again. So a better strategy is to look for the opportunities in a recession – and there are always some of those.

Getting Married on the Cheap

Weddings, for example, are a major source of revenue for many small photography businesses and have long been seen as recession-proof. People who believe they’re only going to get married once in their lives are usually ready to splash out on their big day. Not any longer. According to one report, the average cost of weddings this year fell marginally from $28,732 in 2007 to $28,704. That might not sound like a dramatic difference but it follows fifteen years of growth and a year of relatively high inflation. Even brides are looking at the figures and realizing that cutting back on the flowers can have a real impact on their mortgages.

One option then is to create low-cost wedding packages. You’d still sell your normal shoots – they’d be bought by those less concerned about the recession and they’d also give buyers a sense that they’re getting a bargain – but you’d give less and perhaps be a lot more rigid about the offer. So you might state in advance that the total shoot won’t last more than two hours, including ceremony, reception and party. Only a small number of photos might be edited and arranged, with the remainder available on a piece rate basis. And you could market more carefully too.

Chelsea Kuhn, for example, a wedding photographer in Montana, places the same ad on her local Craigslist every two days and receives one wedding gig for every ten to fifteen ads. The clients, she says, tend to be people looking for “affordable” photography rather than high end jobs – exactly the sort of demographic most likely to grow during a recession.

Promoting those budget packages exclusively on Craigslist would keep that market separate from your usual customers. Budget-conscious clients can click through to your websites to see what you usually charge and realize they’re getting a deal, but if you don’t list your mini-rates on your site, then high-paying clients won’t know that you also offer a cut-price version of your services.

Catch the Freeloaders

Offering a budget wedding package will help you to find clients worried about price. But no one expects wedding photography to be free. That isn’t the case for editorial images and even for some commercial images too. With almost 65 million images on Flickr licensed with some sort of Creative Commons licenses, image users might wonder why they should ever pay for a photo again – even in boom times.

But of course only a tiny fraction of those images will be professional quality, Creative Commons doesn’t cover every usage and finding good photos worth using on Flickr is time-consuming and painful. It’s often easier – and because it’s faster, cheaper too — to use a stock site, especially for more important projects.

As the economic downturn continues to bite though, it’s likely that more and more businesses will be inclined to cut costs and spend time looking for free photos. That means that Creative Commons is likely to become more important, at least for small businesses.

A good option then is to use CC-licensed images as bait. Offer a few carefully-keyworded photos for nothing but indicate in the caption that you have better quality images available for a low fee. Faced with a choice of continuing to search or negotiate with someone who can supply the images they want at an affordable price, many buyers will choose to pay, giving you new regular customers.

One for the Road

And if you’re thinking of traveling during these difficult days, bear in mind that firstly the dollar doesn’t go very far, but secondly neither are travel photographers. Just as a website owner is likely to pay a small fee for an image he can find easily rather than spend half a day looking for a free one, so an editor is likely to be interested in a photographer pitching pictures from the road if it means he doesn’t have to send someone on assignment.

Wherever you’re going, try to find a publication that might be interested in photos from the region, pick an editorial name from the masthead and give them a call. It’s the kind of cold conversation that’s rarely sounds like fun but just ask, don’t sell. With a little luck, you might find yourself in print.

Economic downturns are difficult for everyone. For photographers, with a little bit of smart marketing, they can be chances to make sales too.

Moving from hobby photography to professional photography is a big jump. It’s a jump not just because your ability to pay your mortgage and feed your family will now depend entirely on your talent with a camera and your skills at marketing those talents. It’s a giant leap because you’ll also have to consider the true costs that go into creating those photographs.

That’s something that amateurs don’t usually have to think about when they sell an image.

Shoot a picture of a landscape for fun and the amount that you paid for your camera and lenses, the time you took over your shot and the gas you paid to get there aren’t usually considered expenses. They’re the price of your hobby, the fee you pay for the pleasure of taking good pictures. While photography is an expensive pastime, few amateur photographers consider those expenses as recoverable.

Nor do they attempt to recover them — even when they make a sale.

As you move towards professional photography however, those costs become more important. They have to be factored into the price of an image. That’s particularly true when you’re working on commission or when you’re shooting for the specific goal of selling the photo once it’s been produced.

There’s little point in creating a picture for the sole purpose of selling it if the image costs more to create than the amount you eventually receive.

When you’re not shooting for fun, the sales price has to be measured against expenses.

So what costs should you factor into the price of a photo… and what can you leave out?

Props and Models
Certainly, anything that you have to buy or rent to create the image should be included in the price of the photograph. If you have to rent special clothes, hire a model or charter a boat, then clearly that’s a price the buyer or the client should pay, not you.

If you want to buy a bowl of mangoes for the sole purpose of practicing your still-life photography, for example, that’s just the fee you’re paying to expand your skill range.

If you want to buy a bowl of mangoes to shoot them for a stock site however, then you have to consider whether or not you’ll see the money you paid for those mangoes again — and whether you wouldn’t make the same income by laying out less money for a bowl of lemons.

Time
Time is always a tough element to factor into the expenses of amateur photographers. Hobbyists who don’t shoot professionally shoot in their own time. They’ve turned off their commercial stopwatch and the shooting isn’t replacing other income.

Take pictures to sell though and you do have to factor in the time. You have to consider how much that time is worth, and you have to remember to include the time spent on editing, uploading and archiving too.

All of those are expenses that you have to calculate and attempt to recover.

Travel
Travel too can feel free — even in the days of high gas prices. You’ll fill your tank anyway whether you’re driving to a location for a shoot or to the office for work. Because gas is just part of the regular monthly outgoings, it’s easy to dismiss a few extra miles as making little difference.

When you’re shooting for money though, those miles do make a difference. If you’re using the family SUV, you might still be able to dismiss the cost of the car as something you’d have to pay anyway — and take those expenses off your taxes instead — but count the miles and multiply them by your car’s mileage to include the gas price.

Insurance
For hobbyists, insurance is also something that they don’t often consider a great deal. Their camera equipment, which might have cost thousands of dollars, might be included in their household insurance. That’s useful if the house burns down, but it’s not going to protect them if they bring in a model to shoot and she trips over a lighting cable, bumps her head and talks to a lawyer.

Nor will it be helpful if you sell an image to a client without a model release and forget to tell him.

Professional photography associations such as the Professional Photographers of America offer targeted insurance schemes among other benefits of membership — but again, membership fees are another expense that has to be recovered over the course of your sales.

Equipment
Although photography equipment might be your biggest expense, it’s also one of the hardest expenses to calculate, especially if you’re only shooting for money occasionally.

A professional photographer will price his images so that over time he recovers the costs of new camera bodies, lenses and lighting equipment. He’ll calculate how much he spends each year on new gear, and factor those expenses into his prices. He has to do that because he won’t have bought those tools if he wasn’t hoping to make money out of them.

Because a hobbyist bought his equipment for fun though, the temptation is to write them off. The pleasure they brought paid for them.

In fact, that’s not just a temptation, it’s a positive market advantage, and it’s one that amateurs can use — together with write-offs of any other expense that aren’t directly related to one particular photo.

One of the biggest criticisms aimed at hobby photographers who sell their images is that they don’t understand the true costs of photography. That’s often true. But it’s also true that the costs for amateur photography often appear different than those for professional photography. They’re expenses for fun not just for business — and that means they won’t necessarily show up in the invoice.

On the other hand, nothing tells a buyer that he’s dealing with an amateur faster than a price that’s lower than costs.

PhotoShelter’s VP Marketing told us during a recent conference call.
“Everything is dated, especially in the category of diversity,” added Emily Hickey, VP Products. “The majority are cheesy, too staged, too stocky and not authentic.”

That’s quite an indictment but it’s based on a new survey of over 20,000 photo buyers just conducted by PhotoShelter. More than 700 art directors, creative directors, designers, photo editors and art buyers replied — and delivered some withering criticism of the state of the stock industry. In each of the categories of Healthcare, Multicultural/Diversity, Seniors, Technology & Products, Interior Décor, and Eco-Friendly, more than 80 percent of buyers expressed dissatisfaction with the images on offer. The photos were too similar, they complained, unnatural and too posed. Even the photos available in Business Situations & Settings were given a thumbs-down by 72 percent of the survey’s respondents.

But the Cats are Nice

Categories that came out well from the survey included Nature, Women and Men’s Lifestyles, and Food & Drink (although buyers did say they’d like to see more shots of people drinking water and without them having to work out for it first.) If you shoot in those categories, you might want to consider shifting to Healthcare or Seniors; the demand for your pictures is already well-served.

The idea behind PhotoShelter’s survey wasn’t just to gain an impression of what buyers think about the images that photographers are offering them though. It was also to improve those images by bringing the two sides together.

“Not only do we know what’s being searched for most often but also where buyers are not finding what they need,” explained Andrew Fingerman. “You can focus your efforts.”

Photographers can do that in part by following some of the simple suggestions offered in the survey results: shoot people walking in non-urban settings; make obese people look good; shoot people with flaws (although not, apparently, seniors with comb-overs — some flaws are just unforgiveable.)

But they can also take part in one of the events that PhotoShelter will be organizing on Shoot! The Day, which will take place on July 20, 2008. Intended to replenish stock images in the categories of Families & Kids, Active Seniors, Youth Culture, Business & Technology, and Still Life, the day will consist of a number of separate events.

Photographers worldwide can take part in Shoot! Anywhere by registering online then photographing images in those categories and submitting them to PhotoShelter. Upload the photos in the week between July 20 and July 27, and in addition to seeing your images offered for sale, you will also be eligible to take part in the Shoot! The Day competition with prizes including a D300 camera from Nikon, one of the event’s sponsors.

Twenty PhotoShelter photographers will also be chosen to participate in a shoot in New York which will include coaching from experts like David Hobby of Strobist. (“Be very enthusiastic about it,” Emily Hickey recommended for photographers considering applying. “It’s a learning experience so show enthusiasm and relevance to how you’re trying to grow as a photographer.”)

For those who don’t make it,  PhotoShelter will be uploading videos of the shoot and will also be holding a gathering in New York City consisting of workshops and product demonstrations.

Back to School for Stock Photographers

And finally, the site has also launched what it calls the School of Stock, a data bank of interviews with buyers and advice for stock photographers. The School starts by discussing Lifestyle images, but PhotoShelter has plans to add one new category every month.

All of those resources present both a solution to photographers struggling to make sales, but also a challenge to established photographers. If PhotoShelter’s attempt to bridge the communication gap between buyers and suppliers works, it will no longer be sufficient to produce the same types of images that have sold in the past. Photographers will have to experiment with more natural shots, find new ways of shooting and risking taking the sort of pictures that have no record of selling.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that ploughing through similar-looking stock images to find ideas might turn out to be a lot less painful.

Professional reputations are fragile things. They can take years to build up but they can be knocked down in seconds… taking customers, potential buyers and future dreams with them.

These are just some of the things you should avoid doing if you want to hold on to your name as a photographer that buyers want to deal with.

Dropping the Quality
Your portfolio should show your best work but it should also contain representative work. There’s nothing wrong with choosing your sample pictures carefully, spending time on them in post-production and making sure that they look persuasive.

But the result is always going to be a standard that the client will expect you to meet.

Fail to meet that standard and you’re going to do nothing more than disappoint — the first step towards a damaged reputation.

A portfolio is like a bid. To keep your name safe, you’ll need to reproduce the same level of work every time a client hires you.

That means top quality work every time — even when you’re tired, ill or just having a bad day.

Breaking the Law
Photography itself isn’t illegal, of course, but there are plenty of laws that photographers need to know before they can start selling images. You’ll need to have model releases for photos that contain people, property releases for some buildings and you’ll have to make sure that there are no visible logos that could land the buyer in trouble.

And it goes without saying that you have to own the copyright to any photos that you sell.

If a buyer ends up in legal hot water after using an image you sold him, you’ll be feeling the heat too.

Going Missing
One of the advantages of photography is that you don’t have to go into an office every day and make nice with the boss. The disadvantage though is that communicating with clients then becomes something that takes thought and effort.

You don’t have to answer emails as soon as they come in but if more than 24 hours passes, the client has a right to wonder what’s going on.

You don’t have to talk on the phone every day to tell the buyer what’s happening but you should update her about any delays that will affect the commission.

And you don’t have to let the buyer know where you are every minute of every day, but if you’re going to be incommunicado for a few days, a heads-up before you leave is always a good idea.

Leave the buyer wondering if you’ve been kidnapped by aliens — and whether he’ll get his images — and other buyers are less likely to ask you for some too.

Writing Badly-Judged Blog Posts
Blogging can be a great way to show potential clients who you are and how you approach photography. But it can also be a very effective way to turn a name that commands respect into a name that provokes disdain.

This post, for example, was about real estate, not photography, and turned its guns on a competitor. The result was a torrent of criticism from other readers, including potential customers. The company that posted the blog was forced to apologize, the blogger was fired and her name is now mud.

When you put your name to a blog post, understand that what you say in that post reflects you and your work — and remember too that the Internet doesn’t forget. What you say online stays online.

Writing Badly-Judged Comments
And exactly the same is true of comments. A post on your blog is clearly yours and the fact that it’s on a professional site is usually enough to make most photographers think twice before writing something they might regret. But comments appear on other people’s blogs and no one really pays attention to the name, right?

Wrong.

If you’re going to put your name to a comment on a blog post — and especially if it carries a link too — again, treat it as a professional communication. Anyone Googling your name will see it.

Creating More Problems than you Solve
Commercial clients don’t really want pictures. They want solutions. They have an empty space on a page and they need something to put there that will have an effect.

Buying a picture from you solves that problem.

But if your solution creates a bunch of other problems — because you’ve delivered the image in the wrong format, at the wrong time, or poorly taken — then it will quickly become known that a dollar spent on you is a dollar wasted.

That will leave your reputation worth little more than a dime.

Building a name as a photographer that people can rely on takes time and consistent good work. It comes naturally for good photographers — and can disappear quickly for any photographer too.

[tags] photography reputation [/tags]

Photography: JR Geoffrion

It might not be everyone’s goal but just about anyone who has ever sold an image will have considered it at least briefly. Once you discover that your camera can be a cash machine, the thought of trading in the nine-to-five for days of professional shooting is never far behind.

After all, you’d be getting paid to do something that you currently do for pleasure.

But there’s a big difference, of course, between photographing for fun — and enjoying the odd income from it — and relying on your camera to pay the mortgage and feed the family. Starting any new business is hard, demands some very specific knowledge and often includes an expensive on-the-job education. That’s especially true of professional photography which now has plenty of tempting roads leading in but is harder than ever to stay in full-time.

Only 10 Percent of your Time is Spent Behind the Camera
JR Geoffrion, for example, became a professional photographer after completing an MBA and spending several years in management consultancy. As an engineering student at the University of Toronto, he had been the photographer for the athletic center, shooting sports events, summer camps and even weddings. When his first child was born he drew on that experience to swap a life of constant travel for a job that gave him more time with his family.

“[I]t was the perfect job for someone that takes care of kids during the weekdays as the weddings are on week-ends,” he told us. “[T]hat was all the push I needed to start.”

That was in 2001, a time when digital photography was far less developed than it is today. There was little information and few resources to help him create his wedding photography business, JR says, and what he could find was often inaccurate.

His background helped. As an engineer, JR was able to master the technical aspects of digital photography and his business degree enabled him to think about the bottom line as much as the images — an important consideration once he discovered that photography accounted for less than 10 percent of his time as a professional photographer.

The biggest challenge JR found though wasn’t the little time he had to spend behind the camera but the speed with which the environment seemed to change. Not only is the technology constantly improving but so is the number and skill levels of competitors, forcing JR to continuously re-invent his business.

“It’s… a very dynamic market with many new entrants due to the decreasing cost of digital camera (and increasing quality),” he warned. “It’s a changing world.”

Everyone Thinks They’re a Photographer
That’s an observation with which Tovis Bratsburg is likely to agree. A former website designer, a job which sometimes included occasional product shots, Tovis took up professional photography after creating sites for other photographers. The design work gave him a network of experienced professionals he could contact for advice and inspiration, and what he saw on their sites introduced him to the business and post-production aspects of photography.

Photography: Tovis Bratsburg

Perhaps most importantly though, as a Web designer Tovis had a headstart in online marketing. Like JR, Tovis relies on both word-of-mouth and his website to show off his portfolio and win sales. His site has a Google page rank of 3, he says, and is at the top of most search engines. He has also combined recommendations with the Web’s affiliate model, paying clients and friends 10 percent of a job’s fee for referrals to new customers.

It was only when Tovis started shooting professionally though, that he realized just how competitive the industry had become.

“What surprised me the most was the fact that these days everybody claims to be a photographer,” he says.

Not everyone has the skills to be a professional photographer though, and over time, Tovis became more discerning, noticing flaws in images that he had once found impressive.

“I became pickier and noticed things like aesthetics, color, tone quality, and elements of design,” he told us. “The photos I thought were awesome suddenly had horrible shadows, unacceptable color, and poor composition.”

That sounds like the growth of a professional photographer’s eye and to develop it even further, Tovis went back to school to add a college degree to his experience. He also kept his feet on the ground by holding onto a second job as a printer, work he says that he also loves.

Despite the challenges, neither JR nor Tovis say they have any regrets about their decision to choose a career in photography. For Tovis, it’s a path to becoming not just a photographer but a photography teacher too one day; for JR it’s way of working with great clients, enjoying photography and being with his children instead of on the road.

“This morning, my youngest, Pierre-Andre, said: ‘Hold you tight’ and gave me a huge hug. When we returned from school at lunch time, my oldest, Jacques-Charles, held my hand while walking home, and my little girl, Natalie-Soleil gave me the cutest wink you can imagine and sat on my lap at my computer. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”

Flickr made the announcement with pride.

“Video! Video! Video! The rumours are true and ‘soon’ is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr…”

And apparently the thrill hasn’t gone away. Flickr’s home page is still screaming this message to its users a month-and-a-half after the original announcement, as though the rest of us will be as excited about the rise of video as the site itself.

In fact, Flickr’s videos are pretty restrictive. Calling them “long photos,” the site restricts videos to 90 seconds and only lets pro members upload them. (If you’re wondering what you can shoot in 90 seconds, you’re not alone.) In the meantime, users looking for images have to be careful to click the “photos only” tickbox when searching for stills.

For Flickr, the decision to allow videos is unlikely to have been a hard one. While photographers are making money on the site, Flickr is really meant for sharing, not selling. Videos are just another way of letting others in on an experience. Instead of capturing a moment, they capture a moment-and-a-half.

Nor was Flickr the first to try to bridge the gap between photographers and videographers. The New York Times, no less, instructs its photographers to shoot video for its website, a demand that has sparked some discussion among photojournalists.

But what about people who love photography — and would like to earn from it? Does the rise of video, whether on websites, news sites, Flickr or YouTube mean that we should be playing more with our cameras’ video feature… or even shooting movies and pulling stills from the footage?

Photography Looks Safe… for Now
A look at the market seem to suggest that still photography, while perhaps feeling a touch squeezed, is in little danger — at least for now. An increasing number of sites might be hosting videos but the clips seems to take the place of content rather than the images that accompany that content. While it’s true that a blog that uses a two-minute video to communicate a message is unlikely to demand an image as well, there’s also little chance that it will make much of a demand from a videographer either. The sort of videos found on most vlogs — and even on video-sharing sites — still seem to consist of one man or woman, a web cam and a book to rest it on. Even The New York Times, for all its interest in Web-based video news, still has some outstanding photographic slideshows with a range you’re unlikely to find even in the Sunday print edition.

Some stock sites though do see an opportunity. In addition to offering still images, iStock, Stockxpert and Shutterstock all offer video clips, usually at prices that begin at around $10 — a significant increase on the standard $1 starting price for stills. But even here there’s little evidence that the sites see this market as a replacement for their usual buyers — designers looking for images for the Web, for ads and for the sort of print demands that video just can’t meet.

It’s safer to say that stock sites are hedging their bets.

After all, the infrastructure for hosting and offering video is largely the same as that needed to sell images, so there’s little cost and some potential benefit to be gained for stock sites should video truly take off.

And that’s the attitude that photographers might want to take too.

What Will Video Be When it Grows up?
Video as a commodity is still in its infancy. Even Google appears to be struggling to earn decent returns on the ads embedded in its YouTube content and only distributes them to publishers who can win more than a million viewers a month. Those ads also currently take the form of text at the bottom of the screen rather than the sort of video commercials you can find interrupting your television viewing.

But video does seem to be growing more popular and for people interested in earning from imagery, the market might be worth testing. Some of the stock footage on Shutterstock, for example, is very similar to that offered by still photographers, and can include landscape and road scenes as well as people and objects. Once you’ve shot your still images then, it might not take a great deal of extra effort to shoot a few minutes of video and offer it to that market too.

Videographers, of course, would probably disagree. They would likely point out that while there is some overlap in the skills and knowledge needed to shoot video and stills, the two do demand different talents. A photographer has to know how to freeze a moment; a videographer has to depict movement.

But one of the biggest benefits of the new photography era is that there are few penalties for trying and failing, and plenty of fun to be had in the process. It’s still likely that for the foreseeable future at least you’ll find it easier to earn with stills than with video but if you’re a photographer who finds both enjoyable, it should be worth keeping an eye on the opportunities on the other side too.