No, this isn’t a list post. We’ll spare you having to read a list that long on your monitor. And a list that consisted of little more than 99 headings and a line of explanation would always be of limited value. It’s not enough to know that you can make money selling textures, teaming up with hotels, or creating photo products. You want to know how to do it, what you need to shoot, how much you can earn… and where to begin.
We couldn’t fit all of that information in a single blog post, and to spread it across the blog would make the different methods too difficult to browse. So we’ve gone analog and put it all in a book. It ran to 340 pages.

99 Ways to Make Money from Your Photos took more than a year to produce. It draws on interviews with photographers, businesses and buyers. Its recommendations are based on case studies and success stories that reveal exactly how amateurs, enthusiasts and professionals are making money from their images.

A Comprehensive Guide to Making Money with Photography

We’ve tried to cover as broad a spectrum as possible. Professionals should find plenty of information in the book about licensing, upselling and joint venture opportunities. Semi-professionals can learn the basics of part-time stock photography and discover niches that they might never have considered such as pet photography, children’s photography and food photography. And occasional shooters can discover how to combine their hobbies with image-making to sell their crafts and create products that they can place in stores to bring in a little extra cash.

We’ve also tried to cover as many different aspects of making money with photography as we could. So some chapters focus on particular types of photography, revealing, for example, which images sell the best on eBay and suggesting novel ways of providing portrait services. But we also look at marketing methods, with chapters on iPhone-based promotions, working with sales reps and building subscription lists. Of course, we’ve also discussed the most effective Web-based photography services, explaining what you need to do to make the most of those sites and maximize your earnings.

Most of the ideas in the book describe activities and strategies that are already in use. We’ve talked to photographers who are actually making money from these methods, the companies that act as intermediaries between buyers and producers, and the customers themselves. Occasionally though, we also discuss opportunities that we’ve spotted but which have yet to be exploited by independent photographers (such as creating your own specialized sets of trading cards) or at all (such as working with the homeless to spread your photos and build a brand while benefitting the community). We’ve tried to be both creative and pragmatic, practical as well as inventive.

Filled with Little-Known Opportunities

Some of the opportunities we discovered surprised us. We assumed that children’s dance schools, for example, represented no more than a yearly opportunity to supply photos that parents might otherwise shoot themselves with their camera phones. In fact, we were told that new performances are usually held several times a year and that each performance creates a new opportunity for a photographer to make money. While school photography companies compete fiercely to gain access to high schools, nimble independent photographers are discovering the benefits of extra-curricular classes.

Each chapter is divided into concise sections that explain what that particular method involves, what you need to shoot, how to do it and where to break in. We even offer expert tips for success in each field and talk you through the first steps. It’s always knowing what to do at the beginning that poses the biggest problems. Once you’ve shot the images and discovered the marketing channels necessary to sell them — and certainly, once you’ve made your first sale — whichever method a photographer uses tends to develop a momentum of its own. You discover for yourself what works and what doesn’t and, in time, build a customer base that’s loyal, stable and buys regularly. 99 Ways provides 99 different entry points into the world of paid photography.

So far, the response to the book has been immensely gratifying. Jeff Beaver, a co-founder of Zazzle, has called it:

“[A] great resource for any photographer serious about turning their passion for photography into real money.”

Oleg Tscheltzoff, CEO and co-founder of Fotolia has said that:

“99 Ways to Make Money From Your Photos is an excellent guide for both novice and experienced photographers…. Whether you just invested in your first digital camera or you’ve got an image library spanning years, this book will give you a step-by-step resource for capitalizing on your images.”

And Andreas Reinhold, a professional engineer who now wins regular photography commissions from top car magazines, told us that

“Several of the shown ways to earn money with photography work for me. Some of the given hints were new to me and proved to be successful and this is why I also recommend this book even to more experienced photographers who already earn money with their pictures. This guide is so comprehensive that any photographer should be able to find a good starting point to get his business going.”

Clearly, we don’t expect you to use all of the methods that we’ve described in the book. But you don’t need to. Start selling images with just one or two of the strategies that the book contains, and you’ll already be in profit, whether you’re a professional looking to expand his or her business, or an enthusiast looking to earn a little extra income.

This is the first of a series of publications that Photopreneur has in the works. 99 Ways to Make Money with Your Photos is a print book but we’re also about to release online a collection of premium reports revealing how to make money as a pet photographer, sell microstock images, and market your Photoshop skills, as well as two professional guides to using Flickr commercially.

99 Ways to Make Money with Your Photos is now available for sale at Amazon.com.

Tell people that you’re a photographer, and they’ll imagine that you spend eight hours a day bent over a tripod, filling up a memory card with beautiful images.

If only.

In practice, only a small part of a photographer’s day is actually filled on a shoot. The rest of the time, photographers are doing all sorts of other jobs. These are just some of them…

Location Scout
Whether you’re shooting wedding couples before the vows, postcards for a tourist board or wildlife for a photography contest, you need to know where to go to get the shots you want. Flickr has made location scouting from home a little easier by showing what other photographers have found in certain spots, and even Google Earth can help photographers understand topography. But there’s no real replacement for driving around and creating your own list of unique locations.

Art Director
On some jobs, you might have an art director telling you what the picture should do and exactly how to set up the shot. Usually though, you won’t. You’ll have to design the image yourself and that’s no bad thing. It’s where photographers get to be creative and enjoy their work. But there can be a difference between creative and effective. If you’re hoping to sell an image, it has to do more than satisfy you; it has to meet a buyer’s need. For microstock photographers in particular, that means looking at which images are selling and asking themselves how they can shoot similar scenes that are even better. Then creating them.

Diplomat
No, you won’t be sipping Champagne at fancy garden parties, but you will have to explain to clients why their idea to take their portrait in a dark alley isn’t going to work or why resting their hand on their chin looks cheesier than a mouse’s breakfast. You’ll have to persuade clients to let you take the picture the way you think is best while still making them feel that they’re going to get the image they want — and that it was all their idea in the first place.

Marketing Maven
Fortunate are the photographers who have pros to do their marketing for them. And rare too. For most photographers, selling their services is both one of their most important tasks and one of the hardest. Writing press releases, bringing traffic to websites and creating ads just aren’t the sorts of things that are taught at photography schools. But they’re all vital for any growing business — and that includes a photography business too.

Graphic Designer
In the past, what you saw through the viewfinder was what you delivered to the client. These days, what you see on the screen is only the foundation for the final picture. It might have taken you while to master your new digital SLR but you’ll still have to get to grips with Photoshop. Buyers expect the images they order to arrive clean, sharp and ready for the page. That means working with the computer as much as the camera.

Bookkeeper
One of the most satisfying parts of any business is counting your cash at the end of the month. One of the least satisfying parts of any business is counting how much cash you’re going to give to the IRS at the end of the year. But it’s got to be done, and you’re going to have to do it. Yes, you’ll probably hire an accountant to do the paperwork for you, but you’ll still have to gather the papers, collect the receipts and make sure that you have everything you need to fight an audit.

Take pictures
And at some point in the week, if you can squeeze it in, you’ll have to take some pictures too. But who said being a photographer was all fun and games?

Back in 2003, Eileen Gittins, a photographer who had spent several years working for Kodak, wanted to create her own photography book. It would be a mixture of images and text, “a truly published book that would look like something I would buy at Borders,” she told us.

She tried consumer photo albums but found the binding and image quality too low. She talked to on-demand printers but found they demanded a print run of at least 400 — and Eileen only wanted 40 copies. ‘[I] also needed to figure >out how to design and lay out the book and frankly, it just became too hard and too expensive to produce,” she said.

So when the capital markets started waking up, she leveraged her experience as a former software CEO and set up her own on-demand publishing business: a company that would allow anyone to produce their own coffee-table book at an affordable price and in the numbers they wanted — whether that was one copy or 1,000.

According to Eileen, Blurb now prints “many thousands” of books each week, with the most popular genre, ‘arts and photography.’ Prices start at $18.95 for a softcover book of between 20-40 pages and rise as high as $159.95 for a large format, hardcover book of up to 360 pages, complete with dust jacket. Although books can be printed individually, Blurb also offers discounts for orders as low as ten.

According to Eileen, the relatively low prices are a result of their software, Blurb BookSmart, a free download that works on both Mac and PC, and that makes the set-up economic even for print runs of single books. The number of volumes the company now prints also gives it some bargaining power. “And of course, overarching everything, is the fact that the print-on-demand technology is improving rapidly — and as with everything, costs come down as technology improves,” Eileen said.

Printed wedding albums, produced by both the photographer and the participants, are the most popular books ordered by photographers, but portfolios and exhibition catalogs are frequent orders too.

But perhaps the biggest opportunity that Blurb offers photographers who want to do more than show off their skills in print is the ability to sell their books through Blurb’s own bookstore. Photographers set their own price and receive all of the profits after printing costs.

That creates a world of new opportunities. One of Blurb’s own employees, for example, recently created a yearbook for his child’s school — and made a quick $500.

Creating books that sell though requires some skill. Photography books might not have structures as complex as novels but they still have to keep the reader’s interest if people are going to buy them, enjoy them and recommend them to their friends.

“It’s less about length and more about telling the story,” Eileen explained. “Books have a beginning, a middle and an end — like a movie or an installation at a gallery. The beginning might have a sequence of ‘establishing shots’ to set context. Pacing and white space are also important.”

But with photo-sharing sites, automated slideshows and digital images, why would people want to put images on paper that they can share for free online?

“I think that the tangible and tactile has even more value in an increasingly virtual world,” answered Eileen. “People just like to hold something in their hands and turn the pages at their own pace…”

Photo by bigdaddyhame.

[tags] blurb, blog books, booksmart [/tags]

At Photopreneur, we like to think any photographer can make a difference, as long as he or she is prepared to take action as well as images. Tory Read is one photographer who did all three.

In 1995, the neighborhood of Five Points in downtown Denver was suffering from a bad press. Much of the city saw the area, which had a large minority population, as a center for drug dealing, prostitution and gang violence. Read, a professional photographer who had worked for The Oakland Tribune and the Associated Press, and who had recently moved to Colorado, decided to take a look for herself.

“What I found were a lot of cool and interesting people who were angry about the one-dimensional news coverage and who wanted to tell stories from their point of view,” she told us.

Read went door-to-door rounding up participants for a series of photo workshops. Hoping that the seminars would give local residents the ability to portray themselves on their own terms and build understanding within the community, she ignored the suspicion she encountered as a white girl with a camera, and invited people to pass the word.

Each workshop eventually had around twenty participants, ran for four to six weeks, and took place in venues that included housing projects, a homeless shelter, a health clinic and an after-school program. Temporary exhibitions were held in community spaces, with the participants themselves choosing the images and texts. When visitors began asking why the exhibitions were only temporary, Read started looking for funds to mount a series of permanent, mural-sized photo-text displays.

It was then that things started to get tough.

“I was so naïve,” Read, who had previously produced a book on community rights in Samoa, explained. “It was a shock to learn how hard it was to get support for an organic project that grew out of an artist interacting with a community.”

Read’s plan didn’t always meet funders’ mandates, even though the mandates themselves kept changing. Local foundations that liked the idea weren’t active in Five Points. And community organizations were seen as representing the interests of particular sub-groups, so associating with any one of them would have killed the project from the outset.

At the same time, Read also found that letting the community members choose their own ideas for the permanent photo exhibits meant giving up some of her own. “I thought doing one on ritual would be really cool and revealing about different cultures, but some participants reacted strongly against it, saying it would breed conflict,” she recalled. “We took a vote, and I lost… That was hard.”

Money though eventually came from the state arts council, which led others to contribute too. By the fourth year, the project was established enough to accept funding from a local housing organization, which allowed Read to complete the permanent exhibits.

“By the end, it was my dream come true – hundreds of people of all ages, sizes, colors, classes were in the same room together, celebrating and learning and having fun,” she said.

With one permanent exhibit at the DMV, comments still come in from all over the city, six years after the end of the project. People in the neighborhood still call to tell her what they are up to. Some have become photographers; one has become a poet. Others are teaching photo workshops themselves.

And Read’s advice for other photo community builders?

“Get a fiscal sponsor early, set realistic goals, be open minded and prepared to follow the lead of the community… even if it takes the project away from what you originally intended.”

Photo of Tory at work in Samoa by David Greenspoon.

[tags] photo community building, tory read [/tags]

We’re not alone here at Photopreneur. Yes, we try to put an emphasis on the money side of photography — we want to help photographers turn their skills into income. But we’re certainly not the only site talking about cameras and pictures. There are about a zillion other sites offering reviews, tips and other information about picture-taking.

Some of them are good. Some of them aren’t so good. But a few of them have some great, creative suggestions that you just can’t find anywhere else.

One of the sources that we really like is Photojojo.com.

This isn’t your typical blog or review site. It’s a twice-weekly suggestion sheet delivered by RSS or email. Each post contains just one idea but it’s the kind of wacky suggestion most other photo resources just don’t touch.

Like how to turn an Etch-A-Sketch into a photo frame. Or create photo cupcakes. Or build video panoramas.

The service has been running for just over a year and was created by Amit Gupta, an entrepreneur who has worked with Seth Godin among others. The idea is simply to share cool tips that other photographers are dreaming up.

“We love photos, and we’re always looking around for interesting things people are doing,” Amit Gupta explained to us by email. “I hope it’ll inspire people to take more photos and to do more with their photos. And to bring new people into the photo cult.”

It sounds simple, and for Amit it really is that simple. He started playing around with cameras in high school, experimented with the Apple QuickTake and once he graduated to digital SLRs, never looked back.

“For me photography is a way to preserve and remember and to capture fleeting beauty,” he said.

That sounds normal enough. It’s explaining how to put people’s faces on small cakes and eat them that’s strange.

[tags] amit gupta, photopreneur, photojojo [/tags]

The BBC isn’t very popular with professional photographers these days. The corporation’s frequent invitations to the public to send in their own pictures has annoyed editorial photographers. And their call for stock photos to make up for their own poor library irritated stock photographers.

But take a look at the section on the BBC’s news site dedicated to stills, and you can almost forgive them. Not only is the fact that they’ve actually set aside a page just for the power of photography worth praising, but the images they show can provide great lessons for anyone who wants to move from creating single images to sequences that tell a story.

Skip quickly through the Day In Pictures, a daily selection of agency images, and look closely at the series called “In Pictures”.

A recent sequence, for example, showed the life of a roadside cook in Nigeria. The first shot introduced us to the subject with a portrait, before the remaining pictures showed how she worked, the food she sells, the people she knows and finally, her family.

Each picture also came with a long textual description. The result was a complete report that revealed the life of one person most people would never meet.

Or if they would meet them, wouldn’t think too much about.

And that’s the point. You don’t need to go to Lagos to create pictures like these. There’s no reason why you couldn’t ask to shadow a local panhandler for a day, a car park attendant or a day-laborer. As long as people who see the pictures would recognize their type and be interested in their lives, you’ll have a story that people will want to look at.

You can find a subject, shoot for a day and ask questions to create the textual description. Then follow the structure laid out by the BBC to make the story.

To put the images in front of people, you can either hawk them around galleries, or begin by putting them on dedicated websites and marketing them separately.

You don’t have to wait for a commission to become a photojournalist; you just have to take pictures.

[tags] bbc, citizen photojournalism [/tags]

The New York Times recently ran a fascinating piece about mothers going into business as semi-pro photographers. The article described how some women are buying top-end digital SLR cameras to photograph their own children, and then earning extra income by taking pictures of other people’s children. It’s well worth a read.

There were a few points that really stood out though.

First, some of the women — and the article focused predominantly on women — were using some pretty creative marketing techniques. A few, for example, made business cards that included a picture of the last child they’d photographed and gave a handful to the client. When they felt they were passing on pictures of their little one, other mothers were happy to distribute the cards to friends and family.

The photographers also made a point of networking in the places they were most likely to find clients: playgrounds and parks. That certainly makes sense, and when it’s a place where you feel at home too, the networking should feel natural.

But although many of these part-time children’s photographers seem to find it easy to pick up jobs, few took a professional approach to their work. They didn’t know how much to charge (and often massively undercut professional portrait photographers), and they didn’t have a plan for future growth.

For some of these photographers though, those failings probably don’t matter. They’re likely to see their photography more as a hobby that brings in a little extra money than as a business that pays the bills. Seen that way, neither the income nor the long-term growth of their ‘business’ is important. Other photographers though will need to decide on a rate that allows them to pay for their equipment, their marketing costs and their own salaries, and understand how and when to invest for the future.

That’s something that all photographers who want to continue earning income from their pictures have to do.

It’s also worth noting though that few of the photographers were willing to photograph weddings, a major source of income for many professional photographers.

That isn’t surprising either. Wedding photography requires experience and a particular set of skills that have to be learned. The women profiled in the Times article were simply selling skills that they’d already learned photographing their own children.

And that’s really the secret to extending this sort of business into other areas.

If you’ve taken great pictures of your pets, your child’s sports events or your grandparents, there’s no reason why you couldn’t do the same thing for other people. You’d just need a camera, a set of business cards and a willingness to network among people just like you.

In the end, perhaps the most important point we can take away from this article is just how easy it is to become at least a semi-professional photographer and turn what you do fun into money.

[tags] women photographers, women in photography business, photography mothers [/tags]

When Jason Niedle bought himself a digital Rebel three years ago to take travel photos and shoot pictures of beautiful, young women, he assumed that having a decent camera would make creating those photographs a lot easier.

It could have been the camera. But it could just as easily have been Jason’s eye for a good picture because the result of sharing those images was an offer of $200 from a friend to shoot an event.

“Something switched in my head,” Jason said in an email interview when asked about that first commission. “I thought ‘I’m a photographer.’”

In fact though, Jason doesn’t usually describe himself as simply a photographer, preferring to say that he’s an entrepreneur — or at a stretch, a photographer and business owner. He’s just finished his term as the President of a local chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization and has started several businesses with little or no links to photography.

But it’s not just because of his business interests that Jason doesn’t call himself a photographer. Although he points out that a shoot that appears dull can suddenly look a lot more interesting when it comes with a big check, Jason has strict criteria for choosing commissions… and they don’t include the fee. He only agrees to do shoots that involve travel, are artistic and have either a cool experience or “a beautiful human component.”

“I shot a wedding, not for the money (that helped, of course), but because I’d just seen ‘Wedding Crashers’ and wanted to be, in a way, a wedding crasher,” Jason explained. “And I shot the Grammy Party a few months back not for the small payment, but because it sounded fun (and it was!)

“And I still turn down models who want to pay (because of their attitude or whatever), yet often shoot fun, beautiful models for free.”

If that doesn’t sound enjoyable enough, Jason has also toured the coast shooting the Muscle Car 1000 luxury rally, and was recently offered his ideal gig: an all-expenses paid VIP trip overseas.

Most of Jason’s bookings come through contacts but asked what he would do to get bookings, he answers as a business owner: “I’d probably create several websites, each serving a specific tight niche, such as luxury trip photographer,” he says. “Then I’d buy a ton of Google AdWords, do some targeted post-card mailings and work the ‘word of mouth’ circuit. I’d also consider hiring a sales rep to contact all the niche market prospects, and pay that person a large commission to get me bookings.”

But if he did that, of course, he’d be a photographer.

Photo of Jason by Marcia Napoli. Photos of interior by Jason Niedle.

[tags] jason niedle, photopreneur [/tags]

It never fails. You spend thousands of dollars on state of the art photography equipment and when the greatest shot you’ve ever seen comes along, you’ve got nothing but the tiny lens on your mobile phone. So you pull it out, take a snap… and you’re not surprised when the picture turns out dark, blurry and generally poor.

In the old days, photographers would never have gone too far without an Instamatic, point-and-click camera that they could stuff into their pocket and pull out for those on-the-spur moments. The images they produced were surprisingly good but they were taken by real cameras. Camera phones though are built to be held to the ear rather than to the eye so squeezing a good picture out of one is hard… but not impossible. Here’s what you need to know to do it right:

1. Use lots of light
Camera phones handle low light badly. If your phone has a “night” setting — and many do — you should probably use it in all but the strongest light environments. And don’t rely on the flash to solve the problem. They aren’t exactly like your studio lights; expect to end up with uneven shadows and odd reflections. The only other solution is to either shoot outdoors in bright sunlight or turn all the lights on in the room and point any spotlights at the subject. But that kills the spontaneity, right?

2. Take close-ups of one subject
A wide focal length and digital zoom make for poor landscape shots and fuzzy details. For best results, you want to be about two feet from the subject. Getting even closer and focusing on just one subject though can help with the creativity and let you produce images that are low on detail but rich on composition. That’s one way to beat the phone challenge.

3. Press and… wait
There’s often a delay between the push of the button on a camera phone and the moment when the picture is captured. Of course, delays are the last things you expect — or want — when you’re taking a spontaneous image with a camera phone. The result is often a blur instead of a memory. The only solutions are patience, a solid object to keep the camera steady… and the intention of creating artistic blur.

4. Go for the unconventional
Most decent cameras will always outshoot the lens on a mobile phone. But mobile phones can be taken anywhere, held anywhere and their low quality shots can be used to effect. So hold the phone at strange angles; move while you shoot to get the blur; take shots of body parts instead of whole portraits. Do all the experiments that take just too much work with your main machine but which are a breeze with your phone.

5. Use your images as a palette
Of course, you can always improve the images you take off your phone in post-editing. Vicman software offers a specialized editor for enhancing mobile phone images, but one option is to go wild in Photoshop and completely transform your pictures to create something very different. Your camera phone, for example, could be a great way to build your own mini-stock library that you can use to build montages.

Camera phones are much too limited to replace the kinds of images you can take with your main camera, and without a lot of post-production you’ll always find it hard to sell them. But they’re so easy to take, they’re worth the effort to create some unusual, spontaneous pictures.

Image of a Japanese man taking a picture of the fireworks at the Thames festival 2006 by Sean Brightman.

[tags] photopreneur’s guide, mobile phone photography, camera phone photography [/tags]

For many photopreneurs, it’s the ultimate goal: take beautiful pictures, use Photoshop to stamp your personality on them… and in between selling your prints and your books, get hired by giant corporations to create unique images that appear on huge billboards in your city.

For Chuck Anderson though, a Chicago-based artist and designer, that’s life. His client list runs from Absolut to Warner Brothers, his home-made photography book has sold over a thousand copies and in 2006, he was asked to judge the Art Directors Club Awards in New York.

And did we mention that he’s been doing this for just four years and — hold onto your stomachs — will only turn 22 sometime this year?

Ask Chuck how he got so far so fast though, and you’ll hear the answer to rapid success in any field: work hard and work well.
“I worked my butt off, stayed up late at night working [and] sacrificed quite a lot,” Chuck told us in an email interview. “In the beginning I just took whatever jobs I could get. Over the last three-and-a-half years or so I’ve become more selective, because I can be now… [My work] just really caught some people’s eyes at the right place and time, and I was blessed with a lot of awesome work coming my way.”

Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Actually, Chuck’s success might be a little more complicated than that. His work consists of simple images taken with his DSLR — for Chuck it’s the quality of the photographer not the camera that counts — then heavily edited to create unique psychedelic images that, as he puts it, “make something that is otherwise mundane and boring become exciting and vibrant and interesting.”

In essence, Chuck creates designs that are highly distinctive so that clients know exactly what they’re getting. And his site gets a lot of traffic from magazines, design and news sites, which enables him to sell his personal projects, such as limited edition prints and his self-published book through his online store.

So how can other photopreneurs follow Chuck’s success?

“Try and see the world in new ways,” Chuck suggests. “Show what you know, explore what you don’t, and try to learn new things about your surroundings.”

And have fun in the post-editing too.

“It feels great,” says amateur photographer Rich Legg of the sensation he gets when he sells his photos. “More important than the money though is the validation I feel. When someone contacts me about purchasing one of my images, I really feel that I have created something special.”

And Rich should know. Although he works as a real estate broker, Rich carries his camera wherever he goes, shooting between 200 and 300 shots per week in what he calls a search for that One special capture. In the process, he gets to practice and perfect his technique, and when he makes his best shots available on his blog, Flickr or a forum, that dedication occasionally turns into validation… and revenue.

“Just this week I was contacted by a book publisher about doing some spec work for a government publication,” Rich said in an email interview. “They found me by doing a search on Flickr for Salt Lake City photos. The job could end up paying over $1,000, yet this contact came from a free photo-sharing website.”

Rich also sold a picture of the Salt Lake City skyline to an ad agency for $200 — a photo that he’d taken in ten minutes on his way to the office, but it was his image on his own blog of a light bulb burning out that really sent him to the top of the blogosphere. The page reached the top of Digg and sent his pageload stats through the roof.

In an earlier post, we described how Digg can help photographers and noted Rich’s success, but according to Rich the effects are long-lasting. “I have noticed that my returning visitor count has increased by about tenfold,” Rich says. “This is probably the best thing about it.”

And Rich’s advice for other photographers in search of success like his?

“[S]hoot a lot. Work on perfecting the technical aspect of your work. Then get your work out there.”

[tags]Rich Legg, Photography[/tags]

A new image site has just been launched to meet the demand for images of Latinos and Hispanics. HispanicShots.com is the work of marketing consultant Michele Cordoba, and was created in response to the lack of suitable Hispanic images that had made her life in advertising harder than necessary.

AboutTheImage quotes her as saying:

“I actually got the idea for HispanicShots.com a few years ago, after a desperate search for a health-care related shot of a Latino family that I needed for a new business presentation. I had been looking for weeks for something even remotely relevant, and could find nothing. I finally had to create the shot myself, calling in favors from a photographer friend, and using my husband and my best friend’s baby daughter as talent.”

There are opportunities here for photopreneurs. First, the site is apparently looking to grow its collection, and also wants to supply stock and custom photography. So if you have relevant images that would fit the site’s categories, it might be worth getting in touch.

Another opportunity is to look outside this niche category and think about those to which advertisers want to market and struggle to find images. Have a look yourself. Imagine that you’re a photo buyer looking to sell a product to other niche market.

• How easy is it to find a suitable image?
• Can you be a content provider and fill that need?
• Are you tagging your images to make them findable for that niche?

If you struggle in finding something, you may have just found an opportunity. Collect and categorize the images and make them available.

As long as photo buyers are spending weeks looking for pictures — as they seem to be — photopreneurs shouldn’t have to go weeks without selling an image.

[tags]HispanicShots, Niche Photography, Media Buy, Photopreneur, Opportunity[/tags]

If you’re visiting the Photopreneur Blog for the first time, welcome! Our goal here is to build a community of photography professionals, semi-pros and enthusiasts — as well as media buyers and planners — around the toolset of Photopreneur. If you’ve been to our home page, you’ll see that we haven’t launched the toolset yet:

Photopreneur is a photography marketplace portal that will connect photographers, bloggers, photo buyers, and photo enthusiasts. Our radical, new photography site is NEITHER a stock photo site nor a photo sharing site.

As we get closer to a launch that will allow us all to participate (I haven’t used the tool yet – though I’ve seen the interface of it), here’s what we’re doing:

• Looking for Guest Bloggers: Be it a recurring role or just a one-time thing – we’d like this blog site to belong to the community. We’ll always link back to your blog. I’m just keeping things warm while we build a team of bloggers.
• Photopreneur of the Day: Have a suggestion of a photopreneur (Wikipedia definition) we should know about? You can always suggest yourself.
• Building a Blogroll: A few people have asked our sparse blogroll. Well, we’re building things one frame at a time. If we get too many – we’ll build a separate page. If you know a blog we must have on the roll – let me know!

If you have any thoughts or ideas to the above, let me know via email: mike@photopreneur.com. Are you a Photopreneur?

[tags]Photopreneur, Community [/tags]

Last week, Dan Heller looked deep into his crystal lens on The Future of Photo Sharing and Agencies

The post (article?) looks at how stock photo agencies are moving into the consumer arena as user-generated content becomes part of the strategy for many online business models – including business models for the photographer.

Heller shares three lessons he’s learned:

1. The photo industry culture is resistant to change
2. The culture is limited in broad business experience outside of its own industry
3. Tunnel vision

The article is largely based on the first of Heller’s Five Truisms of the Photography Business, which is “More people practice photography as a hobby than as a profession.”

The statement is but one of the many reasons we’re looking forward to launching the tool-set of Photopreneur.

[tags]Dan Heller, Photopreneur, Photo Sharing, Photography Business, Stock Photos, Agencies[/tags]

A photopreneur could be a photographer with entrepreneurial spirit. A photopreneur might also be an entrepreneur with a passion for photography.

Many opportunities exist in the world of photography, with buyers and sellers alike, looking for innovative ways to tap into available resources. A photopreneur recognizes the opportunities and creates:

• A way to increase awareness of their photographic work;
• New combinations of how to display their work;
• Collaborates with media planners or media buyers on projects;
• Takes their portfolio to another level of quality shoots and quantity of sales;
• Networks with other photographers, sharing and learning from each other;

Capturing the spirit of entrepreneurialsm, combining it with a talented eye, and unleashing the result across the globe – that’s a photopreneur. Are you a Photopreneur?