Photography: Courtesy fotoLibra

Building a portfolio of images is a little like creating an investment portfolio. It’s an asset that should continue to bring in revenue on a consistent basis throughout the life of the photographer. For top photographers that’s certainly true. Annie Leibovitz was able to borrow $15.5 million using her images as collateral in part because lenders the Art Capital Group recognized that her work  would remain valuable enough to cover the loan. For more typical professionals, creating a stock portfolio is often an investment too, largely because it takes time to cover the costs. Ron Chapple, a stock photographer with more than 30 years’ experience, shoots with the idea of his  image sales covering their production expenses within the first year or two of release, with profits coming in years three, four and five. For occasional photographers though, the situation tends to be different. Old pictures often end up not collecting regular sales on Getty or Alamy, or even on iStockPhoto and Dreamstime, but stashed away in albums or stored in forgotten folders on hard drives.

If you really could make money out of those old shots though, you might find that your photo albums are more than a collection of memories and a bank of images that make you proud. They’re also an untapped treasure chest.

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Photography: Del Sol Photography

One of the biggest challenges of wedding photography is cutting the kitsch. Unless you’re marketing yourself as a wedding photojournalist, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to dodge the formals. You’ll have to line up the family, shoot the rings and catch a shot of the flowers in the bride’s hand. Those sorts of images are standards; the bride and groom expect them and they leave very little room for originality beyond the lighting and composition.

There’s also a good chance though that you’ll be asked to create a series of romantic images captured before the wedding takes place. That should be an opportunity to be get creative. It’s just you, the couple, a picturesque location and a chance to create some beautiful pictures. But even those shoots come with a major limitation. Because the images are taken before the wedding, the clothes have to be kept spotless. The result is usually another standard series of couples kissing against watery backdrops and gazing at each other under blue skies. It’s the kind of the thing that pays the bills and makes clients happy but it rarely gets a photographer’s pulse racing.  But what if you saved the romantic shots until after the wedding, when the dress has done its job and before it’s consigned to the back of the closet? You could then get a lot more adventurous and create romantic wedding images that are unlike any other. Instead of shooting a couple in front of the sea, for example, you could shoot them in the sea. Or you could put the bride on a horse or the couple in a cornfield. You could open up a whole new range of creative opportunities. That’s the idea behind Trash the Dress, a branch of wedding photojournalism that’s growing in popularity.

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Photography: blackbiscuits

The toughest way to sell your editorial images is the one faced by most photographers: you have to pitch your photos directly and unsolicited to photo editors. They look at dozens of portfolios a week and only rarely find images that they like enough to pay for. Fortunately it is also possible to try a different way in. Instead of trying to sell your pictures, you pitch a story — one that comes complete with professional-quality photos.

That might not look like such a smart move. Story editors are just as inundated with pitches as photo editors are. But the queries they receive usually come from writers offering only text. If images are mentioned as part of the package, they tend to be the kind of snaps that might look good in the family album but which don’t reach the professional level publications need.

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Photography: Belinda Strodder

School photography is big business. With hundreds of portrait clients crammed into one space, a sales rate of between 70 and 85 percent, and revenues that can reach as high as $1,000 an hour, it’s no wonder that photographers are keen to get their foot in the school door. And it’s  no wonder too that the market is generally dominated by large companies who have the capacity to manage a stream of subjects, process the images and make them available to parents. When the organization is this important — more important perhaps than the quality of the photography — schools tend to stick with the firms they know. That makes life hard for individual photographers and small studios who also want a piece of the school action. But there are alternatives. Schools might be big and stuffed with children that parents want photographed, but increasing numbers of children are also taking part in after-school activities. While they might not pay a grand an hour, these classes can still generate a useful and regular income stream for independent photographers.

And it’s a growing opportunity too. According to a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, the percentage of students participating in clubs, community service, and sports increased between 2001 and 2005. Twenty percent of children were taking part in religious activities by 2005, 10 percent in Scouts and another 8 percent in community services. But the most popular after-school activities also happened to be the most photogenic. Sports, the most popular of all, saw the highest rise in participation from 28.4 percent to 31.1 percent of kindergarten through eighth grade schoolchildren.

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Photography: Sarah Clark

Photography is a creative art. No two shoots are ever the same, and certainly no two pictures. But photography is also a business so photographers need processes they can work through, routines they can follow and results they can rely on. When you’re shooting for money, you have to be certain you can deliver and you have to be able to do it quickly and efficiently. Clients too have to know exactly what they should expect when you hand over the images if a commission is not going to look like a gamble. The result is that photographers play it safe. They stick to tried and tested methods, and the sort of traditional jobs that make up the core of so many photographers’ businesses can start to become a little dull — both to the photographer and to customers. Some photographers though are looking for new approaches. They’re trying to shoot traditional jobs in new and more interesting ways.

Wedding photography, for example, is the main revenue-generator in many photography businesses. And it’s also one of the most clichéd. The packages are clearly marked out as are the kinds of shots you can offer clients. There might be poses of the couple in full wedding regalia in a romantic setting, perhaps some images of the bride being made up, photographs of the rings and flowers, and lots of carefully posed formals of the families standing in neat lines. It sells, it’s what customers seem to want so photographers who have bills to pay make sure they offer it.

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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.”

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

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

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Photography: Rachael Waller

Every niche requires specialized knowledge and a relationship with the subject. Few niches though demand a connection as close as the bond that equine photographers feel with horses. Whether they’re shooting portraits for clients, documenting action shots to illustrate magazine articles or creating fine art pictures that will hang first on gallery walls and then in the ranches of wealthy buyers, for the photographer, it’s always an affinity with horses and an understanding of the breed – as well as a knowledge of photography – that’s necessary to land the shot. That part of the craft has to be felt, not learned.

Rachael Waller has been a professional photographer for 20 years, and first learned her photography skills assisting her father, Robert James Waller, a photographer and author of The Bridges of Madison County. She later completed a BFA and MFA in film at California Institute of The Arts. But she has also been around horses since she was young, owns thirteen of them, is married to Rod Rondeaux, a Hollywood horse stuntman, and regularly helps equine rescue charities. That dedication, she says, is essential for creating effective images of horses. Read the rest …

There are countless photography schools across America. Our list of the top photography schools describes 24 of the best. That list was never meant to be comprehensive though so it’s great that so many people have weighed in with comments about their own schools. But while photography courses today cover just about every conceivable photography topic from equipment and lighting  to post-production and editing, are there things that photography teachers aren’t telling students that – as they head out into the real world – those new photographers really should know?

Technique is certainly covered pretty well. Any accredited three or four-year degree course should have enough time to teach students about composition, lighting and equipment use. For the Art Institutes, a series of private art schools across America currently teaching around 2,600 photography students, those lessons are good enough to deliver an employment rate in a photography-related field within six months of graduation of 83.8 percent for Associate degree-holders and 90.4 percent for Bachelors degree-holders.

But today, photography schools don’t just teach what to do with a camera, they also devote at least part of their teaching time to running a photography business, skills that new photographers are certainly going to need. And those courses aren’t taught by academics who have never had to earn a living with their camera but by professional photographers who have faced the real challenges of finding clients and selling images. Read the rest …

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.

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Photography: ToastyKen

Photographers have felt the effects of outsourcing in surprising ways. Back in the glory days of photojournalism, shelling out thousands of dollars to ship a photographer to a war zone might have been considered as much a part of a news magazine’s expenses as typewriter ribbon, shoe leather and lengthy bar tabs. Today, with subscriptions falling, advertisers turning to the Web, and perfectly good local photographers with top-of-the range equipment available in locations from Afghanistan to Zambia, it makes little sense for a publication to pay a foreign photographer’s per diems, let alone the plane fare. When the war in Iraq was at its hottest, many of the images that appeared in the world’s top news publications were shot by local photographers who were working for the wires. But how has geography affected other aspects of photography, and are the price differences something that smart photographers can take advantage of?

Clearly, the differences in the cost of living around the world offer plenty of advantages for clients. When Grazia, a style magazine originally from Italy, opened its ninth edition in India in April 2008, local assignment and fashion photographers should have been rejoicing. They now had an opportunity to shoot for a prestigious magazine that valued images and would pay a professional rate. The reality though was slightly different.

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

Photography Organizations

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Photography: © Copyright Dave Le

It’s no secret that today’s photographers need to have skills that go beyond shooting pictures. Just as the old-timers needed to understand film, know how to develop negatives and learn darkroom techniques to make a photo look its best, so no modern digital photographer will get far without a basic understanding of image editing.

In fact, photographers often spend more time in front of their computers processing images than they do behind the lens creating them. It’s not unusual for wedding photographers, for example, to give quotes that include two hours of editing time for every hour of actual photography. And only a fraction of those photographers outsource that editing to assistants.

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This might be a bad time to be a banker, an investor, a property developer or… well, just about anything really, but a few branches of photography are still bringing in the cash. In fact, some types of photography might even be doing better than ever.

There are no current figures easily available that cover every aspect of photography but it’s a safe bet that the difficulties faced by both the car industry and the advertising industry mean that car photographers are feeling the squeeze at the moment. And while couples are continuing to get married, worries about job stability and income should mean that wedding photographers will need to emphasize their lower-priced packages rather than the deals that deliver everything, all-in with the frills on top. Stock photographers, and in particular microstock photographers though, are one group that do seem to be sitting pretty.

In November 2007, Getty Images predicted that revenues from its iStockPhoto division would reach $262 million by 2012. The microstock site had earned $71.9 million that year and was expecting to make $122 million in 2008. Chief Operating Officer Kelly Thompson, however, recently told Photo District News that iStockPhoto  would clear $200 million this year already.

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Taxes are a nightmare at the best of times. There’s the form-filling, the receipt-keeping, the revenue-calculating and finally, the check-writing. That always hurts. And there’s very little escape from it. Even part-time photographers have to do the tax thing and hand over large chunks of their sales to the IRS – at least, they’re supposed to. Some photographers though have found that the tax authorities can be particularly mean, landing them with some unexpected bills of eye-watering sizes – and for some very odd reasons.

Sports photographer Eugene Amos, for example, has reason to feel particularly aggrieved. On January 15, 1997, he was photographing an NBA basketball game between the Chicago Bulls and the Minnesota Timberwolves when Dennis Rodman fell off the court and landed on him. Amos received minor injuries but these were compounded when Rodman kicked him in the groin, say representatives at the Risk Law Firm.

The two sides reached a settlement in which Rodman agreed to pay Amos $200,000 in compensation.

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Photography: Pete Prodoehl

Brand yourself an expert and you’ll have already overcome one of the toughest challenges in marketing yourself as a photographer: you’ll have given yourself an edge over the competition and buyers a reason to choose you instead of someone else with a camera. Nor do the benefits end there. Photography knowledge — particularly the kind of strange, specialized photography knowledge that few others understand — is a valuable thing. It can be shared for a fee and, no less importantly, it can be demonstrated to buyers, create a unique brand and win some useful, free publicity.

And marking yourself as an expert isn’t difficult to achieve. The processes themselves require effort and time, but they aren’t impossibly challenging. Anyone can do it; the benefits derive from the fact that so few people actually do.

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Photography: Robert Buelteman

Every photographer has a different vision of success. For some, life would be perfect if Time Magazine were to send them and their camera bag to Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan. For others, sipping wine at a gallery opening while collectors battle to buy their art would be the ultimate sign that they’ve arrived. And for many, just being paid for a picture or winning a commission for a portrait would tell them that they’ve got talent, technique and an audience for their work.

But what happens next? What do you do after you’ve got used to phone calls from editors, when you’ve seen the red stickers on your framed photos or once sales and commissions have become a standard part of your life?

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Photography: Chris Burkard

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

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

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Photography: Yahta Natanzi

Is it really possible to make money as a citizen photojournalist? It’s a question that must have passed through the mind of every wannabe news photographer. Anyone can now earn money from stock photography. Persuasion, a portfolio and word-of-mouth can bring in occasional event commissions. But photojournalism? That means selling to news editors, and when it comes to buyers, they’re perhaps the pickiest bunch of all.

Events, though, provide a chance to find an answer. The demonstrations in Iran have created exactly the circumstances in which amateur photojournalism should thrive. Official journalists were restricted to their offices, the location was inaccessible enough for the mainstream press to have few resources on the ground, and the demonstrators’ strategy of uploading images and videos to the Web made crowdsourcing both expected by the media and accepted by the public.

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Photography: ©2009 Scott Hargis Photo

The recession might be bad news for banks and terrible news for Realtors but it’s been good news for at least one group of professionals. Real estate photographers have reported a rise in demand for their services – and at least some of those photographers are responding with higher rates.

Faced with a glut of properties on the market, brokers are discovering a need to market their properties harder and enable them to stand out from competitors. They’re turning to professional photography to give their listings greater appeal. Read the rest …