Photography: Northcountryboy
Some aspects of photography are easy. If you like shooting landscapes, the countryside is full of them. The hills don’t move, you don’t have to pose them and you don’t even have to ask their permission.
If you’re into still life photography, the grocery store is full of fruit. All you have to do is get the lighting right and avoid eating until you’re done.
Is it possible that an entire marketplace is wrong? Could it be that the biggest buyers of low-cost photography aren’t just wasting their money by buying images but actually damaging their own earnings? And if it is the case, is it possible that we can keep this to ourselves so that they don’t find out?
The answers to the first two questions aren’t entirely clear but the last one is a definite “no.” Enquiro Research, a firm that uses eye-tracking technology to follow what users look at when browsing – or more accurately, scanning – websites, has published a white paper that offers some disturbing news for image users… and for their suppliers too.
The company has found that when placed on Web pages, images can act as barriers to action rather than the sort of eye candy that generates sales when placed on magazine covers. Users don’t just ignore them; they try to look around them. Worse, when action buttons (or “triggers”) such as subscription fields or purchase links are placed near or even on those images, users look straight past those too then click away. Read the rest …
We’re frequently told that if you want to earn sales from stock photography — and especially microstock photography — you should shoot for businesses. Images of people in suits sell better than pictures of clouds and flowers, however well-shot the roses might be.
It’s a message that not everyone seems to be listening to. Search for the keyword “business” on iStock, and you’ll be offered an impressive 202,612 images. Look for “food” images though, and you’ll be able to browse 238,976 pictures. On GettyImages.com, the online version of a more traditional stock company, the figures are reversed but the gap is still surprisingly small. Getty’s website offers 450,884 “business” images compared to 403,142 photos of food of various kinds.
Those numbers however don’t seem to be reflected in sales. None of iStock’s most popular images contain a picture of anything edible. Several though carry the “business” tag.
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.
Photography: blhphotography
The advantage of the digital age is that anyone with talent can now market themselves as a photographer. The disadvantage is that with so many photographers to choose from, buyers and clients have to make some difficult decisions. When they’re looking at portfolio after portfolio, each filled with professional-quality images and each indicating clearly that the photographer has all the right technical skills, how should the client make a choice?
One option is to look beyond the images to the person who took them, a criterion that’s particularly important in wedding photography when the photographer has to blend in, deal with nerves and emotions, and get the shot without affecting the day. Read the rest …
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.
A beautiful image can do a number of different things. It can capture a moment in time, spark treasured memories, decorate a wall and convey a message from a company or a writer. But it can also tell a story – and when put together, a sequence of images can sometimes tell a complete narrative and do it in a way that no other medium approaches.
It was that realization that led bestselling author and illustrator Mo Willems to turn to photography for his 2005 book, Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale.
Recounting the story of his daughter’s first words Knuffle Bunny uses illustrations superimposed onto photographs that Mo had shot in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood. The idea, he says, was to encourage a feeling of reminiscence that couldn’t have been created using sketches alone. Read the rest …
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
Photography: ennor
Look through your hard drive, and you’ll find them. We all will. They’re images that look beautiful, are perfectly captured, speak volumes… and which turn up as frequently as “hard-working families” pepper election speeches.
Clichés are a part of photography. They’re often the first images new photographers take as they’re learning to use their camera and they provide stepping stones from which talented photographers can leap to the more creative, original stuff.
We just wrote and released our first wordpress plugin, Iflickr.
The plugin allows any blogger using wordpress to search and add creative commons photos from Flickr in their blog posts, and automatically put the correct attribution under the photo. All this from within the wordpress web interface.
So, to find out more, visit our iflickr page and download the plugin.
Photography: George Ancona
At Photopreneur, we don’t think that professional photography is for everyone. We wouldn’t dream of telling people to ditch their day job and look to their camera as their sole source of income.
If it’s something that you really want to do, if you have the talent, the knowledge, the business skills and the drive to make it happen, then… well, that’s fantastic.
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.
There are all sorts of ways of selling and promoting your images on the Web these days. With microstock and niche stock sites, professional sites and photo sharing sites, it feels like photographers are spoiled for choice when it comes to ways of putting their images into the hands of potential buyers.
It’s always impressive then when someone spots an opportunity for a whole new way of promoting photography online.
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.
Sometimes it’s the quietest — and cheapest — marketing channels that can be the most effective. Craigslist has no whiz-bang graphics — or any graphics at all, in fact. Its search engine is less effective than its olde worlde Yahoo!-style directory listing, and its pages consist of little more than classified postings placed by anyone offering a service, a product or anything else.
Yet the site is still making media moguls cry into their breakfast as they watch some of the most lucrative real estate on their pages shrink to the size of a column inch.
For people selling cars, cameras and pet-sitting services Craigslist has proven itself to be powerful, popular and universal.
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…”
Photography: Josh McCulloch
Choose a career in movies and everyone will tell you that your first years will be spent waiting tables. Set your sights on medicine and you know you’ll have to spend four years in undergraduate digs, and several more sweating through medical school.
Aim at building a professional photography business though, and you might think it’s as simple as buying a camera, renting a studio and taking bookings from the lines of people hoping that you’ll shoot for them.
Photography: Kelly Bates
When we first heard about Moo cards, we got pretty excited. They were funky and neat, and they provided a useful bridge between the practical marketing power of business cards and the creativity that all photographers want to inject into their work.
It seems that we weren’t the only ones who felt that Moo were onto a good thing. The company appears to have been going from strength to strength, bringing out all sorts of new products, linking up with sites like Flickr, Facebook and Vox, and — most important of all — winning the appreciation of photographers everywhere.
Photography: Giampaolo Macorig
It’s a staple of many photography businesses. Put a client in front of the camera and shoot portraits that they can place on the mantelpiece, pass out to family members, include in a theatrical portfolio or even use on MySpace or LinkedIn.
Artistic portraits might be an interesting challenge, but commercially, portraiture isn’t always the most exciting type of photography to specialize in. Mall studios are everywhere but they tend to be little more than photo booths with someone to tell the subject when to smile. And while portraits can be a steady source of income they’re not always a high source of revenue.
Photography: jaysk
If you wanted to name the biggest complaint of professional photographers in the digital age, you’d have a lot to choose from. Demand is falling. Prices are dropping. Photography schools are growing just as jobs are disappearing. If it was always difficult to make a living taking pictures, it’s safe to say that times are particularly hard now.
All of those are good reasons to grumble but there’s one complaint that stands out above all the others:
