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.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any challenges at all though, and the first is to choose what kind of expert you want to be.

How Specialized Is Your Photography Knowledge?

Clearly, the type of expertise that brings the most benefits is one recognized and appreciated by the largest number of people. Scott Kelby’s field of expertise, for example, is digital photography, which is a broad enough topic to make him an expert in the eyes of anyone who puts images on memory cards and manipulates them on monitors.

Lots of people know how to do that and many of them may know how to shoot and edit digital images at least as well as Scott Kelby does, but because Scott has the reputation and the expertise, his images are treated differently to those produced by his competitors. Buyers and clients familiar with his name assume that his products and services are good. Because he’s an expert, they’ve already given him the most valuable thing any marketing effort can win: their trust.

Pick a topic as broad as Scott’s though, and you’ll be facing a large amount of competition. Your knowledge – and your ability to share it – will need to be particularly high if it’s to survive the scrutiny of a large number of critics. The more prominent your position, the greater the number of people who want to take it.

That’s less true when you choose to stand out in a niche. Alan Detrick, for example, is the author of a book on macro photography. But that too is a relatively broad field with no shortage of other experts competing for attention, so Alan brands himself even further by showing that he specializes in a particular kind of macro photography. His website focuses on “garden and landscape photography” and his book is aimed at “gardeners and nature lovers.”

That limits his market. There are fewer potential buyers of garden photography services – or books — than there are buyers of digital photography knowledge. But those who are interested in the topic will consider Alan Detrick an expert, and the top buyers will turn to him first. He’ll also have less competition for the top expert brand.

Alan Detrick though is primarily a macro photographer. It’s likely that he could also create other kinds of macro images if he wanted too, but his main interest is floral. Every photographer has interests that specific. You might enjoy shooting landscape images but it’s likely that you tend to shoot a particular type of landscape, whether that’s a certain kind of location or in a particular kind of style. So you could brand yourself as a landscape photography expert in general – and battle with lots of other landscape photographers – or you could position yourself more easily but more narrowly as an expert on Utah landscapes, abandoned spaces or images taken at twilight.

Four Tools to Make You an Expert

Once you’ve chosen your field, demonstrating your expertise is remarkably simple even if it does require a little hard work. There are four main tools that can move a photographer out of the crowd and up to the head of the pack.

Teaching is always one option. The better the school, the greater the appearance of your expertise but teaching an adult education course or even an online course can deliver expert branding power. It’s unlikely that the instructors at BetterPhoto.com are more (or less) knowledgeable than the average successful professional. But because they’re instructors, they appear more confident and more competent too.

In part though, that comes not just from their teaching but also because many of them are said to have written “how-to” guides, and book-writing is another way to demonstrate expertise. These days that’s easier than ever. While winning a traditional book contract may take some persuasion, it costs nothing but time and effort to produce an ebook, a Blurb book or a print-on-demand book. And you still get the cachet of saying that you’re “the author of…”.

Easier still is to create a blog. While that demands a long-term effort, rather than the one-off investment involved in writing a how-to guide that shares your techniques, blogs do cost nothing to produce and, with advertising, are easier to earn from. Lee Torrens is certainly not one of the highest-earning microstock photographers, for example, but his informative blog Microstock Diaries, has won him a great deal of respect in the industry, just as David Hobby’s Strobist blog has positioned him as an expert on lighting.

And finally, you can write press releases. These take the least effort of all but the expert branding power is also temporary. Offer reporters a story about photography — whether that’s a photographer’s take on a story in the news or something seasonal such as tips for better picture-taking while on vacation – and anyone who sees your quote will assume that the reporter considers you an expert. That means they’ll consider you an expert too and as an added bonus, you’ll also get to say in your marketing material that you’ve appeared the New York Times, or whichever publication ran the story.

Press releases do tend to be a little more hit-and-miss though, and you often have to write plenty of them before you strike a story. Unless, of course, you’re already an expert.

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?

That was a dilemma faced by Robert Buelteman, a 51-year old landscape photographer known for his pictures of California. His black and white images had already been published in two books. His photos form part of the permanent collections of Yale University Art Museum and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art. And a steady supply of commercial assignments meant that he was able to earn a rewarding living from his camera.

Ansel Adams, Fiber Optics and Sculpted Plants

For most enthusiasts that would be the stuff that photography dreams are made of. But the death of a number of relatives and a desire for new challenges led Buelteman to look at a completely new way of creating pictures.

“It isn’t that I was running from dissatisfaction so much as I was seeking new possibilities for myself and for my art,” he explains. “As a witness to the loss of four family members to cancer in the late 90’s, I had learned that life is short, and didn’t want the precious gift that my life is to be spent doing what had already been done by so many so often.”

Twenty years earlier, Sarah Adams (the granddaughter of Ansel) had shown Buelteman Walter Chappell’s Metaflora portfolio of flower images at her home in Lee Vining. As he searched for a new outlet, Buelteman recalled that meeting and an idea he’d had about combining photography with fiber optics.

The result was a method that draws on his studies in chemistry, physics and optics at Berkeley to create a new kind of Kirlian photography, a technique that involves passing an electric current through an object on an a photographic plate to generate an image of the corona discharged around the object’s edges.

Buelteman’s approach though is particularly difficult. He takes live plants and “sculpts” them with a scalpel until they’re translucent. Working in the dark, he then prepares an “exposure matrix” made up a sheet of 8×10 tungsten-balanced transparency film mounted on an easel. This is supported by a sheet of metal in a solution of liquid silicone, which itself is sandwiched between two sheets of Plexiglas. To create the image, Buelteman connects to the metal sheet to a spark plug cable, places the sliver of plant material on the film, and fires 80,000 volts through the metal — and the plant. The current leaves a glow on the film in the shape of the plant. Finally, Buelteman uses strobe lights and fiber-optic cables to add extra light effects.

3,000 Exposures… 30 Images

It’s a process that can demand a great deal of time and experimentation. A single photograph can take anywhere from an hour to create to a number of months spread over several years. Calla lilies, for example, only bloom for a few weeks, creating a short window each year to get the picture of the plant right. The 30 images contained in Buelteman’s first portfolio “Through the Green Fuse” took 3,000 exposures and 60 hours a week for two years to produce.

“This is not a technique that one perfects,” Buelteman told us. “It reminds me of dancing.  Dancing is its own reward, and once you try to do it right, you’ve lost the rhythm.  This process, impossibly difficult with so many variables that it defies the traditional controls that we have come to expect as photographers, is a roll of the dice.”

The images though, shot without a camera and dependent on the corona created by the electrical charge are unique, and certainly very different to the traditional black and white photos Buelteman had produced in the past. The response though has been phenomenal. Galleries have snapped up his photos and the Santa Fe Institute invited him to be an artist-in-residence, giving Buelteman the freedom to continue developing his technique.

At the same time though, Buelteman has continued shooting and selling his black and white landscapes which he prints himself. Without those sales, he points out, he might “you know, have to get a job or something.” And creating the pictures helps to keep him grounded and engaged in his art, he says. It’s something he predicts he’ll never give up.

It would be wonderful to say that the moral of Buelteman’s story is that it’s always possible for a photographer to change direction, branch out into new areas and succeed. But of course, that isn’t the case. There was no guarantee that Buelteman’s technique would work, that any of the images he produced would be attractive or that anyone would want to look at them or own them. But that wasn’t the reason he did it. Being a successful photographer might be rewarding and satisfying but the thrill of success itself is never a reason anyone ever picks up a camera. That’s always done for the pleasure of creating pictures that make you proud. Buelteman himself notes the most important characteristic he looks at to measure the success of his technique isn’t the number of exhibitions, print sales or media  interest the images generate but his personal excitement and passion to continue doing it.

“When, as an artist, you have tapped into that special place where you no longer feel separate from the rest of life there is a spontaneity and a beauty and a rhythm in your art that others respond to,” he says. “While this is a place available to all of us, I find myself able to visit only occasionally.”

And, of course, if it turns out that people like your new images well enough to buy them as much as they like your old ones, then that really is the stuff of dreams.

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

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

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

Publishing a Photography Book Is Not About the Money

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

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

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

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

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

The Marketing Is Up to You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

And the result? Some amateur photographers in Iran did indeed make money.

One Image in Four Sold

Demotix, a service that supplies images from amateur photographers to the mainstream news media, received some 200 images from Iran during the recent demonstrations. They were submitted by more than ten photographers. Of those, Demotix was able to license some fifty photos to media outlets that included Reuters, EPA, The New York Times and “various national English dailies.”

That’s a remarkable success rate, and the payments the photographers received for those images were reasonable too.

“I am still working on the total remuneration numbers because some of our customers are self-billing and received our images through our FTP feed,” Jonathan Tepper, Demotix’s Chief of Operations, told us. “My estimate is that each photographer will have made an average of 500 dollars, some more and some less depending on how many of their images were used and the placement.”

Considering the quality of the images and their appearances in leading publications those figures might not be too surprising, but they did come in an environment in which demonstrators were constantly uploading images and videos, and making them available for free, both to viewers and — through Creative Commons (CC) licenses — to publishers as well.

Demotix’s success in competing against those free images – even as the mainstream press struggles with costs and falling subscriptions – reveals both the value of professional-quality photography and the importance that the press still places on sourced material. A picture uploaded by an anonymous photographer in a crowd lacks context, explanation and the ability for the outlet to check that it does indeed show what the caption says it shows. Those remain important features for news outlets, and ones that they’re willing to pay for.

“The reason our content is valuable is that even CC stuff has to be vouched for. We know our photographers, can vouch for them. They are part of our community. Simply scanning Twitpic or Flickr isn’t the same,” explains Jonathan. “Those [free] images haven’t hurt us at all.  People go for quality and verifiability.”

For photographers who would like to double as occasional freelance photojournalists then, that all sounds very reassuring. The mainstream media don’t just want the image, it seems, even it’s good and available for nothing on a website. It also wants the verifiability that can only come with a personal submission and a connection to a photographer.

You Need to Be Talented, Available… and Lucky

But the events in Iran might not be the most representative of the opportunities available to amateur photojournalists. It’s fairly rare, for example, for professionals to be deliberately excluded from a news event on threat of expulsion or worse. (Although even amateurs were targeted by the Iranian government’s thugs-for-hire; one of Demotix’s contributors received a beating from the Basij. Taking pictures of thuggery does tend to put you next in line.) And while Iran is far enough away for even the biggest of the mainstream news outlets to  have few of their photographers on the scene, that also means it’s hard for many amateur photographers to reach too.

Jonathan Tepper pointed out that photos of the rallies that were easier to reach have been much harder to place.

“[D]emonstration photos outside Iran are a harder sell. There is no shortage of photographers in NYC or London covering demonstrations.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We have come across semi-professional photographers who regularly submit — and sell — images of demonstrations. Those sales were usually made possible though with a solid understanding of the kinds of images outlets want of political events and a connection too with at least one outlet.

Perhaps the best evidence of the characteristics needed to sell amateur news images though is Janis Krums’ picture of US Airways Flight 1549 floating in the Hudson River. The quality was low. The image was shot on a mobile phone and uploaded to TwitPic, a service that allows users of Twitter to attach images to their tweets. And yet it was a photo that was shown repeatedly on news outlets around the world.

But Janis Krums wasn’t a professional photographer or even an amateur photographer. He was just someone who happened to be in the right place at the right time. While there are things you can do to increase the chances that you’ll be in those kinds of places — like reading the news or following celebrities as they leave their homes – much comes down to luck. Services like Demotix benefit by aggregating the luck (and photographic talent) of lots of people around the world but for individuals, making money out of semi-professional photojournalism is usually going to be a fairly occasional affair.

Unless, of course, you’re willing to move to a far-away trouble spot like Iran.

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.

“As the RE [real estate] industry has been tanking, I’ve found that my services are actually in greater demand than ever,” freelance real estate photographer Scott Hargis told us. “I’ve raised my rates twice in the last two years, with another increase likely this fall.”

The ability to raise prices though — like the rates themselves — depends on location. Scott operates in the San Francisco Bay area where rates typically run from $150 to $550 for a three-hour shoot (including travel and post-production time) that produces from twelve to fifteen images. Panoramas and video, as well as additional services such as websites and floorplans can bring in extra revenue. According to a poll on the Real Estate for Photography blog, an authoritative source for real estate photographers, those rates represent almost the complete range that photographers might charge. More than half of the photographers who voted report receiving less than $200 for a shoot and 49 percent say that real estate photography brings them under $20,000 a year (although 8 percent reported earning over $100,000 shooting images for the real estate industry.) Little more than a third of those polled though said that they shoot real estate full-time. Scott, who has been taking pictures of real estate for four years, also does portraiture and advertising work, areas he’s looking to expand.

A Real Estate Photography Business in One Year

Before a photographer can raise his or her prices though, they first need to  have clients. That can take a while. Photographers typically mention a year as the time it takes to build up a viable real estate photography business. The best place to begin is by approaching the top 10-20 percent of listing agents in your area.

“It is relatively easy in any area to make an ordered list of what Realtors are selling the most homes in the area,” says Larry Lohrman, the Real Estate for Photography blog’s publisher, and author of The Business of Real Estate Photography ebook. “Often the very best prospects are the ones with ‘kind of good’ photos — they’re the ones who have already thought about better photography but who haven’t yet achieved it.”

Many Realtors though work independently and tend to be very aware of costs. High-end homes, for example, the type that look like they could benefit most from professional photography, may take years to sell during which time a Realtor may lose the listing, together with his investment in the photography. For lower-priced homes, you  might have to do some hard persuading to prise Realtors away from their camera phones. The most effective tools are usually a website and a pile of finished products, such as brochures, leaflets and flyers, that you can leave with the Realtors and which contain your URL so that they can see more of your work. Once you land your first clients, you should find that referrals and word-of-mouth marketing bring in others.

One controversial issue is whether to offer free samples as a way to initially demonstrate your work and the benefits it can deliver. Larry Lohrman argues that free samples lower the value of the work overall and are  not necessary, but he also points out that many photographers do it anyway. It is a method that Scott Hargis used to win his first real estate clients:

“When I was just starting out, and had neither clients nor a portfolio, I went around on Sunday afternoons to open houses and asked the agents if I could photograph their listings for free, just to get experience and a portfolio. That worked really well for me.”

Even Scott though recommends restricting your free offers to only the top-level agents and making a sample shoot part of a personalized pitch.  William C. Hutton Jr., who has been shooting real estate for just under a year, suggests offering the first shoot at cost — which may be half price. The most common reasons that Realtors aren’t already using photographers, he notes, is that they don’t know about photography, don’t know how to contact a photographer, or don’t believe it’s going to be cost-effective. Free samples rarely help to remove those obstacles.

Keep the Walls Straight

Real estate photography then may be a relatively easy field to break into, especially at a time when property is hard to sell and brokers are looking for every advantage they can find. A good website and high-quality printed material may be enough to get your foot in the door, and a year of patience as your name spreads and the referrals bring you a solid base may be enough to give you a business. But you will need the photographic skills. Real estate photography has to be effective rather than creative, and provides different technical challenges to those presented in architectural or interior design photography. The shots tend to be wider — between 18mm and 24mm — but must still keep the walls straight and vertical. The rooms need to be bright and airy, the colors vivid and accurate, and the view through the window is an important part of the final image and not a distraction that can be blown out. Scott Hargis offers specialized workshops but nothing beats practicing on your own.

“Before  you find your first client, practice on homes of friends and family members,” recommends William C. Hutton Jr. “Keep a diary of each shot… [and] photograph the same interiors on bright sunny days and cloudy days.”

And it might be a good idea to do it now, before the economic climate warms up again

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.

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.

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.

It sounds about as modern and up-to-date as silver-gelatin prints and watching the birdy. In the age of social networking and pay-per-click advertising, the idea of sending marketing material via the post office feels like a trip back to the 1950s, the time when mailboxes first started filling up with unwanted bits of paper.

And yet, as any trip to your own mailbox will tell you, businesses still do it. In fact, Americans receive a total of about 4 million tons of junk mail every year. That’s an awful lot of overflowing recycle bins but if businesses are still filling envelopes, then there’s a good chance it still works. According to the Direct Marketing Association, an advocacy group, more than $173 billion was spent on direct marketing in the United States in 2007, generating over $2 trillion in incremental sales. Eighty percent of advertising material is at least scanned before being binned, the organization says.

At Least Paper Junk Arrives

The association’s definition of direct marketing is likely to be pretty broad to incorporate those sorts of figures – and its idea of “scanning” might well include a glance to affirm you’re not throwing out the gas bill — but it is easy to understand the appeal. Eight out of ten mailbox leaflets might be seen but spam filters knock out around ninety percent of marketing material sent by email. At least paper junk reaches its destination.

Direct marketing firms are also much better at targeting than in the past. DirectMail.com, a company which used to be known as the DM Group and which has been in business for 35 years, now has a “geoselector” that allows businesses to build a list of recipients by location and lifestyle, and even to see pictures, a “personality tree,” and a detailed profile of the sort of people they’re aiming at.

And the product range is broad too. Direct mail companies will print and deliver door hangers, rack cards and calendars in additional to the traditional catalogs and flyers.

But is this an approach a photography business should take?

In theory there’s no reason why not. The flexibility of today’s list builders make it possible for photographers to identify businesses that might need photography services, young families considering portraits and even new graduates in the first years after college who might be thinking of hiring a wedding photographer.

The costing isn’t unattractive either. To send 1,000 postcards using DirectMail.com will cost a little over $400. With an average response rate that ranges from 0.25 percent to 1 percent, a wedding photographer could reasonably expect to pick up between 2.5 and ten jobs from that mailout.

Or to put it another way, direct marketing can let a photographer buy a job for between $160 and $40. For work that can cost several thousand dollars, that might not be a bad deal and it might well be more effective than a newspaper listing or even pay-per-click advertising.

Make your Junk Mail Valuable

Those response rates are a typical figure supplied to us by DirectMail.com, but when it comes to direct marketing, photographers might well have an advantage. One of the rules for handing out anything for free – even ads – is to make the freebie valuable. It’s hard for a plumber to make a postcard valuable, but photographers sell postcards. A photography marketing piece that included a beautiful image is much more likely to kept, stuck to the fridge and eventually acted on than a leaflet with a phone number and a drawing of a blocked sink.

The fact that it’s also possible to focus a list on a specific area means that the photographer could even make sure that the image had local appeal. Instead of just showing a photo of a wedding couple, for example, the photographer could make a local landmark the focal point of the image with the couple providing an additional romantic touch. Recipients could be tempted to hold on to the image because it’s pleasant to look at – exactly what a photographer is supposed to do – while couples could find the romantic addition inspiring enough to make contact.

And if a business holds on to your calendars because the receptionist likes the pictures, there’s a good chance that their own marketing people will understand the benefits of producing their own professionally-shot calendars for their clients.

Of course, direct marketing like this isn’t for everyone. Junk mail is, after all, very annoying and while you might pick up one job for every 100 postcards you send out, it’s possible that you’ll alienate the other 99 recipients. Other marketing methods can also be at least as effective without any of the drawbacks. Craigslist, for example, is free, annoys no one and according to photographers we’ve spoken to can deliver a budget wedding booking for every ten to fifteen listings.

But it always pays to diversify your marketing streams and for photographers targeting businesses in particular, a trip back to the world of print and paper might be one effective way of getting your foot in the door.

They’re unusual. Flickr doesn’t usually inspire people to go out and fall in love — although it would be nice if it did. It’s much better at inspiring us to go out and become better photographers.

Or rather, the people on Flickr inspire us to become better photographers because that’s what Flickr’s really all about: looking at great images, chatting to fantastic photographers and using their examples and their advice to get better and better every day.

Here are five of the most inspiring people on Flickr.

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir

Photography: Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir

Icelandic photographer Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is, of course, a Flickr icon. Her self-portraits have won her stacks of fans who follow her website and her blog. Her photos have grabbed the attention of picture thieves who swiped her images and sold them for profit. But most inspiringly, her images have also landed her a prestigious shoot for Toyota (who thought her “multiplicity” series matched the twin power sources of the Hybrid) and the chance of a whole new career as a professional photographer.

Not bad for someone who is still an art student and originally used Flickr as a place to show her sketches.

Rebekka’s pictures are an inspiration for anyone who wants to take beautiful, unique and creative images, but also for anyone who hopes to find success through Flickr.

So who inspires Rebekka?

“Three people come to mind right away,” Rebekka told us. “Dr Joanne was the first self-portrait artist that seriously inspired me to work harder and put more effort and thought into my self-portraiture… I had of course previously been inspired by a number of well-known artists, Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman for instance,  but I remember seeing Joanne’s work inspired me all over again.

“Notraces’ long exposure photography inspired me to try my hand at that,
and continue to work on it until I started getting more than just
mediocre results.

“

And last but not least, Antimethod (Cole Rise) was probably the first person on Flickr whose work left me speechless. Opened my eyes to a lot of things, and I admire him greatly.”

David Hobby

Photography: David Hobby

David Hobby is better known by his online moniker, Strobist. His blog is one of the most popular — and for anyone using artificial lighting, one of the most useful — photography sites on the Web. His Flickr group though, has almost 20,000 members, helping both pros and amateurs get to grips with innovative lighting techniques.

As for the people David has inspired, here are the words of just one photographer who responded to a researcher’s question about the effect of Strobist:

“I never used a flash until January of this year (2007) when I discovered Strobist. In march I quit my job as a car designer and went freelance. I just did a job yesterday for $2,500 with only two SB600’s. That’s more than my monthly living expenses. In a day!”

David Bean

Photography: David Bean

David Hobby is an inspiration because he is able to take the advice he turns out on his blog and turn it into the sort of collaborative affair that can only happen on a Flickr group. David Bean, the founder of Pro Corner, runs a Flickr group that’s a lot smaller but just as important at handing out advice, helping amateurs step up and professionals stride ahead.

“Pro Corner takes up a few hours a month,” David told us. “I would dedicate more but as a full-time photographer who shoots and travels all the time, it’s hard to keep up. I made two people moderators so they could help police the group. They’ve done a great job with it.”

John Watson

Photography: John Watson

All of the people we’ve mentioned so far are known for their photography or for the advice they give about photography — or both. John Watson, who uses the name FD on Flickr, is famous for his huge range of Flickr tools. From magazine covers and galleries to jigsaws and a Warholizer, John has almost 40 ways to help people enhance their photos… and according to his site, they can be used on almost 1.5 million photos a month.

“It started out very small,” John explained. “Folks wanted to create badges but most of them didn’t have Photoshop or know how to use it well enough to make one. So I created the Badge maker toy. It turned out to be a huge success and the rest is history.
The bottom line is that it’s a project that is a great deal of fun to work on and I’m immensely grateful that I can make something that brings a little happiness to so many people.”

Julie Kertesz

Photography: Julie Kertesz

French photographer Julie Kertesz might not be as well known as Rebekka or Strobist, but it’s her attitude that we like. Julie was already over 70 when she discovered blogging and Flickr which was then still in Beta. In addition to her blog called  “Il ya de la vie après 70 ans” (“There is life after 70”), she also created groups called
“Never too old (to enjoy life),” “Strangers no more” and “People Reading.” It’s her Afterclass learning group though that takes up most of her time.

“[W]e learn every month another theme about photography, created [and] organized by me,” Julie said. “[It’s] now in its nineteenth month and [has] about 2,100 members… some contributing to the discussions, every month [with] another leader.”

Who inspired your photography? Tell us here.

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.

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

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

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

10 Million Image Views a Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making the Most of the Image Wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The photos are still top-quality. They’re pretty and technically perfect. The colors on the petals are vibrant, the pets’ expressions are cute and the printing is second-to-none. And they express concepts that are about as original as the idea behind a fourth Hollywood sequel.

But if major publishers – the companies with the sort of distribution channels that can land them front-of-shop placements across the country – are consistently producing photo products that look the same year after year, there’s probably a good reason. They know they sell, and that can’t be said of products with more imaginative shots.

Pictures of Flowers Sell…

And you can see this outside the walls of Borders and Barnes and Noble too. Browse the most popular items on Zazzle and topping the list of calendars isn’t twelve unique pictures of Lego characters recreating classic images or expressive self-portraits but… flowers. They’re closely followed by images of Japan shot by the same photographer, and in third place are… more flowers.

“[N]ature, travel, architecture, landscape and historical photographs sell well,” Josh Elman, Zazzle’s one-time Head of Marketing has told us. “For instance, with nature, many contributors take flower photographs and see interest.”

Nor is it just uncreative concepts that can help to secure sales. The types of products on which those floral scenes are printed is important too. Zazzle might have made it possible to stick your photos on anything with a surface, from shoes to skateboards, but the most popular products for photographs remain posters, cards, stamps, prints and yes, calendars.

Of course, producing a photography product that sells still isn’t going to be easy, even when the subject matter is obvious. It may not take a great deal of thought to dream up the idea of creating a calendar with twelve pictures of stamens and stalks but it will take some great photography and smart marketing to beat the competition. Zazzle lists over 1,130 calendars tagged as depicting flowers while Cafepress offers a mind-boggling 1.55 million calendar designs of which more than 26,000 may contain floral scenes. If coming up with a simple plan takes the strain out of trying to be original it does leave an even bigger battle with the hordes of other photographers doing the same thing.

Clearly, one way to beat the crowd is always going to be to create professional quality images. While Etsy charges contributors to sell their products, both Zazzle and Cafepress allow open access. That’s good news for no-budget hobbyists but it does mean you don’t have to look too far to find products decorated with images that might have been lifted straight out of a snapshot album. The subject matter might be old but having the technique to shoot the pictures well can go a long way towards lifting your products out of the pack.

…and So Do Photos of Funny Animals

And depending on the product itself, you can get a little creative with the way the images appear. That’s particularly true when you’re putting the pictures on clothes –  another competitive area but one which does provide a little more room to be flexible. Josh Elman pointed out that Zazzle sees “many users create t-shirt and apparel products using photographs modified with special graphics and design effects.”

Darren Glenn, a designer who told us that he has been “very successful” on Zazzle recommends making a few simple changes to the image to improve its chances of selling when it’s placed on an item of clothing.

“I would suggest (for t-shirts) clipping out the subject of your photo,” he told us in a comment. “A square on a shirt looks bad. Clip it out, give it some text…something clever and funny, and save it as a png.”

Darren also mentioned the importance of meeting changing demand and producing new, relevant items constantly. Political shirts sell well during election campaigns. And, he added:

“Funny animal shirts sell good on Zazzle.”

The good news is that there is still room for creativity when you’re looking to sell photo products. Tried and tested ideas may be a safe bet provided you can pull them off at the right level and back them up with a marketing push to bring buyers into your store (Darren Glenn, for example, doesn’t rely on sales through his store on Zazzle; he has also placed his Zazzle store on his own domain, allowing him to market his products separately). But taking a few risks and shooting what you love will always be more fun even if it’s not more financially rewarding. Vlad Gerasimov has built himself a presence on product sites with t-shirts, pictures and illustrations based on his creative designs.

Perhaps the best strategy if you’re looking to put your images among the top-selling photography products then is to do both. Accept the technical challenge of creating eye-catching images from traditional subjects and concepts — and enjoy the cash those sales bring – but also leave time to experiment, test the market and produce a range of products that are a little more edgy. You might never see them sitting on a display case in your local bookstore and even on the Internet, you may find them harder to sell, but they’ll be good for your soul.

And who knows, they might prove so successful, you’ll be tempted to produce sequels of those too.

There are few moments more exciting, more thrilling and more satisfying than your first paid photo shoot. And if that first shoot is a wedding, there are also few moments more nerve-wracking. A couple have hired you to document the most important day of their lives. They’ve trusted you to produce the pictures that will spark their memories, record their celebrations and which they’ll show their children and grandchildren in the years to come.

Get a portrait shoot wrong and the client will go to another photographer. Get a wedding shoot wrong and there are no second chances. The couple will have nothing but poor shots to remember their day – and nothing but word-of-mouth criticism to offer other couples instead of positive recommendations.

And wedding shoots aren’t easy. They can last for hours, require the co-operation of dancing, boozy guests and demand lots of preparation and plenty of post-production. But they are the bread and butter of many photography businesses and for good reason. While retail firms may cut back on their product photography and magazines can reduce their budget for editorial images, people will always get married. And they’ll always be willing to splash out when they do.

My Mother’s Friend’s Wedding

Winning that first job though is perhaps the hardest part. Without a portfolio of shots to show a client, persuading a couple that you have the temperament to handle the pressure and the skills to create the photos isn’t easy. Many photographers, in fact, begin by shooting for friends or family, people who already know and trust them.

Gil Plaquet, a journalism student who usually shoots for StampMedia and occasionally for local Belgian newspaper Gazet Van Antwerpen, recently completed his first wedding shoot. He picked up the job through family connections.

“They were friends of my mom’s who knew about my photography and wondered if I wanted to document their very special day for them,” he told us. “I was honored to do so, met up with them, showed them my portfolio and discussed pricing and the itinerary with them.”

To fix the prices Gil contacted a friend who had done wedding shoots in the past and followed his rates, lowering them a little because it was his first job. He also managed to upsell the clients an interactive DVD and a dedicated website to show off their images. Other photographers though have been known to shoot their first job for free in return for the portfolio. Joanna LeMasters, for example, shot her first wedding in December 2008 as a wedding gift to a former colleague. The couple agreed that she would use the photos in her portfolio and they would link and credit each photo to her.

Although she didn’t regret that choice, it took Joanna about half an hour after arriving at the church to decide that the work and planning involved in wedding photography meant that this would be the last time she shot for a gift.

Guests Placed My Posed Photos Online in a Day

When it came to the shoot itself, Joanna did have the advantage of having assisted her father, a professional photographer, at wedding jobs in the past. Gil, despite also coming from a family of photographers, hadn’t even attended a wedding for a number of years. Both were surprised at the co-operation they received from guests. People were generally willing to do as they were asked, Joanna found, and even the minister asked her how the wedding was going to go and when she wanted him for the shoot. The only trouble came when she chose to take the posed photos of the wedding party immediately after the ceremony.

“The subjects were very willing to obey. The guests who remained inside the church caused some problems though,” she recalled. “The groom and bride asked them more than once to quiet down and stop taking pictures. Still, some of my posed photos showed up on the Internet less than 24 hours after the wedding via the other guests’ cameras.”

Joanna can probably put that down to experience and now recommends that photographers get the posing and special requests out of the way as early as possible while there’s still light and before the celebrations begin. She also suggests using a flash for everything to save on post-production, taking multiple shots whenever possible, and above all, remembering that you’re the photographer, not a guest. While that means you have to wolf down the food quickly at the reception — a good opportunity, she discovered, for candid shots — it does provide a little leeway to be pushier than others. You can interrupt the couple to ask them to pose, suggest that subjects adjust their hair and clothes before you shoot and stand with your back to other guests as they take their own pictures. Gil too discovered the value of discussing the itinerary with the couple before the shoot, knowing exactly what they expect, and making sure that you’re properly equipped with enough batteries to get you through the day and either a versatile lens or multiple cameras. The practice at shooting portraits and documenting events was useful, he noted, and of course, the extra money was certainly helpful too.

Despite the difficulties, both Gil and Joanna indicated that they did have a good time shooting their first wedding and would want to do it again the future. And having done it once, winning the second job should be a lot easier too.

“All in all, I enjoyed the experience,” said Joanna. “Giving them the finished product and reading/hearing compliments on your work is very rewarding. The nice thing about shooting a wedding is that there are often quite a few friends of the happy couple who will soon be getting married themselves.”

The ability to display images on the Web has made it very easy for photographers to put their work in front of buyers. Unfortunately, it’s had another effect too. It’s also made it very easy for buyers to pick up images for free. When a buyer sees a photo he likes, whether it’s in someone’s Flickr stream, on their blog or sliding across their website, the first step is often to praise the image… and ask if they can use it for nothing. Flattery — and the thrill of publication – are often enough to persuade the photographer to agree, winning the photo editor a great image without touching his budget, and no doubt giving him a smile from the boss too.

This Creative Commons-licensed nature shot, for example, was spotted on Flickr and featured in Maxim magazine, a publication that’s certainly used to paying for its photos. The photographer received nothing more valuable than bragging rights.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Many publications, including Maxim, have a budget for buying images. They’d just prefer to get them for nothing if they can. It may well be possible to negotiate a payment with an image user that wants to skip the fee, winning both the kudos that comes with publication and a check too.

Low Res Images are Free, High Res Images Require a Fee

That begins with knowing who you’re dealing with. Different users always have different budgets which is why stock companies offer a bewildering range of rates for different types of usage. Software like fotoQuote can provide an idea of what exactly those rates should be (and it’s possible to pick up ball park figures by looking for similar uses on PhotoShelter, which incorporates the program) but even before you start negotiating, you have to decide if the request comes from someone who has the money to pay at all.

In general, you can assume that a print publication has a budget and the willingness to stump up the cash, while a blogger with a small site is more likely to keep looking than dip into limited funds.

Win a request from a large company then and you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for a fee, start negotiating at the market rate, and walk away if the buyer balks. Publication is nice but being paid for publication is even nicer. And being taken for a ride is certainly nothing to boast about.

One way to lower the risk of losing the opportunity to see your image in print while still asking for payment is to place only a low-resolution of the image on the Internet with a Creative Commons license. When the request comes in, tell the buyer that he’s welcome to use that version for nothing but point out that a higher resolution version is available at a fair price. Bloggers will be happy with the small picture; serious publishers will want the big image.

It’s likely though that most requests will come from websites and Internet publishers without budgets to buy images – there are more of them. But it is possible to earn even from these image users. They might not be willing to pay a fee but small online image users are always willing to supply credit and a link, a demand that’s usually a requirement of the CC license.

It Pays to Advertise

Make sure that the page the image links to provides plenty of information about the photo to build interest in the subject. Then try to monetize the image by offering prints of the photo for sale to the public, and by indicating to buyers that higher-resolution versions are available for licensing. You might not earn directly from that image user, but you can turn the request into a chance to advertise your photos to editors who do have budgets.

There is a good chance that buyers of those sorts of images will see your photo and click through to see what else you have available.

The biggest opportunity though isn’t using a publisher as a billboard for your photos, and it isn’t even turning a request into a one-time payment. It’s the chance to turn that image user into a regular buyer. That’s always going to be difficult and clearly, it will depend on who’s doing the asking. But it can happen. After Diego Lema sold a self-portrait to a publisher for use on a book cover, for example, the authors asked him to supply more images for their next three books.

The hardest part of selling to an image buyer is always making the first sale. Once the deal has been done, trust  has been established, a rate has been set and the buyer understands the type and quality of the images the photographer can supply. Repeat sales should then be easier. Add the buyer to your mailing list and when you produce a new series of similar images, let him know.

And finally, every time an image is picked up by a buyer – even if it’s for nothing – cash in on those bragging rights. The fact that you’ve been published lets other photo editors see what your images look like on the page and tells them that other image users think your photographer is professional quality too. That reassures them about making an approach.

It has become almost a tradition now for photo buyers to begin their negotiations at zero. Too often though, that’s also where the negotiations end. But whether a photo is used by the buyer for free and by you for advertising, or whether you’re able to receive a fee for a higher resolution image, you should get something out of every request.

The first requirement is perhaps the most surprising. Despite the whiz-bang features and slick animation offered on so many sites, simple is usually best. Editors are short of time, and faced with a large number of images they want to gain an understanding quickly of what the photographer can do. They’re less interested in what the photographer’s Web developer can do.

“There is no secret that photo editors like clean, clear, unfussy websites,” says Whitney Lawson, photo editor at Travel + Leisure, a travel magazine. “I personally won’t last long if the photos are going by in Flash animations.”

Images should be grouped into themes, she recommends, with an ideal website showing between five and ten different series, followed by a selection of tearsheets. These don’t have to be from a national publication but they do help photo editors to understand how the images look in an editorial context.

The Image with no Sky’s the Limit

Obviously, the images have to be technically correct too, and digital problems can be one reason that photo editors click away. “Acidy” reds and greens or a magenta cast are the worst giveaways, says Whitney, and the sky should be detailed rather than left to disappear into the background.

“If the sky is blown out, with no information, it’s not for me,” she says. “I am not talking about a white sky, I’m talking about a no-information sky… It is not just negative space to me.”

It’s not just the tearsheets and the stories told in the professional series that can help win a photographer a job though. Personal projects are also important and reveal a great deal about the person behind the camera, what they like to photograph, and perhaps most importantly, how they’re likely to act on a shoot.

That’s a feeling common to all photo editors. Ryan Gamma, photo editor at Eastern Surf Magazine, tends to look particularly closely at personal projects when assessing a photographer for the first time.

“It shows me their range and helps me to judge how effective a photographer could be in an assignment situation,” he says. “Especially when it comes to a new photographer who I’m still trying to figure out.”

Creating a simple website is reasonably straightforward, especially if you’re willing to hire a designer to do it for you. Whitney pointed to Anna Wolf, Amanda Marsalis and Joao Canziani as three examples of young photographers with particularly strong sites. All of those photographers have multiple series, and Joao’s website even suggests that he has multiple portfolios. Putting that website in front of the editor though requires a different set of skills.

Whitney says that she looks at around 25 photographers’ websites every week. Some of them she finds by searching for photographers in locations where she will be holding shoots but others she discovers as a result of promos and emails sent to her by the photographers themselves.

Good Subjects Attract Photo Editors

What the photographer puts in those emails then is always crucial and especially what they put in the subject line. Messages with titles like “New work” and “New website” arrive in Whitney’s inbox every day – and are usually ignored. More interesting, she says, are emails with subject lines that reveal a specific detail, especially the sort of location detail that would interest a photo editor at a travel publication. Emails with subject lines like “Photographer based in Vancouver” or “New series from my recent trip to Argentina” are more likely  to be opened.

With a little consideration then, attracting the attention of a photo editor shouldn’t be too difficult. Ryan says that surf photographers find him and that he looks at everyone’s portfolio, new photographers and old. Persuading him to hire them though is a little  harder. Ryan wants to see that the photographer has a firm grasp of the medium but more importantly, he wants to see that the photographer has something fresh and new to offer to his publication.

That’s perhaps the easiest mistake for a photographer to make. When catching a photo editor’s demands little more than a well-worded email, it can be tempting to shoot out messages to every photo editor you can find. That might bring in views but to win the commissions, the images the email points to also have to match the needs of the editor – and the publication – they’re being sent to. Whitney Lawson mentioned one photographer who sent her an email with a link to his website that included a series about bullfighting. That was an instant rejection.

“I remember seeing a dead animal on one of the first photos on the site,” she recalled. “No thanks. I am not in the dead animal business.”

One of the biggest advantages of showing your images on a website though is that a rejection doesn’t have to be the final word. Asked what advice she would offer a photographer building a professional website, Whitney suggested befriending a Web designer.

“Treat them really well, buy them dinner, because the best website is the one that you can update all the time with all of your beautiful new work!”

It took Shutterstock two years to gather its first million images. It took the company just over three months to increase its library from five million to six million photos. That growth represents an acceptance rate of around 70,000 new photos every week — and yet, Shutterstock says, it continues to reject more than 60 percent of the submissions it receives.

Shutterstock’s landmark was reached at the end of February 2009 but more interesting even than the fact that photographers are submitting to the company at a rate of 112,000 photos a week was the photographer who created that six millionth photo. The image depicting flowers on the British coast was taken by Turkish photographer, Sadik Demiroz.

Unlike many of Shutterstock’s 144,000 contributors, Sadik is not a part-time shooter hoping to earn a little extra cash from his  hobby. He has an MFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design, and teaches in the Fine Arts Faculty of Maltepe University, Istanbul. In the fifteen years that he has been shooting professionally, Sadik has had seven solo exhibitions and his images have picked up more than 200 awards, including Best of Show at the Hasselblad Austrian Super Circuit and the Gaudi Medal at the 39th Gaudi Photographic Exhibition in Spain. He has been selling his images through traditional stock companies since 1997 and shoots every day, sometimes placing his images on stock companies, sometimes on microstock and often working directly with clients as a commercial photographer.

If You Can’t Beat Microstock, Join It

While many professional photographers remain appalled at microstock’s low prices, others, it seems, have decided that the best response is to join in.

“Microstock represents the direction in which the industry is moving,” explains Sadik. “I chose microstock as a sales channel because I believe it represents the future of stock photography and I want to be a part of it.”

At the moment, microstock represents only a small part of Sadik’s photography earnings. Forty percent of his sales still comes from traditional stock and just 15 percent from microstock. But Sadik has only been submitting microstock images for five months during which time he’s managed to create a 1,100-strong portfolio at Shutterstock while also contributing to Dreamstime, Fotolia, iStock, PantherMedia, BigStock and 123rf. Numbers, he argues, are important. The more images in your online portfolio, the greater your chances of making money. In the future, Sadik sees himself shooting only low-cost, royalty-free images.

That’s a career plan that’s likely to horrify professional photographers who see the value of their portfolios decline as buyers too turn to microstock for their image sources. No high-quality photograph, they would argue, should be sold for a dollar, and photographers who offer good images for those prices are undervaluing their work and harming other professionals. Nor do they understand why anyone would choose to sell their photos for a buck when they could sell it for far more elsewhere.

Simple Images Sell Best on Microstock

The answer, Sadik argues, is income that’s both regular and reliable. Even though the individual payments are small, the frequency and reliability with which they arrive outweigh the occasional nature of regular stock sales and the difficulty of achieving them.

“What some people might not realize is that microstock images continually produce income,” he says. “A good image posted on a microstock site is like an investment because it constantly returns profits for years down the line…. As many professional photographers can attest, it is not always easy to secure a fair payment for rights-managed images.”

The shift away from traditional stock is not entirely straightforward, however. Although Sadik expects most rights-managed photos to become microstock eventually, his editor currently helps him to choose which images he sells on a rights-managed basis and which he offers royalty-free. Good artistic photos, and even good traditional stock photos, do not necessarily sell well in a microstock environment Sadik has discovered.

“I have found personally that images that get one clear message across are the best: a hand reaching for a heart, or two businessmen shaking hands, for example.”

Sadik’s top-selling images include close-ups of food, as well as rural landscapes.

Of course, Sadik isn’t the only professional photographer to be attracted by frequent, if low-priced, sales. Yuri Arcurs famously rejected an offer from a traditional stock company to remain with microstock and stock photographer Ron Chapple has created his own microstock portfolio, iofoto, licensing his images through a dozen different microstock sites.

Ron though continues to shoot traditional stock, selling through Corbis, JupiterImages and Getty. The diversity, he argues, makes good business sense. Standing in both camps gives his company stability even as the market environment continues to change. Rights-management also allows him to negotiate appropriate usage for images that lack model or property releases.

While Sadik seems to be preparing for a world without Getty – or rather, a world in which Getty sells its licenses through iStock – that combination of traditional and microstock sales is perhaps a more likely future. Getty itself has just launched its Flickr collection, offering the high quality images it’s found on the photo-sharing site on both a royalty-free and rights-managed basis. Instead of simply placing the photos on its microstock outlet, Getty is demanding prices that range from around $50 for a royalty-free photo to several thousand for a rights-managed image depending on usage.

It’s unlikely then that traditional stock photography is going disappear altogether. Buyers still see a difference between the simple, single-idea shots that sell well on microstock and the more complex and varied photos available on stock sites. We just might find that more professionals like Sadik are tempted by microstock’s frequent sales — and that Shutterstock’s seventh million photo won’t be too far away.

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

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

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

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

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

An Online Picture Cabinet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not All Creatives are Creative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Interested in Photography? You’re in!

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

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

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

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

Take a Photography Degree Online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

They’re among the biggest users of photographic images and yet they’re rarely the first firms that photographers think of when they start looking for buyers.

Greeting card companies generate around $7.5 billion in retail sales from the 7 billion cards that Americans purchase each year. While not all of those cards will be photographic, a quick browse along the card racks in a stationery outlet or bookstore reveals a generous ratio of cartoon cats and saucy jokes to photographs of cute dogs and muscle-bound hunks… as well as the images of flowers, romantic scenes, cars, sports players and just about every other subject that could appear on the cover of a card.

Even if photographic images make up a fraction of the greeting card industry as a whole then, just a small slice of a pie that large should still be enough to make any photographer happy.

But shooting for greeting card companies isn’t easy. The two giants of the greeting card industry, American Greetings and Hallmark Cards, swallow up 80 percent of the market alone, and they tend to use in-house photographers for their images. Selling cards through firms like these usually means choosing a career, not landing a customer.

Protect your Rights

That still leaves around 3,000 independent publishing firms though, and at least some of them are willing to take on freelance photographers. Fantus Paper Products works with freelancers, for example,  as does Avanti Press, which has been selling photographic greeting cards – largely, although not exclusively, of animals — for almost 30 years, accepting around 200 new photos each year. CardMakers is about as old as Avanti Press and also says that that it’s on the lookout for new talent. Its guidelines state that the company pays around $250 for each design.

But Cardmakers also says that in return for that sum, it expects to receive exclusive greeting card rights and to be able to copyright the published work under the CardMakers banner. In fact, it’s not unusual for a greeting card company to make some fairly stringent demands for the images it purchases. While “greeting card exclusivity” is practically a standard (and for lengths of time that can range from five years to perpetuity), it’s not unheard of for a company to demand full rights to an image.

For professional photographers expecting to continue to make money out of a photo then, licensing it to a greeting card company can look like a very bad deal, depending on the company they turn to.

One alternative is to publish and sell the cards yourself. You won’t have to compete against thousands of other photographers pitching their products to card companies at the same time, you’ll be able to decide what you want to do with those photos and, no less importantly, you’ll get to keep all of the royalties for each sale, rather than relying on a one-off payment for the photo.

You’ll need to find independent stores that have the flexibility, space, style and willingness to take on your cards, and you’ll need to do the math to make sure that the production costs still allow you to sell the printed product at a competitive rate, include a cut for the retailer and generate a profit. But even those tricky bits could be the easy parts. It’s the marketing that makes the real difference.

Proprietary Marketing Methods

Carol Ross, for example, has been a professional photographer for about fifteen years. She shoots events and her images have appeared in books but she’s perhaps best-known for her range of romantic greeting cards which she publishes, sells, markets and distributes herself. She currently offers around 500 images, selling about 100,000 units a year. Some of those sales come through licensing to publishing firms such as Papyrus, and Carol also has an agent, receiving 5 percent of net sales and paying the agent 30 percent of that amount.

Photography: Carol Ross

It’s only because Carol’s images are known though – and known to sell – that she’s able to land those licensing agreements, she says.
Her cards are also easily recognizable, and her pictures of flowers and rural scenes fairly timeless, allowing her to avoid being left behind by changing trends. To keep her line fresh and provide additional choices for loyal customers, she adds new Valentine and holiday cards each season.

When Carol started marketing her cards, she did what any photographer is likely to do: she created a sample box and went from store to store. It was her husband, who has a background in sales and marketing, who added the level of sophistication and professionalism to her business that allowed her to really generate revenue.

“That is the breakthrough,” she recalled. “When I reflect on how all of this came about it was through sales and marketing that opened all of the doors for me.”

In fact, those sales methods make such a difference that Carol regards them as proprietary and while she was happy to talk about her photographic style, she refused to explain in detail how she managed to persuade sellers to take her cards.

One clue though might lie in the approach taken by Northern Cards, a Canadian greeting card company which focuses on small businesses ignored by large suppliers and attempts to make the retail process as simple as possible for sellers. All retailers have to do, the company says, is supply a small amount of space and pass over the profits to the supplier during a regular service visit. That might require a small investment in display material but it could make the marketing easier too.

According to the Greeting Card Association, a trade body, if the rise of e-cards has affected sales of printed cards it’s only been to increase overall card-sending. Senders, the organization argues, tend to use e-cards for informal moments, keeping the printed cards for holidays, anniversaries and birthdays.

That means that $7.5 billion industry is still an opportunity for photographers prepared to shoot the kinds of images that customers want to buy and who can present them to retailers in a way that makes it easy for them to offer. As Carol Ross put it:

“They would be good photographers, they should be good business people as well.”

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.

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

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

Provided you know how to do it.

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

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

Etsy is Crafty and Red Bubble is Arty

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

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

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

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

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

So which store should you use to sell your products?

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

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

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

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

Create your Own Photographic Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography: Ryan Libre

Pictures of Graves are Taboo

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

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

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

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

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

Pitch the Show, First Shoot the Photos Second

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

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

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

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

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

Every branch of photography has its challenge. Portrait photographers have to capture the subject’s entire personality and character in a single shot. Architectural photographers have to fill shadows, dodge reflections and shoot a picture that portrays the feeling of space. And still life photographers? They get to move lights around so that the object is properly lit, focused and sharp.

Those aren’t always the most exciting jobs in the world but much depends on the type of objects in front of the lens. Photographing shampoo bottles in front of a white background all day could grow quite dull quite quickly. But photographing food usually requires a great deal of creativity. The food has to be prepared and styled, a task often completed by a professional assistant, a composition has to be put together to show off the food at its most appetizing, and each type of dish offers its own challenge.

Most importantly, trends in food photography tend to change quite quickly too. A look through an old magazine or an old recipe book reveals not just how diets and food fashions have changed over the years but how the way we want to see them has altered as well. Food photographers have to shoot what the client tells them but they also have to shoot images that suit the food and match their own style.

“You get asked to shoot whatever people want by editors and art directors, and being a working photographer I do what is asked of me,” explains Tim Hill, a professional food photographer whose clients have included the BBC, Fortnum & Mason’s and Haagen Dazs. “Normally when I shoot like that, at the end — when I have shot what is asked for –  I then go on and shoot what I want.

Maybe it’s a different setting or maybe a lot tighter in on the food or the lighting changes — whatever the reaction I get with the food makes me do… Keeping an eye on current fashion is fine but being true to yourself is very important too.”

Breaking into food photography isn’t always easy. Tim himself started his career as an assistant in a catalogue studio in London in 1973 before becoming a junior photographer two years later. He’d been shooting still life images for seven years when he was asked to photograph some pottery soup bowls for the catalog’s cookware section.

Photos of Soup Sell Bowls

To make the subject more interesting, he hired a food stylist, then called a home economist to bring in food props and make a number of different soups to fill the empty space in the bowls.

“The management was horrified at her bill but the client loved the shot and the increase in sales of the soup bowls,” recalled Tim.

Photography: Tim Hill

Tim soon found himself receiving all of the food photography the company was asked to perform, as well as more equipment and an assistant to help him prepare the shots.

Today, Tim shoots independently, winning commissions through his personal website and selling licenses through his own stock site.

He still works with a food stylist though, usually his wife, Zoë Hill, who trained as an artist and whose role is to prepare the food with the camera in mind. That’s a rare skill and one that differs from the techniques used by a chef.

“A chef prepares a meal to look good from above, relying on smell and taste as well as visual appeal,” explains Tim. “A food stylist only works on the visual from a pre-determined angle of view a lot lower than overhead.”

A typical shoot will involve creating “stand in” food which is used to fix the viewpoint, arranging the lights and the props, setting the plane of focus and choosing the depth of field. When everything is ready, the plate is removed and its place marked with wooden blocks. The stand in food is discarded, the “hero” food added and the blocks removed, and the shots are taken as quickly as possible to ensure that the dish remains fresh.

Food Stock Doesn’t Have to be Food Alone

The resulting images tend to have uses that stretch beyond catalogs and brochures. Food stock is used by advertising agencies, magazines and newspapers, book publishers and designers, and many others. And the definition of food photography can now be fairly broad too. StockFood, a specialist supplier of food images, is now expanding  beyond the ingredients and meals into food-related areas that include flowers, decoration ideas, table settings, and health. The company is also interested in images of food and people that could include shots of diners in restaurants or shoppers in supermarkets. As always, the more versatile the image, the likelier it is to demand high usage fees.

“For example, an image depicting a family in a grocery store could be used for editorial purposes as well as for advertising uses such as point of purchase displays and  supermarket circulars,” Shannon Mahoney, StockFood’s General Manager told us.

The images can then be sold on a rights managed (RM) or royalty free (RF) basis. The RM photos tend to have higher production costs and a more conceptualized look, but StockFood allows the photographer to choose how they want their images sold. Earnings depend on the quality of the images but also on their quantity and on the frequency with which new material is added, advises Shannon. Those changing fashions are important too.

“Successful agency photographers produce a continual stream of new photographic material that takes current trends into account,” she says.

StockFood is accepting submissions, provided that they’re high quality, professionally produced and follow the submission guidelines. Images must include caption information and any necessary model releases need to be included. Accepted photos also have to be exclusive and must remain with the agency throughout the term of the contract. Although it is possible to pull images, StockFood has an international distribution that makes removing submissions expensive and time-consuming. Submit a photo that the company doesn’t sell then, and it will be stuck there until the end of the term.

So what makes a sellable food photo?

According to Tim Hill, it’s the best ingredients prepared by a food stylist with a good visual eye.

“Learn to cook,” advises Tim, “and appreciate what it takes to present food for a camera.”

Gallery owners might be dedicated, connected and knowledgeable but they’re not known for their open natures. You usually have to book in advance to see one and they’re unlikely to pull the pictures off their walls immediately to make room for yours. Their wall space is limited and valuable. It’s their livelihood, after all, and if they’re not certain that your photographs will sell, they’re going to tell you to come back when you’re more established.

For professional photographers, that’s galling enough. For people who shoot in their spare time though, it can sound like a flat refusal – a polite alternative to laughing.

Rejection shouldn’t be treated that way. Gallery owners have to be as conservative as their collectors and they’re aware that as much of a work’s value is wrapped up in the name on the label as the colors on the canvas. If you’re entirely unknown, even a great picture is going to be a hard sell to a gallery owner.

Which is why it might be worth giving galleries a miss – at least initially – and looking at one of the alternative options that don’t involve trying to impress a professional seller.

Cafes and Restaurants

Perhaps the easiest is to persuade the owner of a café or restaurant to show off your pictures. Unlike gallery owners, they don’t need the images to sell to make money. They just need the pictures to look good enough to act as free decoration, show that they’re committed to the community and bring in a few extra customers.

They’re also a lot more approachable. While a cold pitch could certainly work, you might be better off choosing a venue you like, patronizing it a few times and chatting to the owner. Build up a relationship and you could even receive an offer without having to ask.

And even though the place might not be as prestigious as a swanky gallery, with the right images, you should still be able to make sales. Brandy, a photographer in Spokane,  displayed her photographs in a local coffee house. She told us that she made a sale on the first day of the exhibition and went on to sell more than 80 prints.

Do it Yourself

Cafes and restaurants are open to the public anyway. Once you’ve been accepted, all you’d have to do is choose your images, print and frame them then place them on the walls and wait for the orders to come in. Even if you didn’t do any additional marketing yourself – and you should – the flow of a busy café should be enough to land you some sales.

If you wanted to organize your own exhibition from scratch, you’d have to do a lot more work.

It’s not impossible. Photographers have done it and with impressive results. You’d have to find a venue that’s large enough to accommodate plenty of people and send out masses of invitations, especially to people who matter. Because the exhibition itself is likely to be short and because it won’t have a natural flow of visitors, you can’t count on making as many sales. But invite gallery owners, critics and collectors and you might just give your own career a boost.

Nor do you have to spend huge amounts of money. Jeremy Mason McGraw was able to form a deal with a local framers when he organized an exhibition, while Rei Dishon, an art student, used Moo cards to show his pictures and allowed people to take them away with them when he had an exhibition in Italy. Both of those methods can keep the costs down and the visitors coming in.

Art Fairs

Art fairs can be both as powerful as exhibitions at generating revenue and almost as prestigious. Juried fairs in which prizes are awarded to the best artists look great on a resume and can go a long way towards persuading gallery owners that you really do have art that people are prepared to buy.

There are costs involved here too. Most art fairs have exhibition fees which you’ll need to pay at each show and there are also one-time costs for the display tent and bins.

But art fairs are more open than galleries. Although they can be competitive – there are usually more applicants than space – persistence and talent should be enough to land you your first berth. Art galleries will be much more demanding.

Online Exhibitions

Okay, putting your photos on Flickr or your website isn’t quite in the same league as showing them in a gallery – or anywhere, in fact, that lets people see them in the flesh. But it’s still one form of exhibition. People will still be seeing your images, they can order them and you can organize them by theme instead of simply uploading your images in some random order.

You don’t have to ask for anyone’s approval to put on a show like this, it won’t cost anything except uploading time and while the number of prints you sell could be fairly small, you could make money by linking the images to a book on Blurb or even by offering affiliate products in the image caption. It might not be where you want to end up as a photographer, but it’s not a bad place to start.

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

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

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

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

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

One Image, One Sale, One Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giving Up Your Photo Rights

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

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

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

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

Photographers can find out by applying for NoEquivalent membership here.

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

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

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

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.

Photographers understandably put a huge amount of time and effort into their portfolios. They might not always do it right – a small, carefully-picked selection is usually more helpful than a bumper buffet, and the bio and personal work can tell an editor as much about the photographer as a tear sheet – but the sentiment is spot on.

Your portfolio tells potential clients what you can do, how you do it and, most importantly, how much they can rely on you to get the job done.

And this is where photographers have a real advantage. You might need professional help creating the website that will show off the portfolio but the images themselves you get to create. You don’t need to rely on anyone else to demonstrate your work.

That isn’t the case for other creative professions. Sculptors need the skills of photographers to light their work in the best way possible if they want to demonstrate their achievements while actors, famously, need headshots to send to casting agents, a regular line of business for photographers.

Five Years to Learn Lighting

Thespians though rarely present too much of a challenge. Their portraits are fairly simple. Much harder is shooting for interior designers.

It took Barbara White, a professional photographer who specializes in shooting architectural interiors, about five years to “get it.” Learning what good lighting is supposed to look like was the biggest challenge — and getting it right without ending up with overlighting or flat lighting took a while too.

“Never put a light near your camera,” she advises. “Have your shadows coming toward you, rather than away from you. Show dimension. Have highlights and shadows, but not freaky shadows.”

Barbara’s clients include architects and recently, a property developer for whom she shoots apartments, but most of her work comes from interior designers. They put the images she creates on their websites but they also use them in competitions, for advertising and as editorial images in magazines.

Initially, Barbara found her clients through cold calling but she later moved on to direct mail and now relies on referrals to bring in new designers. A bit of luck with her website has helped too.

“It somehow disappeared off of Google for about five years, and now is back on page one. I haven’t changed  much of anything since it was on page one (for about five years) before… go figure.”

Getting into the profession was, perhaps, a little more straightforward. Barbara began photographing interiors while at college. A friend was a designer and allowed her to photograph her house, shoots that Barbara enjoyed more than the usual tabletop work. These days though, Barbara recommends that photographers looking to break into interior photography spend time assisting an experienced pro and attend classes and workshops such as those held in Santa Fe and Maine.

The benefits of this specialization are clear. Barbara charges $2,400 – $2,600 for between six and eight views, prices that are more than fair when you consider the amount of time involved in the shoot and the post-production as well as the value of the images to a designer. Even Barbara’s practice shots of her friend’s house turned out to be valuable. After the home was destroyed in a brush fire, Barbara’s images helped to persuade the insurance company to pay an additional $100 per square foot.

Money is not a Motivation

Shooting stage design though is a little tougher. The lighting challenges can be even more extreme and like sports photography, it’s important to know what you’re looking at when photographing during a rehearsal to get exactly the right moment. And like film photography, shooting a set while artists are performing in front of it, can involve all sorts of difficult restrictions. Dress rehearsals might be the best time to shoot without disturbing an audience but costumes aren’t always complete and some scenic elements may be missing.

Worse, while the photos still need to have perfect composition and tell a story, because the aim of the images is to describe the show rather than to help a designer win a job, money is rarely a motivation.

Richard Finkelstein, for example, a set designer and photographer, says that financial considerations are the last thing he thinks about when shooting a set. As a theatrical worker, in addition to creating shots for publicity and marketing, he also wants to record the process that went into creating a theatrical performance, especially as the set itself disappears once the curtain has fallen for the last time.

“In the visual arts, once an artist becomes great, we usually have a ton of sketches and other materials from which we can discern the process that led to their greatness,” Richard explains. “Here in the theatre world [that] has been lacking. It’s all about the final product with an audience. But to me the process that got the artists to that point is just as important, and perhaps more so.”

It’s a job that often falls to the set designer. Most of the commercial photos for Cats came from John Napier, the show’s scene and costume designer.

“This is usually not an accident,” says Richard. ” I designed a new off-Broadway musical a few years ago and they needed shots for press publication. I already had them!  It makes finding this work easy.”

All of Richard’s clients reach him through word of mouth and he has worked as a designer with 90 percent of them. Volunteering, he says, is a good way to get your foot in the door, although being a participant is even better.

Pay may not be a motivation for shooting the work of set designers, but it does have one valuable advantage: it puts a photographer in close contact with actors – and they do pay for photography.

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.

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.

But we’re far too modest for that.

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

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

iStockPhoto

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

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

iStockPhoto Started as a Free Stock Site

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

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

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

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

Flickr

Image: notsogood

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

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

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

You Can’t Ignore Flickr’s 3 Billion Images

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

But it did much more than that.

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

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

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

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

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

Google

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

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

Learning about Copyright

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

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

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

Cafepress

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

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

Cafepress Sets a New Trend

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

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

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

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

eBay and Craigslist

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

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

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

The No-Cost Way to Market Photography Prints and Services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The iPhone as the Music-Lover’s Camera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be a Winner with your iPhone

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what happens now?

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

Consolidating Three Million Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Back Door to the Mosaic Wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographers Just Push Buttons

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

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

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

Photography: Andrew Houser

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

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

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

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

Skills that Make Friends… and Make you Stand Out

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

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

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

We all do it. Even the sort of cutting-edge, super-cool street photographers who are more likely to get excited by a pile of concrete than a glowing sunset will find themselves in a spot of nature, holding a camera and thinking “That will make a nice picture.”

It’s why just about every photographer has a folder marked “landscapes” (or “nature” or just “outdoors”) on their hard drives, and just about every commercial photographer wonders what on earth they’re going to do with it. With the number of landscape images available clearly outstripping demand – even if only a fraction of them are professional quality – is it really possible to turn images of sunsets, woods and hills into hard cash?

There are ways, but the pictures have to be good and the photographer has to be prepared to put in the work to sell them.

Turn the Elements into Elements

The most effortless method, as always, is to upload them to a microstock site and hope that someone buys them. The effort though will come in being accepted. iStock is just one company that makes clear that it has little interest in “sunsets and clouds” or “forest snap shots.” That’s not likely to be because there’s no demand for them at all (this image of a lighthouse is currently the company’s highest rated file and has 69 downloads) but because stock companies will only accept images that are better than those already available. And there are plenty of others available.

Rather than uploading your landscapes directly then, a better option might be to look at your landscapes as elements rather than as finished products. This image by Eva Serrabassa, for example, has been downloaded more than 12,000 times. It might well have been shot as a complete composition but it contains two parts: the girl blowing a dandelion; and the rural background. If you can turn your landscape into a background that offsets an emotive foreground – even if it’s just one you’ve pasted on — you’ll have a whole new image that might just get you past the stock site’s selectors.

Tag your Pictures

Alternatively, you can regard the photo not as a work of art but as a beautiful recording of a beautiful place – as a travel image. Usually, travel photographs are as hard to sell as landscapes (people always take their cameras with them when they travel) but Backpacker magazine and the Bruce Coleman Photo Library take unsolicited travel images, and Everywhere Magazine is now in its fifth issue and invites open submissions.

As you might expect from the publishers of JPG Magazine, selection for Everywhere is made through a combination of peer voting and editorial decision-making but the prize for selection is a free subscription and a crisp one hundred dollar bill. Obviously, your chances of winning might not be huge but it costs nothing to enter and the odds are certainly higher than if you leave the image on your hard drive.

You can raise the odds of selling higher still by placing them on a public map. Google Earth can work but Flickr’s map is probably the best because it’s a site that buyers are known to browse. Either add the geotag data to your image before you upload it to your photostream, or you can simply drop the photo into the right location on the map.

At best, buyers looking for images of a specific location will be able to find you and at worst, you’ll help to show people what the world looks like. As Anita Gould a nature photographer who geotags her images told us:

“[Geotagging] might help someone else find a Roseate Tern or a Maryland Meadow-beauty… but beyond that, it contributes in a small way to an online ‘citizen science’ database.”

And who knows, you might get luckier still. Hamad Darwish, a Kuwaiti student studying in the United States, was commissioned by Microsoft to shoot landscapes for Vista after uploading his images to Flickr. That might not happen to you but landscape prints do sell on the photo-sharing site.

They sell even better though at art fairs, and these are always good places for ambitious photographers to try to make sales. You’ll have to apply, hope you’re selected and pay for the space. You’ll also need a good selection of photos and more importantly, a good selection of prices too. But if you’re looking to sell prints, that’s always a good idea anyway.

Selling framed prints for a few hundred dollars apiece is hard; moving postcards will bring you a steady stream of small money, especially if you’re also able to place them in local stores.

Landscape photography is one of the hardest niches in which to make a name for yourself. Supply is high, demand is low and the competition is intense. If you’ve already done the shooting though, there are a few ways you might be able to make at least occasional sales depending on how much effort you want to invest.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buyers Beat Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Flickr Sales Easier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s an even bigger group who would like to buy photo-based calendars that don’t show the usual fluffy kittens and ball-of-fur dogs that chain stores stock up on towards the end of every year.

More importantly, many buyers would also like to buy those photographs from living artists whose works they appreciate – and those artists would very much like to sell to them.

Blogging for Photo Artists

RedBubble was created to try to bring these two demands together. Launched in early 2007, the site aims to deliver for aspiring artists what blogging has done for aspiring writers and what YouTube has done for aspiring directors… with one exception: it wants the artists to get paid too.

The site is free to join and anyone can upload images, making them available for sale as prints, posters, calendars and cards, and on t-shirts too. RedBubble sets a fee to print each item and artists are then free to set their own mark-ups above the cost price.

So far, so familiar. Zazzle too allows artists to offer their works on products that range from plimsolls to mouse pads. Unlike that site though, RedBubble steers clear of big brands in order to focus on individual creators, while Etsy, which has a similar feel, tends to be more craft-oriented.

Judging by the result of its first couple of years in business, the service seems to be working. More than 90,000 contributors have already joined the site and after generating more than $1.2 million in sales in the first year, RedBubble looks likely to double that this year. Around 40 percent of those sales have been of photography products, not including t-shirt sales.

“We… don’t see ourselves as just a print-on-demand service but as an art site which means that we don’t promote things like mouse pads or a service of getting your dog’s photo on a mug,” co-founder and executive chairman Martin Hosking told us. “Right now we are growing so rapidly because we have really tried to deliver on the needs of living artists and allowing them to reach a global audience.”

Calendars are the best sellers, Martin says, because they combine accessibility with a high quality art product, but cards and framed prints also sell well.

$2.4 million Divided into 90,000 Equals…

A tougher question though is how well they sell, and what a photographer has to do to generate those sales. If the site is generating $2.4 million a year in sales and has 90,000 contributors, each artist is earning on average… less than $27 per year. Clearly, no one is going to get rich on that but equally clearly, the sales aren’t averaged out. Not all of the contributors will be active and while some may be making good  money, many are presumably making very little, if any, money at all.

In part, that’s likely to be down to their own marketing skill. While RedBubble handles search engine optimization, offers widgets that can be embedded in blogs and social media sites, and has active PR offices, as usual, the real marketing work is left to each seller.

“Our best sellers are making a reasonable part time living,” says Martin. “This is obviously growing and if they combine this with sales off RedBubble they can do OK.

“It is not, however, as simple as simply putting up your work then letting it sell itself. If you want to do well you will need to find multiple ways to promote yourself both within RedBubble and in other forums.”

Martin points to the Aussie Exotics sports car photography calendar as one example of a product that has sold “many hundreds” of copies. The photographer contacted sites directly to promote it, he says, winning a glowing recommendation from at least one site. Other photographers though, Martin concedes, are not as good at marketing themselves so the site offers a sales blog and a sales forum to help them learn the basics and pick up some new ideas. Those suggestions might include the importance of describing the works on offer so that buyers can put them in context and understand what they’re buying. Themed calendars also sell much better than calendars with a random collection of attractive images, and the images themselves have to be high-resolution so that they print at top quality.

Like non-commercial sites such as Flickr though, RedBubble also has groups that allow contributors to swap tips among themselves and arrange local meet-ups, a factor that has helped to contribute to the site’s rapid growth.

“People want to get together with each other (both online and offline),” says Martin. “They are motivated not only by the sales but the overall experience of sharing.”

So if you decide not to put in the effort at marketing and find that you don’t make any sales, at least you’ll make some new friends. And maybe one of them will be looking for a new picture for the landing wall.

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.

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.

You know all the old standards. You know that you can walk into a bookstore and see calendars filled with photos of fluffy kittens and baby Dobermans. You know that you can browse a gallery and – assuming you don’t die of envy first – see beautiful photographs, framed, matted and available for sale at eyewatering sums. And you know that you can browse a stock site and see image after image of jumping families and headset-wearing backroom staff.

You might even know that with a well-managed Flickr stream, you could be selling licenses and offloading prints to the buyers who cruise the site.

But here are five places you probably didn’t know that you could sell your pictures:

Etsy

The trouble with handicraft sites like Zazzle and Etsy is that they don’t really do any marketing. Instead, they supply the shop window and the selling infrastructure, and rely on the sellers to bring in the buyers themselves.

Often then, they don’t work.

In part, that’s because when anyone can open a store, the quality of the site as a whole tends to suffer, putting buyers off. And in part, it’s because marketing a Zazzle page requires special skills and knowledge that only a few handicrafters possess.

Etsy though does things a little differently. It charges sellers a fee, which puts off chancers, and it enables buyers and sellers to browse and chat. We’ve come across at least one amateur who made her first photography sale on the site. Market carefully and it might just happen to you too.

Subscription Sites

Most photographers are accustomed to selling one image at one price at one time. Stock companies though try to chain their clients to their outlets by selling subscriptions. In effect, they give their buyers a large discount in return for advance payment, ensuring that they won’t go anywhere else in the future.

It’s a model that some artists are using to sell their works directly too.
Vlad Gerasimov, a Russian designer, makes high quality versions of his wallpapers available for $19.99 a year or $29.99 for life. These include his photographic series of Siberian wooden houses.

He told us that he’s sold more than 11,000 subscriptions, and that’s without spending a penny on advertising.

You’d need to create good, original images to do this, and you’ll have to network like mad to become well-known. But if your photos are interesting enough, you could find that you’re locking in plenty of buyers and packing away lots of money too.

Twitter

Twitter might be a lot of fun and a great place to network, but it’s also becoming a valuable marketing tool. That’s especially true of each Twitter page’s background which allows twitterers to create a sidebar packed with URLs and product information.

Designer Natalie Jost is cashing in on that opportunity by allowing twitterers to use her textures as their background designs for free. If they want to use them for any other purpose though, they have to pay.

That’s a clever marketing ploy that photographer can learn from, even if they don’t want to give away their images for nothing. Create a series of images formatted for Twitter – complete with space for sidebar – and you’ll have a new product line.

You’ll also have the ideal marketing tool to spread the word too.

Tourist Stops

Postcards can be as tricky a sale as calendars and posters. Stores tend to buy from their regular suppliers, the profits from each are tiny and the competition is fierce. Some places though are easier to break into and sell from than others.

We’ve spoken to at least one amateur photographer who was able to place his photos at tourist sites that he visited frequently. If there are places near you that have a steady stream of visitors – and especially if it’s the kind of place that tourists bring their own cameras to – then there’s an opportunity waiting to be plucked.

Again, you’ll need great images of course, and you’ll have to be able to persuade the sellers that that your images really will sell but the fact that you’re local gives you a big advantage. You know the best places to shoot, the times of day that have the best light and the times of year that produce the best colors.

You’ll also be able to update your collection frequently, and offer a complete range of site-oriented products that could range from postcards to posters, and from books to t-shirts.

All you need is the right images and the right places.

Colleges

One career choice chosen by many photographers looking for the security of a regular salary while still keeping their hands on their camera is to teach. The top photographers teach at universities and on professional courses but there are plenty of further education centers which demand few qualifications and while they won’t pay very much, they will give you an audience of eager photography enthusiasts.

You won’t be able to sell directly to your students – colleges tend to look down on teachers hawking their goods in class – but it’s likely that many of your students will want to see your images and buy your Blurb books, if only to get a feel for the sort of images you take.

Strictly speaking, it might be against the rules but if someone is going to buy your book anyway out of curiosity, is it really so bad if you order it yourself and give them a discount?

Those are just five unusual ways of selling images that we know of. Put them into practice, and you might find that they become the new standard.

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

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

But what do you do in the meantime?

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

Brother, Can you Spare a Lens?

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

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

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

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

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

Help in Wyoming, Not Wichita

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography can be glamorous work. But usually it isn’t. Few photographers spend their time lining up celebrities as they leave nightclubs, persuading the Queen to sit still long enough to strike a pose or hanging out with supermodels as they reveal their Victoria’s Secrets.

For most photographers, work means driving from one event hall to another, getting the light exactly right on a bottle of detergent or trying to hide the retainers during a senior portrait shoot.

There is a middle way though, a type of photography that’s not quite as mundane as shooting a wedding but which doesn’t run the risk of being covered in baked beans by Hugh Grant. Part of creating a movie includes shooting still images that are used in promotional material. It’s a job for the Unit Stills Photographer, someone who hangs around the set taking pictures and trying desperately not to get in the way.

The Second Most Important Photographer on the Set

According to Dan Turkewitz, a screenwriter and editor who was recently asked to shoot stills for short film “Sodom by the Sea,” Unit Stills Photographers have to create two kinds of images. The first documents the making of the movie and includes close-ups of the actors and crew, wide shots of the crew shooting the action, the set and the equipment.

“The second was, for lack of a better term, artsy shots,” Dan told us. “Cool lighting and shadows stuff that might never appear in the film…. [S]ome images, of the set and Coney Island in general (where the film takes place) would be used in the credits, on the DVD box and website, and generally for promotional materials.”

It all sounds like straightforward stuff – and fun too – but shooting on a film set does pose some very special challenges. The biggest of course, is that the photographer’s camera is the least important on the shoot. The best position will always be taken by the movie camera which means that you have to work knowing that you’re missing the composition you’d really want because someone else’s gear is in the way — and theirs is much bigger than yours.

And you might miss the best moments too. Once the director shouts “action” the photographer has to stop working, says Dan, even though that will be when all the drama begins.

“[U]nless you’re far  off with a zoom, don’t snap away while the actual filming is taking  place. You’ll end up pissing off the actors, or the sound man, or the director, or all of the above.”

While much of the crew and actors are standing around and waiting, you’ll be free to shoot as much as you want. But as soon as it looks like the fighting’s about to begin or the lips meet, you’ll have to put your camera away.

Common Sense and Film Sense

Toss in the fact that it’s the cinematographer, not the photographer who sets the light levels – and that often, according to photographer John D’Agostino, the cinematographer will aim to use as little light as possible – and you might think that this kind of photography is a frustration too far.

In fact, says Dan, much of it relies on common sense – and more importantly, film sense. The most important knowledge that a still photographer on a film set can possess isn’t just how to use his own equipment but what everyone else is doing with theirs. Like a photojournalist, the photographer has to document the action without getting in the way of the lighting crew, the grips or the boom. And, even more crucially, without getting in the shot itself as the scene develops.

That means understanding what’s happening around him, and what’s about to happen too.

For Dan, who used to be an architect but has since worked as a movie editor and has seen one of his own scripts optioned, that’s relatively easy. For a photographer with little understanding of the film world though, it might mean that the first job or two could be a little uncomfortable,  however experienced they might be in other forms of photography.

In practice, that might not happen very often simply because without familiarity of the film world it would be difficult to land that first job. Director Johnny Salvatore asked Dan to shoot the stills for “Sodom by the Sea” because Dan had edited his first movie. He also asked Dan to be the second assistant director, edit the credits and prepare the DVD. Dan agreed as a favor, an experience he’s now trying to translate into paid photography work.

“[I]n the movie industry, it’s all about who you know,” he warns. “Nothing means more than connections. You could have the top gear Canon or Nikon sells and have a portfolio that rivals Ansel Adams’, and still get beaten out for a job by a photographer who knows somebody.”

Breaking into movie photography then might mean spending as much time as possible around movie people rather than standing behind the camera. That might not result in a paid job, but at least it will be glamorous and fun – and if you do get to use your camera you’ll be able shoot some stars without getting covered in baked beans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographs sent in by employees though can present tougher problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

There are lots of different ways to make money from your images. You can license their use and see them appear in ads or on websites. You can shoot them on commission and hand out bumper albums to beaming wedding couples. And you can photograph for the media and see your images accompanying news reports and articles to name just three.

Those are all enjoyable and rewarding but they’re not as satisfying as selling your photos as prints. When someone buys a framed copy of one of your pictures they’re not making a comment on the usefulness of your image – Does it suit the sales message? Does it spark a memory? Does it capture the story? – they’re passing judgment on the quality of your photography. Only beautiful pictures sell as prints and there’s no clearer indication that your photograph is beautiful than that someone is prepared to pay to own it.

Offering Prints is Easy, Selling Them is Hard

That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to sell prints. There’s no shortage of beautiful pictures available – even if everyone’s idea of beauty is different – but there is a limited number of people prepared to buy photography, and a limited amount of wall space on which to display it.

Nor is there a lack of channels to put those prints into the hands of buyers. As FotoLibra, with its 1,000-plus different licensing prices shows, stock photography is complex and challenging. Taking orders for prints however is very simple. Even Flickr allows viewers to order images through Qoop while PhotoBiz includes a complete printing, ordering and payment system.

It’s no surprise then that with so many images available, it’s so difficult to make a sale. Josh McCulloch, a professional photographer whose revenue streams include commissions, stock, prints and postcards, reports that prints make up the smallest part of his income.

There are ways to make things at least a little easier. Farmboy Fine Arts, for example, acts like a conventional stock site but instead of accepting images of smiling call center clerks and families jumping in fields, it looks for artistic photographs that could be used to decorate hotel restaurants and spas. The images are sold as prints and the photographer receives a royalty for each use but it’s likely to have fewer customers than stock companies so contributors could be in for a long wait before they make their first – and subsequent – sales.

And when an image is sold to a corporation, there is still a sense that it’s serving a purpose rather than being bought for its beauty alone. (Farmboy Fine Arts does also place images in homes but most of its work is done for institutions rather than for private clients.)

Sales for Crafty Photographers

One alternative which markets to individuals is Etsy.com, a craft site which charges contributors a usage fee. The costs keep the quality high – only people with reasonably good products are likely to contribute — and ensures that artists and craftspeople work hard to make a return on their investment.

And they do need to work hard because with more than 76,000 photographs available for sale on Etsy, the competition is fierce here too. Etsy though makes the sales a little easier by allowing buyers and sellers to meet in the forums. Although that’s not quite as effective as being able to walk up to a shopper in your own gallery and ask if they need any help, it does allow contributors to build relationships that might lead to deals. It’s a system that some photographers have found effective enough to generate their very first print sales.

Building those sorts of relationships online is difficult and time-consuming. A conversation that can drag on for weeks in a forum could last just a few minutes had it been held face-to-face. That’s one of the things that makes art fairs so attractive to photographers – that and the fact that you can be certain that people visiting are the sort who tend to buy art and that they’re likely to be in a mood to do so.

The challenge at art fairs though is being accepted in the first place. Photography is often one of the most over-subscribed art forms submitted to acceptance committees (jewelry-making is the other) and acceptance rates of just one in nine are not unusual. Exhibitors also have to invest in display material such as a tent and container bins, they must ensure that their images are protected from the sticky fingers of browsers, include enough framed examples to encourage buying, and offer photos in a range of different prices to suit buyers of every budget. All of that requires an up-front investment.

But with sales that reach four figures a distinct possibility, you wouldn’t need to exhibit in more than a handful of fairs each year to generate some very useful extra cash.

And perhaps the best benefit of selling at art fairs is that winning prizes at juried events can help to attract the attention of gallery owners. This is always going to be the best way to sell prints. Gallery owners don’t just provide a venue and marketing power. They can also offer career advice, pricing suggestions and allow the photographer time to do what he or she does best: create images.

Being accepted by a gallery is probably the hardest way to sell images though. Gallery owners tend to prefer photographers to make appointments than drop in and they’ll expect to see a resume and an artist’s statement as well as a record of previous shows even if many of them are group exhibitions. It’s the name and history that sells at galleries as much as the images themselves.

When you’re looking to sell your images as prints, the biggest and most important challenge is always going to be to create beautiful photographs. After that, the work begins.