7 Steps to Your First Paying Photo Job
Photography: Billy Quach Landing your first photography job will take time — as well as lots of preparation, practice and networking. Selling your first photo is relatively easy. Image sales, especially stock licenses, depend more on the quality of the photograph than the name of the photographer. Get the subject right and shoot at the...
Making Pinterest Work for Photographers
Photographers have good reason to despise social media’s new golden platform but Pinterest is visual, viral and too big to ignore. In December 2011, Pinterest achieved a landmark. The site drove more traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube or Google Plus. With two of those services supported by the Internet’s biggest company, that was some...
Become an Independent Photographer in 2012
As 2011 comes to an end, it’s time to start planning for the year ahead. For professionals, that means looking at the most successful marketing channels of the last twelve months, understanding which demographics were most likely to hire them and increasing efforts to bring in more work and at higher prices in the coming...
Inspiring Photographers on Facebook
Facebook isn’t the best place for photographers to show off their images. Flickr is better known for serendipitous sales (and its tie-in with Getty) and searching Facebook for pictures, let alone shooters, isn’t straightforward. But the site’s size and its constant growth have made it a popular destination for photographers. Some use it just to...
The Reasons Your Photography Blog is Failing
Photographers need two websites. They need a portfolio site that shows off their images, offers tear sheets, introduces their portfolio and reveals their taste through their personal projects. Those sites win jobs — and they need to do it fast. Buyers consistently report that when it comes to looking at photographers’ online portfolios, they prefer...
3 New Skills Every Photographer Will Need
Old school photographers might have experience, contacts and a bag full of equipment built up over the years, but young photographers now have an important advantage. While shooters who picked up their first camera more than a decade ago may be a dab hand in a darkroom that’s now been turned back into a closet,...
The Rules for New (Paid) Photographers
Every community has rules and everyone who wants to join that community needs to know those rules. That doesn’t mean that you can never break them but you should know what those rules are — and the consequences that come from ignoring them. That’s true whether you’re trying to join the country club or the...
A Five-Step Guide to Your First Photo Sale
Selling images should be easy. Stock agencies now look at the photographs, not the photographers. Buyers have multiplied as millions of Web pages have spread across the Internet. The gap between collectors and creators has broken down as sellers can use their own marketing skills to create their brands, build a reputation and promote their...
Photography iPad Apps You’ll Really Use
The iPad wasn’t built for photographers. The in-built lenses are punier than those on most smartphones, memory space is limited, library functions are poor, bulk processing is impossible and upload a RAW image from the iPad to another device and you’re going to lose noticeable quality. When we asked one photographer what surprised him the...
Flickr Still Beats Facebook for Photographers
When stock photography company Getty Images announced its agreement with Flickr to broker photo sales on behalf of the site’s members, one of the attractions of the Yahoo property was its size. According to the press release issued at the time, Flickr was then attracting 54 million visitors every month and its 27 million members...
The First Steps to Making Money with Photography
The road from first camera to first commission from National Geographic is long, difficult and unlikely to be travelled by any but the most talented and dedicated of photographers. But the path from photography passion to photography profit, even if it’s just a little extra income to help subsidize an expensive hobby, is much shorter...
Creative Ways to Earn from Your Photography Knowledge
For photographers, the image is the product. But photographers also have knowledge and that information is an asset that can be sold too. Here are five ways that photographers can turn their photography knowledge into new revenue streams. 1. Workshops When Paul Van Hoy moved to Rochester, New York in 2005, it didn’t take long...
