Jordan & Posh: Truce?

Ever since Who Let The Dogs Out was a hit, Jordan and Victoria Beckham have been at war.

Snipy comments, dirty looks, blanking one another – they’ve employed all manner of petty tactics.

But now, at last, there’s a glimmer of peace on the horizon.

What Happened, Olga?

This chick was last seen as a sexy Bond girl.

But there’s nothing about this look that would shake 007′s Martini.

What a difference a trip to the costume depo can make…

Jack: The Verdict’s In

Jade Goody’s husband Jack Tweed has been found guilty of assaulting a taxi driver.

The 21-year-old cried in the dock after being convicted.

He had earlier pleaded not guilty to the charge.

Jonas Brothers New CD Concert Experience Released Buy Now

The Soundtrack to Jonas Brothers’ new film “Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience” is available today! The jam packed album includes live versions of favorites like “Hello Beautiful” and “S.O.S” as well as performances with Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato, a Shania Twain cover, and one new, never-before-heard studio recording called “Love Is On Its Way.” The highly anticipated film goes behind-the-scenes with Kevin, Joe and Nick on last year’s Burning Up Tour, following their every move along the way.

The Saturdays On Booboo

Girl band The Saturdays are naughtier than they look.

They’ve made a confession about blouse bunnies…

Or one pair in particular.

No Shoes For Suri

Has Suri Cruise become a hippy at the tender age of two?

Or does she just not fancy the footwear mum Katie Holmes has chosen for her?

Either way, the adorable tot is going footloose and fancy free on the streets of LA.

Jennifer Hits London

Watch out Blighty; the gorgeous Jennifer Aniston has landed.

She and Owen Wilson arrived for the London premiere of Marley & Me last night and Sky Showbiz were there to scoop up the action.

Delve in on all the goss.

The Sites that Changed the Photography Business

We’d like to think that at Photopreneur we have influence in the photography world. We’d like to believe that we’re among the movers and shakers, the people who set the agenda, the picture-taking elite who are changing the face of photography forever.

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 million.

The price may have been a bargain. In 2007, the site generated almost million in revenue, sharing almost 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 .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 ,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.

Using Photography to Beat the Recession

Photography: Arty Smokes

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.

Choosing Your Photo Sales Channels

Photography: tarotastic

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 {content} 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.