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Watch out Blighty; the gorgeous Jennifer Aniston has landed.

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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.

Wanted: Photographers with $800 Photos

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 0 to 0, 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.

Photography Shows Build a Career right now

Photography: Ryan Libre

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 ,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.

Photographing Interiors

Photography: Barbara White

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 ,400 – ,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 0 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.