Photography: illustir

Anyone looking at the banks of professional photographers snapping celebrities attending the BAFTA award ceremony in London recently might have assumed they were seeing technology nerds rather than camera geeks. In addition to the Nikons and Canons dangling from the photographers’ necks, there was also a steady line of Macbook Pros hanging from the press barriers. It’s a testament to one of the biggest changes that digital imagery has brought to photography. While a professional photographer would once have had to press his film rolls into the hands of a waiting courier to get his images back to the office as quickly as possible, he’s now expected to load his shots into his computer and ftp them from the location ready to run online even as the event he’s shooting is still taking place.

With the passing of Polaroid, the end of development labs and the rise of digital platforms, it’s tempting for anyone hoping to sell images to think only of file sizes and licenses. Buyers aren’t interested in touching an image, holding it or hanging it; they only want to display it on a monitor — or upload it to a website so that others can see it on their screens.

In fact though, the print market isn’t just alive and kicking; it’s flourishing and growing in a range of different directions, opening up all sorts of new opportunities for savvy photographers.

Photobook Sales Reach 1.2 Million in a Single Year

The clearest evidence of the continued interest in printed images is the rapid growth of Blurb. In 2010, the photobook company’s three-year growth rate of 4,829.6 percent put it 47^th on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. In 2009 alone, just four years after its launch, Blurb created and shipped more than 1.2 million books, generating sales of $45 million from people who wanted to look at their images on paper rather than through glass.

It’s an opportunity that other print companies haven’t missed. EZPrints, which now provides the printing services to SmugMug and a number of other photo-sharing sites, used to cater primarily to professionals who wanted to create large, professional-grade prints and fine art rather than photo products. That original interest remains, says Evan Kramer, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, but the demand for printed images has now expanded into new products, even among professionals.

“Many pros find that their customers want to create more than just prints of their wedding photos or family portraits. They want to create photo books or canvas prints of their pro shots,” he said. “So pros have had to adapt to changing trends and offer their customers innovative photo display packages.”

Canvas prints and mounted prints are popular home décor products, Kramer says, and personalized stationery in the form of flat and folded cards sell well too. Last year saw a trend for magnet packs, especially for Save the Date announcements that foreshadow formal wedding invitations. And photobooks too have proved to be a valuable element of EZPrint’s range, with different sizes, options and designs appealing to a wide audience.

Individual photographers hoping to cash in on the demand for printed images can make use of a number of solutions. EZPrints styles itself “The Power Behind the Print Button” because it services so many of the print orders on websites, but choosing your own printing company can be complex and demand a fair amount of research.

While a lab that’s reputable, trusted and recommended by other photographers is likely to be safe, says Kramer, photographers should also know what kind of premium products or substrates they offer, whether they have specialized packaging services for large format prints, how frequently they balance and calibrate their printers (professional labs calibrate to a single color target daily and balance the printers hourly to maintain color consistency), and whether the staff is knowledgeable enough to answer specific questions when placing a print order.

The Challenge of Marketing Prints

And that’s just the printing. The real challenge will be winning the orders. If wedding photographers are finding that there’s a demand for large format prints of their best shots, then they’re either going to have to push those prints as upsells during the negotiations or include them in their packages to make their offers more attractive.

If there’s still a demand for Save the Date magnets, then photographers will need to figure out which designs customers are most likely to order. (A picture of the couple might be appropriate but how many people would want a friend’s engagement photo on their fridge door forever? When the magnet carries the name and contact details of the photographer that opportunity to stay visible to a new lead is an important consideration.)

And if stationery sells as well as Evan Kramer suggests then photographers will have to get the pricing, the images and the promotional platforms right to make those sales. Flowers are said to be popular themes on Zazzle but photographers selling online tend to do best when they have a clear creative line that allows them to be distinctive and memorable. That’s easier to do with a subject that requires expertise and props that are hard to find than one as ubiquitous as flowers.

The simplest solution is to head to a product site like Zazzle or a photo-sharing site like SmugMug and rely on the company’s own printing service to fulfill the orders while you worry about the photography and the marketing. But you’d still have to market those services yourself. Even the top-selling books in Blurb’s bookstore tend to have sales figures that are numbered in the dozens rather than the thousands. Most sales appear to be made by professionals on behalf of clients or enthusiasts who want to handle their own images in book form.

It’s an easy solution but one that requires some difficult selling and working with a printing lab does deliver a couple more benefits: it lets you feel like a traditional photographer again — and you too can get to hold the photo before it’s delivered to the customer.

Related posts:

1. Blurb Makes Photography Books For Anyone
2. Blurb Offers $25,000 for the Best Self-Published Photography Book
3. Creating Narrative Photo Books
4. What You (Probably) Don’t Know About Digital Photography… And Should
5. Creating a Blurb Photography Book that Sells

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Photography: gynti_46

When John Griffin launched Cutcaster in early 2008, he injected a novel idea into the world of commercial photography. A former equity sales trader on Wall Street, Griffin’s aim was to create a research tool that would deliver to the photography industry the kind of vital information that Bloomberg supplies for finance. The site would also provide a platform for the deals to be made, allowing photographers to sell image licenses for the true market rate.

“We wanted to create a dynamic marketplace much like the NASDAQ stock exchange and also give people tools to educate themselves on what the marketplace was looking for, analyze the data surrounding their content and find available market research,” Griffin told us then. “It’s supposed to be a fluid system where buyers and sellers
can adjust to what the market is telling them.”

Sellers were able to set their own price or choose an algorithm created by the site to fluctuate prices. Crucially, buyers could also submit a bid lower than the asking price, allowing buyer and seller to negotiate until they reached a price on which both could agree. The site’s launch followed two years of research into the factors that affect photography pricing, and should have created a marketplace in which all deals were fair, photographers never felt that they were receiving less than they deserved and buyers never felt that they were paying too much.

It should, in other words, have solved the two largest problems generated by microstock and traditional stock.

Bidding for Photos is Confusing

It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Visit Cutcaster now and a message welcomes you to “the new Cutcaster… a simple-to-use website for intelligently searching and buying royalty free photos.” Navigation is simpler and search has been overhauled to enable buyers to find what they’re looking for faster and to discourage keyword spam.

But the most obvious change is a list of fixed royalty-free prices on the home page that range from 70 cents for a “tiny” image to $14.95 for “XXX-large.” Credits cost as little as 80 cents.

The change is recent and was brought on by the response to Cutcaster’s flexible pricing system. Buyers weren’t interested in bidding for royalty-free images and only placed bids 6 percent of the time. Removing a bidding option that allowed the two sides to negotiate, Griffin says, has made the system less confusing.

Sellers can still choose either to set their own price for a medium-sized image, allowing Cutcaster to price other sizes in relation to their choice, or use Cutcaster’s algorithm to price all of their sizes for them. (Cutcaster sets the price for about 60 percent of images, Griffin says.) The flexibility and responsiveness though have gone. A buyer who disagrees with a seller’s price point has no option but to move on to the next picture.

So why didn’t the bidding option work? Why weren’t buyers willing to enter into negotiations with sellers to achieve a fairer price?

Part of the reason might have been the complexity of image pricing. For Wall Street brokers the value of a company can be measured in earnings reports; Cutcaster’s pricing algorithm is affected by less obvious factors that include views, downloads, exclusivity, keyword queries and time available, among other things. And that’s before you reach usage, an element that has no parallel in finance where corporate investors pay the same price per share as individual savers.

But it could also be because the prices were fair already. Last July Griffin told us that pricing on Cutcaster was stable at around $10 an image (“although $5 images sell better.”) Advertisers and designers who use the site tend to look for downloads below $10 and the average sales price across all sizes was $9. With prices that low and with thousands of other options a click away it made more sense for buyers to keep looking than to lose time talking.

“The three things that obviously effect buyers thinking the most are price, speed and quality,” said Griffin.

If the price wasn’t right, then buyers weren’t going to sacrifice speed of purchase to change it.

That dynamic though has also been shown to work in the opposite direction.

Sellers Won’t Haggle Either

Go to GoSee4me.com now, and you reach a site stuffed with keyword spam and little by way of valuable content or a useful service. It wasn’t always that way. The domain used to provide a photo bounty service on which buyers would describe a picture they were looking for and the amount that they were willing to pay for it, and photographers could pack their cameras and get shooting.

The site’s founder Josh Rothman came up with the idea when he was considering buying an antique chair online.

“The seller had some photos posted on his website, but I was concerned that there might be some flaws in the chair that the seller was not revealing in either the written description or the photos he chose to provide,” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘I wish I knew someone who lived there that could go look at that chair for me.’”

He wasn’t the only one thinking that way. SpyMedia was already offering a similar service. That site also no longer exists.

The problem with those services is that the value of the image to the buyer — usually around $5 to $10 — was much lower than the expense for the photographer in creating it. Few photographers were willing to spend several hours shooting and editing a picture for the chance — and there was no guarantee — of winning five or ten bucks.

The principle of requesting images as part of a stock service can be useful. UK-based photo library fotoLibra puts out frequent calls for images and iStockPhoto has a forum thread on which designers can ask for specific content. But building a business around the concept seems to have been a pretty poor idea when the two sides have such different ideas about the price of an image — and an unwillingness to negotiate that price.

The photography market might sound like a place in which haggling is a part of business and negotiations can take place over time, but it’s more like a supermarket than bazaar. Buyers want to take images off-the-shelf, but they’ll put them back quickly if they don’t like the price on the label.

Negotiation might work for high-priced rights-managed images but for royalty-free, you only get one chance to name your price.

Related posts:

1. CutCaster Creates an Efficient Photography Marketplace
2. Pricing Your Pictures — Or Taking The “Free” Out Of Freelance
3. Stock Photography Agencies for Amateur Photographers
4. Photographs Don’t Want to Be Free
5. Photo Buyers Still Asking for More Ethnic Diversity in Images

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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 for the young photographer to form a friendship with local photographer Brady Dillsworth. Van Hoy’s work had already won him a write-up in Professional Photographer Magazine, both photographers were working on their own books, and shooting at the high end of wedding photography, they both found that clients would speak to each of them before making their choice.

And both wanted to help other photographers build their studios. The pair have now expanded their businesses to include jointly-held wedding photography workshops.

They’re not the only ones. Denis Reggie, the founder of wedding photojournalism, organizes regular workshops with photographer Joe Buissink that cost from $699 each.

The format of a workshop can range from a few hours in a classroom to a weekend retreat with models and formal poses. They’ll require a bit of marketing and plenty of organization but they can be an enjoyable way to turn knowledge into income without selling pictures.

2. Blogging

A workshop will take some hands-on effort and personal interaction but blogging you can do from home.

You won’t make $699 from each reader in that way that you can sell tickets to your workshops for large sums, and you’ll have to work pretty hard to bring in users and monetize them. Despite the hype surrounding the money-making opportunities available to professional bloggers, when AdSense ads deliver clickthroughs of around 2 percent and revenues of $1 to $1.50 for every thousand users, even a relatively successful blog with 10,000 monthly users is only going to make $10-$15 a month. For every Strobist, there are thousands of  photography blogs that do little more than help a site’s SEO.

It’s one more revenue stream but unless you’re willing to put in the promotional work needed to hit the big time, don’t bank on a blog doing much more than supporting your other photography services.

3. Outsourcing

Workshops and blogging sell your knowledge of taking great pictures. But building a successful photography business also means developing an understanding of marketing, client relationships, leadership and management. Those are also skills that can earn revenue.

Kathleen Ferry spent ten years in advertising before taking some photography classes and opening her own photography business. Many of the clients that her Firefly Photography studio now wins though aren’t serviced by her personally. Instead, her skills bring in the business which she then outsources to part-time photographers who shoot the weddings on her behalf.

It’s a different kind of photography business, one that turns the photographer into a manager rather than a hands-on image-maker. It still requires an understanding of photography and a photographic eye — the company will only be as strong as the skills of the photographers you hire — but it’s one that puts the emphasis on the business side of photography rather than on its creative aspect.

The advantage is the business’s scalability. A wedding photographer who works alone or with a single assistant is limited by the number of hours in a week and the number of weddings they’re prepared to shoot in that time. Bring in additional photographers and you can dominate your market by taking on more photographers to meet additional demand.

The downside though is that few photographers enter the industry because they’re inspired by the idea of building a successful business. Most are inspired by the idea of creating beautiful pictures; the management, marketing and selling are just the process they have to go through to win the opportunities and make revenues. Photography is also so artistic that a studio’s brand tends to be closely tied to the photographer him or herself. Clients usually want to hire a particular photographer and receive that photographer’s style rather than the work of an impersonal studio.

The scalability of an outsourcing studio is horizontal, not vertical. Selling your business skills might build you a bigger and more profitable studio but it won’t improve your photography or deliver the satisfaction that comes from shooting the very best images. But again, it’s another way of turning your professional knowledge into a revenue stream — and there’s no reason you can’t both outsource and charge a premium to shoot the images yourself.

4. Non-Profits

Volunteering for a non-profit won’t create a new income stream directly. You’ll be shooting for free and supplying pictures for nothing. But it will open a new niche and give you a new area of specialized knowledge. Whether you’re shooting animals in shelters (as leading pet photographer Grace Chon did to kick start her photography business) or helping out on a campaign, you’ll pick up both contacts and an understanding of one new subject that can help you develop your business.

It’s a way of picking up knowledge and leads that can generate revenue later.

5. Your own exhibitions

And one way to convert that specialized knowledge into cash is to put on your own exhibition. Mounting exhibitions in galleries is always difficult but there’s no reason you can’t show your work yourself, either in your own venue or in a café, an increasingly popular option.

Instead of focusing on artistic shots though, a topic that will only attract photography lovers, you can focus on a particular subject, using your knowledge of urban degradation, local wildlife or sewers to bring in people who want to see not just good pictures, but images of a topic in which they have an interest.

While it’s an approach that relies on the images themselves (and the accompanying catalog) to generate revenue, the sales are as dependent on your expertise in the subject as they are on your ability to communicate that knowledge through imagery.

For the most part, you’re going to be generating revenue by selling pictures. But with those sales difficult to make, hard to depend on and dropping in value, any other asset that you can use to support your photography can only be a benefit.

Related posts:

1. 5 Ways To Earn Money With Flickr
2. Different Ways to Teach Photography
3. More Creative Ways to Get Your Photos Seen
4. Five Overlooked Ways to Sell Your Wedding (and Other) Photography
5. Get Creative with Traditional Photography Jobs

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Photography: Enze Dal Verme

For many photographers, creating images doesn’t get more enjoyable or important than reportage. It’s the world of the photojournalist, the jetsetting professional shooting around the world to create stories and bring back pictures of events, people and places that are rarely seen. It’s a combination of exploration, exposition and artistry that together make up a life of adventure and excitement. Whether they’re lying next to an Arctic ice hole for National Geographic or covering the demonstrations in Egypt for the New York Times, reportage allows photographers to not just take pictures but to create the stories they want to tell.

It’s very difficult to do. And it’s even harder to do profitably.

Enzo Dal Verme has been doing it for ten years. A former PR consultant, he turned to freelance journalism when he closed his agency, publishing occasional pictures to illustrate his writings. His business grew and he now divides his time between travel photography, fashion, backstage, portraiture and reportage. His images have appeared in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle and Glamour, among others.

Good Reportage is Inspiring

For Enzo, who has recently published a guide to help other photographers shoot reportage, a photo narrative should do more than deliver images to a viewer. It should move that viewer too.

“[It’s] very subjective,” he says. “Good reportage is inspiring. It triggers something in the viewer, perhaps challenging and unsettling his or her beliefs.”

Enzo’s own work has included a series on urban heroes around the world, people who are leading recycling projects, defending local mangrove swamps or offering medical services to the poor, but he’s also covered wealthy parties in developing countries, ayurvedic medicine and art gallery directors.

All reportage, he says, starts with an idea, a topic that he’s curious to explore and which he believes might be published in a magazine.  He then starts doing the research, using social media, and ASmallWorld, an exclusive social networking site, to source contacts and advice about the locations.

Once Enzo reaches the destination, the clock is ticking and he has to work quickly, filling his schedule to ensure that the shoot pays. He organizes his images each day, placing them in a “first choice folder” and a “reserve folder” that allows him to track the development of the shoot while he’s still on location. Finally, he has to deal with post-production, a period that can be long if he’s to develop the images at the quality his clients demand. It’s a hard job, he says, but one that’s extremely rewarding.

Be Prepared to Fall into a Swimming Pool with Your Camera

Surprises on shoots are also common, not always welcome, and can range from fixing a broken camera to dealing with strikes, assaults and floods. Enzo has fallen into a swimming pool, camera in hand, while shooting a story about interior design in Bali, seen his laptop spill from his bag onto a marble floor in China, and had an editor change entirely the subject of the shoot two days before he was due to leave for India (he was able to complete and sell both projects).

“When you are used to last minute changes and unforeseen events,” he explains in his book, “problems can turn into opportunities.”

The difficulty of coping with contacts, tight schedules and equipment failure in distant locations are nothing though compared to the real challenge of reportage photography: making it pay.

According to Enzo, there are two ways to turn an idea for a reportage story into a payment. The first is to contact an editor you know and pitch the idea. Even if the editor doesn’t accept it as is, her feedback can help you to find a marketable angle. For experienced professionals, the kind of people who have a body of work large enough to build trust, overheads to meet, and contacts strong enough to get editors on the phone, this is the usual route. Beginners and enthusiasts though are more likely to have to shoot the story first then try to sell it when they get back.

For both kinds of photographers though, making the sale is hard — and getting harder.

“Magazine and newspaper budgets keep shrinking [and] the crisis started a trend that is giving photographers a very hard time,” Enzo pointed out in an email interview. “If someone is really passionate about a certain story, I believe it’s a good idea to go ahead and shoot it.[But] my suggestion is:  keep in mind that you may well be about to invest money that you will never see come back.”

That’s not encouraging news but it’s also not news that’s going to surprise anyone.  Photojournalism is not about to become less competitive and the decline in the readership of newspapers and magazines — the kind of publications that have the budgets to pay for photographers to fly around the world and tell their stories — may be slowing, but there’s little sign that it’s reversing. Even the iPad doesn’t look like it’s going to save the day.

There are a few things that a photographer can do to increase the chances of making his or her money back, says Enzo: look for unexploited topics; cultivate connections with buyers; be passionate about the subject; and, of course, deliver excellent quality work. Flexibility helps too, both to cope with the surprises the shoot will throw up and to adjust ideas to the needs of the market.

But perhaps the most important advice though is not to depend on reportage as your only source of income. Even Enzo’s business has multiple channels and what he shoots from one week to the next will depend as much on the needs of his clients as the inspiring idea that strikes him next.

If flexibility and an eye for an opportunity are essential for coping with the rigors of a reportage shoot, they’re no less important for developing a career as a reportage photographer.

Related posts:

1. Get Paid to Play with Cars and Cameras
2. The Most Overlooked Paid Photography Opportunities
3. How to Get Paid for your Flickr Photos
4. Write Your Way into Editorial Photography
5. My First (paid) Wedding Photo Shoot

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