Photography: Andrew Cullen

In January 2009, more than 2,600 students were enrolled in a photography-related program at the campuses of the Art Institute, a chain of private art schools. Of those who were studying for a bachelor’s degree, nine out of ten would be expected to find a job in their field of study within six months of graduating. For associate degree students, the employment rate would be just over eighty percent. While those figures may be encouraging, stepping out of college into an industry squeezed by media cuts, falling stock prices and wedding couples concerned about their budgets is never going to be easy. The industry may be getting tighter but there’s no shortage of young photographers hoping to squeeze in. One way to build a name, stand out and develop the kind of unique brand that can lead to a successful career in photography may be to pack a bag, flee the crowds and head to the back of beyond.

Andrew Cullen graduated from Boston University in 2005 with a degree in photojournalism. Rather than pass his portfolio around media outlets more concerned about which staff photographer to let go next, he joined the Peace Corps looking to discover another culture, learn a foreign language

“and find some stories that would strengthen my photography portfolio while maybe doing a little bit of good for the world at the same time,” he told us.

The Peace Corps sent him to Bangladesh then, after evacuating the program for security reasons, flew him on to Mongolia, a place where Cullen had spent some time as a student. From 2006 to 2009, he worked in community development, primarily in English language education. When his stint with the Peace Corps ended, he stayed on as a freelance photographer, only returning to the US in the late fall of last year.

Documenting the Dzud

Most of the stories Cullen shot during his time in Mongolia focused on development, health and the environment. He photographed rural hospitals, air pollution in the residential districts of
Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, and cultural festivals, as well as a few travel pieces. His biggest story was on the dzud, a long, bitter winter so cold that livestock are unable to graze. In the winter of 2009-2010, one of the worst dzuds in many years killed about 9 million of Mongolia’s 44 million livestock animals.

“It hit the poorest herders hardest,” Cullen recalled. “If you had 500 animals and 200 died, you still had a good base to build back from, and you would still have enough to eat, and could make some money come spring by selling cashmere wool from the goats. If you had a herd of 30 animals and you lost 25, you might as well have had nothing.”

Most of Cullen’s story ideas came from his familiarity with the country. He had already been in Mongolia for several years before shooting full time, had read about the country and knew which stories most interested the foreign media.  Most of his ideas though — as well as many of his subjects — came from conversations he had had with Mongolian friends and acquaintances.

If coming up with stories to shoot in a country as interesting and photogenic as Mongolia was relatively simple, selling those stories was always going to be a lot harder.

“Finding buyers was a huge challenge,” says Cullen, “[especially as] a young, un-established photographer working from a country that tends to fly under the radar as far as international news goes.”

Most of his stories Cullen pitched before beginning the shoot, but some were shot first then sold afterwards. UNICEF and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) commissioned some work from him, and EurasiaNet, a site focused on Central Asia, provided Cullen with enough work to keep him in the country.

Networking played an important role as well. Cullen sent emails to all of the international development agencies working in Mongolia to let them know that he was available to document their projects or social issues. When he was in the capital, he arranged meetings with their communications officers to discuss ways they could use his photography.

A New Photojournalist

Turning a long trip abroad into the start of a photojournalistic career then depends on two factors. Knowledge of the country is vital but has to be gained in the field and not just from books, media reports and travel guides.

“Give yourself time to explore the culture before you start blazing away with the camera, or you’ll end up with images that say a lot more about yourself and your norms than about the people you came to photograph,” warns Cullen.

And cultivating connections is vital too, both as a source of story ideas and to find outlets that publish and pay for those photographic stories.

Now back in the United States, Cullen is shooting and writing for a newspaper, finishing a travel guide to Mongolia, which will be produced by Other Places Publishing later this year, and running a photo blog on the New England music scene. He’s also looking for funding that will allow him to move back to Asia within the next year or two and is hoping to complete a portrait project and a social/landscape series back in Mongolia.

In other words, five years after graduating with a degree in an endangered profession, he’s doing all of the things that a professional photojournalist can do to develop their career. Much of that opportunity came from an early decision to pack a camera and head to a place that most photographers tend to ignore.

“Mongolia gave me a chance to follow stories that I was passionate about, and that weren’t being covered by many — or any — other photographers,” says Cullen. “It gave me a sort of calling card to set me apart from other young photographers. And it gave me a lot of practice finding stories where the stories weren’t always obvious.”

Andrew Cullen might have had a host of different reasons for joining the Peace Corps — a combination of curiosity, philanthropy and photography — but a long trip abroad has helped him to build the foundation of a long career as a photographer.

Related posts:

1. The Art Institute Turns Photography Enthusiasts into Professionals
2. Citizen Photojournalist Sells Image For $40,000
3. 14-Year-Old’s Self-Portrait Turns Up On Porn Film

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PhotopreneurBlog/~3/3-LHWY0XVww/peace-corps-turns-graduate-into-photojournalist

When stock photography company Getty Images announced its agreement with Flickr to broker photo sales on behalf of the site’s members, one of the attractions of the Yahoo property was its size. According to the press release issued at the time, Flickr was then attracting 54 million visitors every month and its 27 million members had uploaded more than two billion photos. That was in July 2008. By April the following year, the number of photos on the site had grown to 3.4 billion, and Flickr was continuing to grow at a rate of 90 million new photos and videos a month. Today, Flickr has about 5 billion images. That’s an impressive growth rate until you realize it only makes Flickr the fourth largest image store on the Web — and that according to Pixable, a photo management service, Facebook  now receives 6 billion photos each month, more than Flickr’s entire inventory. The social media site is on track to hit 100 billion images by the summer of this year. So has Flickr had its day? Is Facebook now the Web’s most important photo-sharing site?

Judging by the features Facebook has been adding to its photo-sharing services, Marc Zuckerberg’s company certainly seems to think so. In February of this year, Facebook rolled out its new Photo Viewer, a slideshow that lets its 500 million active users “browse more photos faster without having to lose your place.” Its image tags already do more than help the site deliver search results, the only function Flickr’s tags offer. They identify faces automatically, allow multiple images to be tagged en masse and, most importantly, they push images into the timelines of the people who appear in the photos, giving them instant viral power.

Success on Flickr still relies on steady networking, and participation in groups and discussions. On Facebook, it’s enough to have lots of friends and the time to tag them in photos to get your images seen.

Facebook for Wedding Photographers

The advantages haven’t been lost on wedding photographers. They advertise on Facebook using demographic data to target engaged women in their market area. And they upload tagged images to their business pages to push their photos in front of potential new customers on the guest list. Inviting viewers to add their own tags helps them to reach people they couldn’t identify themselves.

But while Facebook is now an enormous image depository and has the kind of social connections that Flickr lacks, its benefits seem to stop with event photographers — the people who can get the most from  those social connections. Landscape photographers can’t tag the mountains in their images, and stock photographers can do little on Facebook with the pictures in their portfolios. Getty Images’ page is a public relations channel rather than a commercial site that makes sales. Fotolia’s page tries to draw in potential buyers with free images, and iStockphoto doesn’t appear to be on Facebook at all.

Top microstock photographer Yuri Arcurs is one of the few non-event photographers to make good use of the social media site. His page has more than 26,000 “likes” and offers updates about his business and his latest shoots.  Even Arcurs though doesn’t attempt to sell through Facebook — at least not photos. His photo gallery contains fewer than 30 images, mostly shot behind the scenes. The only items he promotes on his Facebook page are branded tools, such as his SteadyPod, which are aimed at other photographers. For Arcurs then, Facebook can be a branding tool but not a photography-selling service.

That isn’t true of Flickr. Getty, which now sells “thousands” of images on the Yahoo property, has brought a level of professionalism to a service which photo buyers had already been using to source original imagery. You don’t have to look to hard to find examples of photographers who have sold images they placed on Flickr, even for sums large enough to buy themselves new cameras.

And while Flickr can’t automatically push tagged images to potential new clients it can push photos onto the pages of other photographers. The contacts you make on Flickr get to see your latest uploads when they log in; upload frequently enough and you can ensure that a steady stream of your images are passing across screens around the world. The number of those screens will depend on the number of contacts you’re able to generate on the site, and the proportion of image buyers they include may be no different to the proportion of potential clients among the group of guests who see a wedding photographer’s images on Facebook.

No less importantly, those Flickr viewers who aren’t buyers — and they’ll always be the bulk of the people seeing your images — can still deliver valuable rewards. They’ll add comments, ask questions, point you in the direction of similar images and offer critiques that will help to improve your photography.

Facebook is the Old Flickr

When Flickr started, it was often portrayed as a site for vacation snappers and a place where people shared images of lolcats. That it could also be a place where photography enthusiasts swapped ideas and experiences, critiqued each other’s work and laid down challenges tended to be hidden beneath the piles of casual users. That it was a place where usage licenses were bought and sold was one of photography’s best-kept secrets until Getty made everything official, first with a collection and then with a complete licensing plan.

The rise of Facebook as a photography platform hasn’t changed those benefits. If anything it’s made them easier to acquire. As casual users upload their photos of friends, family and felines to Facebook, the social media site may grow in size but it leaves Flickr to grow in quality. Wedding photographers can still win new sales and clients by using a service that’s relies on personal connections rather than images themselves, but other kinds of photographers — especially stock and art photographers — would do better by sticking with Flickr, a site more often used by image buyers.

After all, while size was important to Getty when it teamed  up with Flickr, it was mostly the quality of the original, creative and unusual images on the site that the stock company really wanted — and which it now sells.

You can learn how to use Flickr to make photography sales in our book The Successful Flickr Photographer.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Fails Stock Photographers
2. Facebook Claims Right to Create Derivative Works from Members’ Photos
3. Ad Men Seek Flickr Photos and Flickr Members
4. Flickr Photographer Says No to Getty
5. The 5 Most Inspiring People on Flickr

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PhotopreneurBlog/~3/KFTo-ROo2qY/flickr-still-beats-facebook-for-photographers

Websites for wedding photographers currently provide two kinds of services. They can act as portfolios, allowing photographers to show off the quality of their work to potential clients, take bookings and field enquiries. And they can ease the photographer’s workflow, providing a place for them to upload images and a store from which the couple can order prints and assemble albums. Both those types of sites though are aimed at the same market: the couple that hire the photographer and buys most of the images. With an average of 141 guests attending each wedding though, the sites miss a large opportunity for additional sales and marketing. It’s an opportunity that PicsCliq, a new wedding photography service, is now trying to exploit — and it’s aiming to do it with the help of social media.

Like traditional wedding sites, PicsCliq allows photographers to upload the images they’ve shot at a wedding but it also provides an easy way for them to promote those photographs through Facebook to an audience larger than the couple itself. By “liking” an image, the photograph is placed on the photographer’s Facebook page and by adding tags, the photographer can make sure that it’s seen by the people in the photo as well as their friends.

“Facebook is the number one photo sharing site in the world,” explains PicsCliq founder Reuven Moskowitz. “That’s what people do on Facebook: they like, tag share and comment on photos. What PicsCliq has done and is continuing to do is add the same components that exist on Facebook to each photo on PicsCliq.com, and then ‘push’ those interactions back to Facebook.”

From Photo Pushing to Photo Selling

The idea of using Facebook as a channel to distribute images to potential leads isn’t entirely new. Facebook cites Chris Meyer as an example of the value of targeted demographic advertising on the site. (Last year, the wedding photographer told us that his $1,000 spend on the site had generated over $100,000 in bookings). But his ads only run from December to March. The remainder of Meyer’s Facebook enquiries come through tagging and distributing images on the site.

PicsCliq takes the idea a step further by allowing photographers to use Facebook as a way of selling images as well as promoting their services. The site, which is free for photographers, depends on merchandise sales for its own revenue. As users browse and tag the images, they’re offered the opportunity to buy a print, as well as a decorated mug, teddy bear, keychain, canvas print and mouse pad. The site is geared towards generating sales rather than enquiries, the opposite of a traditional wedding photography website.

“Without the right environment, promoting, products and approach, even if an event guest does come to view the pictures he or she will not be compelled to purchase photos in a way that is optimized for them,” warns Moskowitz.

So far, most of those sales have come in the form of prints but Moskowitz expects that as the site develops, products that reflect the entire event — collages, mosaic prints and memory books — will become more popular.

The site launched in February 2011 and remains in private Beta as it gathers feedback that will influence its operations. Six hundred photographers have requested an invitation and more than 100 are currently active. Most importantly, the idea that a set of wedding pictures can appeal to more than the couple that hired the photographer appears to be well grounded. PicsCliq is seeing over 150 unique viewers for each wedding added to the site.

Guests can find those images through Facebook but also by browsing the categories on the site; photographs need to be arranged by family, portraits, dance, guests and children. PicsCliq is also working on a function that will allow guests to view all of the pictures in which they’ve been tagged.

The service isn’t intended to replace traditional wedding sites, says Moskowitz. It doesn’t allow the wedding couple to create their wedding album or provide a way for photographers to take direct bookings so photographers should retain their current online proofing solutions. But it should allow photographers to generate some extra sales from a wedding they’ve already been hired to document — products like memory albums for grandparents that include pictures of all the grandchildren.

Changing Wedding Photography

It’s possible that PicsCliq will do more than that though. When wedding photographers plan their shoots, they tend to have a collection of images in mind that they know they’ll need to capture. Mostly, those images will be of the wedding couple itself, the formals that include the entire family, perhaps a few candid, photojournalistic shots, and a number of images of friends and guests that reflect the atmosphere of the event.

If PicsCliq can turn those guests into a market in their own right, then photographers may need to enlarge their list of planned images to include plenty of guest portraits, shots of children and smaller family clusters. In addition to shooting the bride and groom — and shooting for the bride and groom — photographers working at a time when social media allows easy sharing, universal access and the ability to sell directly to anyone may now need to consider the entire wedding party as their market. The couple paying the bill will always be the priority, but the ability to generate a few hundred more dollars in sales by shooting some extra pictures could change the way wedding photographers work.

Even without those changes though, photographers should find that a social media-connected sales page like PicsCliq’s can still generate some useful additional revenue.

“The more purchase-worthy images uploaded the greater the sales possibilities,” says Reuven Moskowitz. “However, we believe that even without changing the way photographers currently shoot, there are many images that are never sold that PicsCliq can help sell.”

To the two kinds of wedding sites now used by photographers then, it may now be possible to add a third: one that uses social media to generate not just potential new referrals but real additional sales.

Related posts:

1. Five Overlooked Ways to Sell Your Wedding (and Other) Photography
2. My First (paid) Wedding Photo Shoot
3. Creativity Really Can Sell Pictures
4. When You’re Not The Only Photographer At The Wedding
5. Are Your Pictures Ready To Sell?

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PhotopreneurBlog/~3/WG4i2Ce8Ro4/sell-your-wedding-pictures-to-all-the-guests

Photography: maxyphoto.com.au

A photography shoot that ends with a check starts long before the photographer hits the shutter release button. It starts even before he packs his bag and selects the gear. It begins with research. Before any business, including a photography business, can  produce a product, it has to know whether there’s a market for that product and how profitable it might be. Market research is an essential stage in any venture and while it’s not a straightforward effort for photographers, with a little thought and an investment of time, it’s not an impossible mission either.

The first focus of any market research is the product itself. Photographers need to know whether anyone is going to want to buy the photos they produce. Stock photographers have a range of tools that — although they can’t promise sales — can help to predict the chances of success, assuming that the image reaches the right levels of quality.

Following the Stock Market

Some of that comes down to a general market knowledge. Agencies consistently report that buyers struggle to find images that contain broad ethnic diversity, that reflect older customers or which are realistically shot instead of posed with models. Knowing that buyers are looking for images that contain those features should help to improve the chances that a photo series will produce sales. Glancing through magazines regularly, too, should give photographers a good idea of the styles that photo editors are currently looking for. Top microstock contributor Andres Rodriguez has described how he keeps records of published images that he uses to inspire his own compositions.

More helpfully, microstock sites in particular also list the images that are now selling well. Fotolia, for example, lets photographers view the most popular images today, in the last week, over the last month, and ever. Just about all the sites indicate roughly the number of licenses an image has sold, giving buyers an idea of how likely the image will  have been used by a competitor and providing photographers with an impression of the kinds of pictures that buyers prefer to see when they search for a particular keyword.

While keeping an eye on that data will help to determine what to do with a search term, it won’t necessarily reveal which subjects are currently in demand. PicNiche can do that. Created by software engineer and photography enthusiast Bob Davies, the site offers toolbars used by both buyers and contributors to compare supply and demand for search terms. Crunching the data the toolbars produce allows Davies to assign a score that correlates with the level of a competition a picture on a particular topic may face. On a scale on which anything below 10 is “bad” and a score over 100 is rated a “niche,” the keyword “office” comes in at 0.33. “Beer gut” is currently 1,522, a good excuse as any to head back to the fridge.

Photographers can use the site both to check the levels of competition for a keyword they’re thinking of shooting and to see lists of current opportunities. Neither can guarantee sales, but both should give a clue to the likelihood of selling a stock license and an indication of whether the picture is worth shooting.

For photographers hoping to win event commissions, the research is a little harder. There are no tools that can tell them the right kinds of images to produce let alone the best demographics to target or the most effective marketing channels. Market research is going to be largely intuitive rather than based on the solid sales figures that stock companies produce even if they don’t share directly. On the other hand, the level of competition is going to be smaller too and largely restricted to other photographers in the same geographical area.

The research then will be mostly based on understanding what those other photographers are offering. For the images themselves that will be an assessment of whether they’re pitching traditional wedding photography images, edgier wedding photojournalism or edgiest Trash the Dress Photography. In practice, you’re likely to find that many will be offering a combination of at least the first two. The real challenge will lay not in assessing the nature of the product itself, which should be fairly straightforward, but in understanding how to deliver the images, how many images to deliver and how much to charge for them.

The Photography Pricing Process

In fact, for photographers, pricing is likelier to be a harder market research topic than subject. Even stock photographers need to be aware of how much their pictures are worth to buyers; with agencies taking as much as 80 percent of the sales price and websites allowing them to cut out the middle man, there’s a strong incentive to know how much to charge yourself.

But stock photographers have an advantage: fotoQuote has done the work for them. The software uses sales data contributed by professional photographers to produce an accurate snapshot of current market rates. Although it costs about $150, it does take the legwork out of the research and provide a justification for charging a set price based on usage.

Event photographers are going to have be a little less scientific and look at the contents of the packages their competitors are offering and the amounts they’re charging for them. Photographers looking for other kinds of commissions, whether commercial or editorial, can do worse than follow the suggestions outlined by Susan Carr, former President of the American Society of Media Photographers and author of The Art and Business of Photography. She breaks down the pricing process into four elements: creative fee, expenses, license, and market. Each of those elements is complex and each poses a whole new set of market research questions.

But those are questions that any photographer hoping to generate revenue from their images needs to answer — and they’re answers that should be collected before the photography session begins, not once you’ve shot the images and are wondering how much to charge for them and why they’re not selling.

Related posts:

1. HispanicShots Supplies Niche Market…And Opportunities
2. How to Market your Photography Without Really Trying
3. Using Direct Mail Blasts to Market Your Photography
4. Art Will Solve Photography’s Problems
5. Promote JPG Magazine and Market your Images

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PhotopreneurBlog/~3/oxYptSXcRxU/assessing-your-photography-market