Photography: Bruce Myren

Full time professional photographers complain about the competition from enthusiasts who don’t count their overheads. They worry about finding their next client, spend more time than they’d like on paperwork and marketing, and if they’re being honest, they’ll admit that not all jobs are equally exciting. But they still have one big advantage over enthusiasts: they get to take a lot of pictures. They get to hone their skills, they’re paid to build their experience and even if they’re not taking photos, they’re working with photography. By the time they hang up their camera for the last time, they can be confident that they’ll have had every opportunity to become as good a photographer as they’re ever going to be.

That’s not true for enthusiasts. People who work full-time and cram their picture-taking into their weekends and evenings have to battle to find the hours they need to improve their skills. There never seems to be enough time for photography tours and road trips. And as for building the kind of long-term personal projects that interest galleries and build a name as an artist, they can drag on through years of occasional weekends — if they ever start. There are things though that anyone can do — both professionals and amateurs — to keep their skills developing and to move their photography in the direction they want it to go.

Create Time and Make It Solid

The number of hours in the day are limited and when you fill it with an eight or nine-hour workday, take away sleep and time with the family, you can start to wonder how you ever find time to eat, let alone practice photography. But it is possible to arrange your schedule and use your calendar to create gaps for picture taking.

Bruce Myren, for example, is an adjunct professor of photography at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, a job which should keep him in touch with imagery. Teaching as many as five classes each semester, though, makes finding time for personal projects no easier than for anyone working a full-time job.

“It is always a juggling act to find time to prep for teaching, doing freelance work, getting to the studio, and going out to make pictures,” he says.

Myren’s solution is to schedule one day each week as a studio day. He writes the day into his calendar so that it looks as real as any other appointment. While he doesn’t always make it there, he does try.

“The more I adhere to this the happier I am,” he says.

For people who don’t work in photography, scheduling an entire day in the studio is a little harder but it may be possible to schedule a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon or an hour as soon as you get back from work. Like Bruce, you might find that family commitments and sudden work crushes mean that you don’t always make it, but if you can work your photography into your routine — instead of picking up a camera whenever you feel like it — you should find that it’s a habit that’s hard to break.

Network Now So That Supporters Know What You’re Doing

Scheduling time to take pictures will help to sharpen your skills and build your project. But you also want people to see those photos once you’ve created and edited them. Putting them online is easy enough and will give you some form of audience but no website is as prestigious or as rewarding as a photography book that people buy and enjoy or an exhibition of your photos that people can browse and admire.

Photography: Bruce Myren

That requires building a platform before you publish your photos. You need to have people ready, waiting and keen to see your photos as soon as they come out.

Photography classes will give you access to a teacher’s network of gallery owners and editors. Visiting galleries can provide an opportunity to talk to staff, get to know them and their taste in photography — and make sure they know about you and your work. But even online networking can yield benefits too. Let family and friends know about your personal project. Build connections with other photographers and with people who have an interest in the subject of your images. Those connections will prove valuable when your pictures are ready to be seen.

Raise the Funds That Will Let You Shoot What You Want

And they’ll also prove valuable when you’re looking to fund your projects. When Bruce Myren turned to Kickstarter to fund a collection of images shot along the fortieth parallel, he was able to turn to friends and family on Facebook for the money and to ask them to share news of the project with their friends. He describes himself as “shameless” in his willingness to send direct tweets to companies he thought might be receptive and he had also built up a large email list over the last few years as he promoted his other work around Boston and the country. Having put together the promotional video and written up his campaign, he had all the sourcing funds he needed already in place to pay for his trip across the United States.

Altogether, Myren estimated he’d need around $15,000 to complete his project. He asked for $10,000, made that amount by the end of the first week and went on to collect $17,860.

“To be successful, you need to do your homework, plan everything out, account for contingencies, and remember that you did not think of everything,” says Myren. “It is a well-prepared person that can capitalize on an opportunity as it comes by.”

Bruce Myren describes himself as an artist and photographer. He’s had a long list of exhibitions and his work is noticed. But even he struggles to find the time and the money to shoot what he wants and to keep developing as a photographer. His solution, a mixture of scheduling and networking building, is one that can be used by all photographers, time-strapped enthusiasts and professionals alike.

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Photography: Star Rush

For most photographers, the lens on a smartphone is a fun toy. It provides a way to capture a moment — a moment to which they hadn’t brought their DSLR — and it lets them share those snaps with friends and family. But it’s not a real camera. It’s not a device that they would use to shoot for a client or to create the kind of art that they’d expect to see in an exhibition or hang in a gallery. For other photographers though, an iPhone or Android is more than a telephone with some basic imaging capabilities; it’s their main tool, their go-to device for capturing landscapes, people and scenes… and the device they use to create the kinds of pictures that end up on gallery walls and win cash prizes in prestigious competitions.

Star Rush, a Seattle-based street and documentary photographer, has been shooting as a “serious hobbyist” for more than twenty years. She now focuses on mobile photography and last year founded Lys Foto, an online magazine that showcases images captured on mobile phones. Her own work has been displayed in solo exhibitions in Seattle and she’s contributed to group shows in London and Rome. Her 20-photo solo show is currently in preparation for the City of Edmonds Arts Commission in 2014. While the venues and publications that have shown her photos were not exclusive to mobile photography, all of the work was captured using an iPhone 3GS or an iPhone 5.

The Device Determines the Picture

Star’s shift towards mobile photography was inspired by her desire to see what a simple, utilitarian device would do for her photography, to discover what she could create and capture with a fixed lens, fixed aperture and limited exposure meter. The basic editing and sharing functions built into the device were also an attraction, allowing her to shoot, process and publish her imagery quickly and easily.

Asked about the advantages of mobile cameras over traditional cameras, Star listed nine benefits that included accessibility; integrated capture, edit and share functions; simplicity; access to the work of other photographers; reduced clutter; the focus on composition; and fun. All of them, she argues, change not just the way the picture is made but the picture that the photographer produces.

“In the end, it’s all photography, isn’t it?” she says. “The photo is a photo. But the medium and process by which one captures and makes that photo is going to differ and often the medium can impact the process — this is where mobile is different. So, for me, I use a smartphone because the best camera is the one you have with you, as Chase Jarvis has said.”

Star describes mobile photography as “connected photography,” emphasizing a mobile device’s ability not just to always be on the scene but to be connected to other photographers. She uses three photographic social media platforms and notes the difference between the communities found on each of them — and the cultures those communities have created.

Flickr, says Star, is still best used on the desktop and has the most effective tools for photo management. She uses the site to see and communicate with a wide variety of photographers, to access a broad range of different kinds of images and film, both mobile and traditional, and as an off-site back-up for all her photography. Unlike other social media sites, she notes, Flickr is entirely image-based with users sharing little text-based news or other information at all.

Google+ Star describes as a cross between Flickr and Twitter, despite its apparent attempt to compete with Facebook. She contributes to the site because of the diverse photographers in its community and sub-communities. The platform is also useful for building a personal brand.

“The site dynamics are such that an active stream with engaged followers does positively impact search rankings and other matrix, such as visitors to my own personal blog,” she says.

Star has also been active on EyeEm, a Berlin-based service that started when mobile photography was primarily part of the underground art scene. The community, she says, is image-centric rather than social media-centric. Its users are engaged and the quality of the images is high.

“Sometimes communities overlap among these three, but not that much really. So being involved in each permits me to extend my reach and engage followers from a wide spectrum of the photography world in a regular way. It’s rewarding as a photographer to see diverse images so regularly and to communicate with those who create them.”

No Instagram

Star’s following is large enough for her to receive frequent requests to test or join new apps, but one app she’ll no longer use is Instagram. She left during the debacle over their terms of service and hasn’t been back since. The platform, she argues, is not about photography but is an “image-centric social media tool” with too many false accounts and spam, and too little management. “Serious photographers,” she argues, don’t use Instagram’s filters. The service has developed into a network that competes with Twitter, rather than a photographic tool that can push photographers in new directions.

Star Rush does not describe herself as a professional photographer. (She teaches composition and rhetoric at Cornish College of the Arts.) Although she can see the benefits of mobile photography for photojournalists who can use a device that’s light, agile and connected, she concedes that commercial photographers will find the limitations more restrictive. A smartphone might be useful for test shots, for off-site client reviews and as a replacement for the old Polaroid but few commercial photographers will be swapping their Nikons for their iPhones.

“My thinking is this, if you were going to use a point-n-shoot in a commercial job, then sure, you’d use a mobile device. If you were never going to use a point-n-shoot, then you’re never going to use a fixed lens, fixed aperture, limited exposure meter mobile phone in a commercial job as the primary camera.”

Unless, of course, the photographer is switching to street shoots, documentary images and art photography. In that case, they might well find they’re able to conveniently shoot photographs that end up in solo exhibitions and winning awards.

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When Bruce Livingstone launched iStockPhoto thirteen years ago, he split the stock industry. For the first time, enthusiasts — people with no connections to the photography industry, no professional training and no experience of creating for a market — could upload their photographs and make money from their talent. The result was a revolution. While established professionals were able to continue selling through Corbis and Getty (although against greater competition), engineers like Sean Locke, one of iStockPhoto’s first contributors, were able to quit their day jobs, buy a consumer DSLR and make livings, sometimes good livings, as microstock photographers. Other enthusiasts with careers they didn’t want to leave have been able to make a bit of extra cash shooting and uploading at the weekends.

That revolution has been grinding to a halt. Multiple platforms have followed iStockPhoto but the sale of the site to Getty in 2006 for $50 million allowed it to outgrow its copycats, become the biggest microstock site on the Web — and slash commissions until they were as low as 15 percent. Yuri Arcurs, arguably the world’s most successful microstock photographer, quit iStockPhoto last year to focus on direct sales, claiming that the prices and commissions were now too low to cover the costs of production. In March, iStockPhoto expelled Sean Locke after he pointed out on his blog that the company was giving away its photographers’ images to users of Google Docs.

Now though, a new revolution may be under way, and once again Bruce Livingstone is at the center.

Profit-Sharing for Photographers

Stocksy, Livingstone’s latest enterprise, is a new stock site that takes a completely different approach to delivering images from photographers to buyers. Like many sites, photographers will receive 50 percent of the sales price of their photos but they’ll also receive 100 percent of the price of extended licenses and a share of the profits the company generates.

That’s because Stocksy is a photographer’s co-operative, owned and operated by the people who create the photos the site sells. Instead of generating profits for a corporation, Stocksy will distribute its profits to its contributors.

The idea came from photographers themselves, disappointed at the structure the industry had developed.

“Photographers came to visit us at our house in Los Angeles. They all said the same thing. They wanted more. They were disillusioned and frustrated with the state of affairs in the industry — artists were not fairly paid for the work they were creating,” Livingstone explained to us in an email from British Columbia. “We started talking about what would make a better business model, what would give photographers ownership, a decent royalty and a voice in how the business was run. Cooperatives in rural Canada and co-op structures are well developed and quite advanced as they have been around for a long time supporting group farms. The co-op keeps enough cash to operate, but the collective owners get all the money.”

Stocksy currently has 250 members. Most are photographers but some are employees and directors who provide advice. Each year, the co-op will hold an Annual General Meeting at which shareholders will vote on the running of the business. Once the firm is profitable, 90 percent of profits will paid to photographers with 10 percent going to employees, directors and board members.

That revenue-sharing may be unique in the world of photography but it also marks another change in the development of the stock industry. While anyone can upload an image and make it available for sale, following a review of the photo, on a microstock site, Stocksy maintains much of the exclusivity familiar to photographers who have tried to sell through Corbis or Getty. Photographers can apply to sell through Stocksy but the co-op will only invite photographers to join if their images match the co-operative’s aesthetic criteria. Stocksy is looking for photographers who can demonstrate a style and workflow that is consistent and unique, and who produce images that go beyond “too-perfect models pretending to do things, floating in white space or anything that appears to be forced conceptually.”

If that means that the site will have a relatively small collection, that’s fine with Bruce Livingstone.

“Something that’s really important for us is not to compete with any other agency on numbers of images or numbers of photographers,” says Livingstone. “That game is old and already has a winner. The size of the collection creates too much competition for photographers, dilutes earnings and disappoints buyers when presented with tens of thousands of bad results. The bigger the collection the worse the experience for everyone. It becomes unmanageable and inexplicably overwhelming for the consumer…. Each picture found on Stocksy should be inherently useful and special.”

Prices for the images are generally higher than those found on microstock sites, with RF licenses for small images starting at $10 and rising to $100 for X-Large photos of 2829 x 4242 pixels. Licenses for unlimited print runs or resale products cost even more. Livingstone, though, is confident that buyers will be willing pay a premium not just for the higher quality of the site’s curated collection but because supporting a sustainable model for photographers is the right thing to do.

The Return of the Two-Tier Stock Industry

Despite deliberately avoiding direct competition with iStockPhoto’s giant collection, Stocksy is clearly intended as an alternative to the microstock site that Livingstone created. Asked how he felt regarding the way the site has developed since its sale to Getty, Livingstone responded with a mixture of admiration at the growth Getty was able to create and disappointment at what they did with that growth.

“Getty grew the revenues on iStock exponentially. I couldn’t have done that alone. It’s what happened to iStockphoto after I left that is really at issue. The focus on corporate profits, not on fair pay for photographers is what we believe is problematic.”

If Stocksy succeeds, it will go some way towards solving that problem. But the co-op’s exclusivity means that it can only solve the problem partially. Livingstone recommends that photographers who want to succeed in stock find a niche, specialize and commit to shooting it full-time. Enthusiasts who want to remain part-time will have to stick with sites like iStockPhoto, creating a two-tier stock industry made up of committed professionals working and selling together, and part-timers accepting the small fees delivered by microstock sites.

“If that’s how it plays out,” says Livingstone, “then I think that’s fine.”

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When it comes to telling their own story in images, photographers often struggle. While their photos and galleries may be memorable and unique their websites and portfolios are too frequently dull, derivative and, to a buyer who sees one slideshow after another, instantly forgettable. Instead of showing who they are, the websites become a collection of what they’ve shot, a series of images with no connection to the person who took them or the photographer the buyer will be booking.

According to one expert, it’s only when photographers see their websites and their portfolios not as marketing devices intended to show their skills and range but as autobiographies — as an opportunity to tell their own stories and show who they are — that they stand out and win jobs.

“The best portfolios, to me, are materially self-portraits regardless of the subject matter,” says Allegra Wilde. “This is not about a romanticizing the suffering or narcissistic artist. The kind of imagery I am talking about is much less likely to be forgotten by the viewer, or in the case of the pros, the buyer.”

For Wilde, who started her career selling ad space at Workbook before becoming the company’s Director of Talent and Agent Branding, a portfolio (and now a photographer’s website) should flow. The presentation should have a rhythm, match the work and, most importantly, tell the story of the photographer.

It Takes a Hero to Be a Successful Photographer

That’s not something that all photographers want to do — or think of doing as they create a site to pitch for work. Building a website that doesn’t just show pictures but shows who you are means putting yourself as well as your images on display. The personal projects become more important as they reveal the questions you address in your images, the aesthetic that attracts you, the messages you want your photos to communicate and the way you want them to speak. Buyers are invited to judge the photographer and their interests as easily as they judge the quality of their work. It’s not a display that makes all photographers comfortable.

“The most successful photographers (or any other artists for that matter), always take some kind of leap into discomfort,” says Wilde. “Usually this level of discomfort is rooted in their own personal ‘exposure,’ or fear that no one will like their images or hire them. These heroes of photography, (yes, I call them ‘heroes,’ because it takes enormous courage to do this) make images from a very naïve place, usually self-reflective and quite emotionally ‘naked.’”

After operating a couple of private online forums — one for photography and illustration agents; the other for ad agency photo editors and buyers — Wilde now runs Eyeist, her own photography review service. The company employs a team of photographers, buyers and photography business experts to examine photographers’ websites and portfolios, and recommend improvements. Photographers can register and upload images for free then book a review when they’re ready. They’ll be asked for “tons of info” about their images, their aims for the review and their development as a photographer before they select (or ask for) a reviewer and choose the kind of review they want. The fees range from $100 for a basic review consisting of an audio commentary critiquing up to 30 images to $350 for help with editing and sequencing a series of images so that it showcases the scope and storyline of a project. So far the company has provided around 200 reviews for photographers who range from students, emergent photographers and enthusiasts to full-time professionals.

The reviewers look at whether the words the photographer is using to describe his or her images actually match the images they’re showing. Often, says Wilde, the two things differ so the reviewer will focus first on repairing that disconnect. They’ll then start thinking about suggesting ways in which the photographer can create images that help them achieve their goals, change those goals or address their presentations and marketing.

Reviewers Reignite a Photographer’s Passion

The result should be not just a plan that a photographer can follow to improve their appearance, but a renewed interest in creating images that have something to say.

“It wasn’t enough to give the photographer a road map for improvement. You have to ignite (or re-ignite) their passion about their own work,” says Wilde. “That way, they have a much better internal sense of how to make progress and become much more open to creative ideas that they might not have entertained before.”

None of these recommendations, says Wilde, compare to the sort of congratulatory comments that you’ll find placed by friends or family at the bottom of a Flickr set or a Facebook album. Those comments might make you feel good but they won’t point out the flaws that are preventing you from winning work.

Overall, Eyeist’s reviewers tend to find two mistakes in photographers’ presentations. The first is the tendency of photographers to aim at a particular market or follow a popular style in the hope that joining the crowd will bring success. In fact, says, Wilde, it just brings them more competition. And the second is not pushing their images hard enough or spreading them widely enough so that both the photographer and the photographs connect with the right buyers.

“I know this sounds crazy in this day and age of photo sharing, social and business networking with photographs, but many photographers either undersell their work by not marketing it enough, or, by overselling it — by first dumbing down the work (making it more generic to follow the marketplace), and/or by constantly promoting and posting their images and assignments without any personal context,” says Wilde. “This makes it hard for the viewer, and especially the buyer, to ‘invest’ in the work, and to engage with the photographer personally as a possible collaborator.”

At a time when social media has made branding personal, photographers are going to have to learn to step out from behind their cameras and put themselves on display. They don’t have to shoot self-portraits but the way they show their work has to be about them as much as about the subjects of their images.

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It’s not just photographers and social media fans who like Instagram; lawyers love the photo-sharing site too. After Instagram announced a badly-written change to its terms of service that would apparently have allowed the Facebook property to sell contributors’ images without compensation, the lawyers brought out their briefcases. Even though Instagram quickly took down the new terms and reverted to the old ones, the lawyers filed a class action suit alleging breach of contract. Last month, Instagram applied to have the case thrown out.

That case may not lead anywhere, and if it did, it would benefit photographers at the expense of a big company. That doesn’t always happen. Photographers, amateur as well as professional, need to be wary of being sued just as much as they need keep an eye out for big firms trampling over their legal rights.

Wedding Photographer Sued for Missed Kiss

That happened earlier this year to Australian wedding photographer George Ferris of Studio Edge Multimedia who found himself in court defending a lawsuit brought by two unhappy clients. Ferris, said the couple, Jarrad and Sheree Mitchell, had missed all of the most important moments of the wedding, including the ribbon cutting, the certificate signing and the pair’s first kiss as husband and wife. They withheld $400 of the $2,700 fee — and sued for $6,700.

Ferris countersued for $6,000, claiming the remainder of the fee, court costs and $63 for a meal that he bought at his own expense. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal showed a surprising amount of sympathy for the difficult work of wedding photography; it agreed with Ferris that capturing the kiss is a challenge. But ordered him to pay the Mitchells $750 for failing to supply the full value of the package he’d sold, and told the couple to compensate the photographer for the cost of his meal.

That’s the sort of case that haunts every wedding photographer. The photographer appears to have screwed up. If you’re blaming shadows and blur on flowers and flash bounce, and missing key moments of the event, you can expect clients to be unhappy — and you can be afraid that they’re going to overreact and demand a giant chunk of compensation.

User Uploads Images, Photographer Sues the Site’s Owner

But it’s not just clients who can reach too fast for their lawyers. Photographer Charlyn Zlotnik recently threatened to bring a suit against Les Irvin, owner of jonimitchell.com. According to a page that went up on the site, Zlotnick demanded between $25,000 and $600,000 in compensation after an anonymous user uploaded four of her images without her permission.

Irvin’s site includes a legal page that explains how copyright owners can claim infringement, and he removed the images from the site as soon as he was informed of a claim. That quick deletion and the fact that the images were uploaded by a user and not by himself should have been enough to clear him of any accusation of copyright infringement.

Despite some apparent initial obstinacy, Irvin’s plea for the site’s users to write to the lawyers and to the photographer pleading with them to drop the suit might have been successful. The site no longer mentions the suit and the plea has been removed. BoingBoing has noted that the photographer was recently caught up in a drugs bust, while the legal firm that sent the letter demanding compensation has been mentioned on watchdog sites Ripoff Report and Extortion Letters Info. There may have been a lot less law to this case than meets the eye.

Prepare the Evidence Before the Suit

Zlotnick’s attempt to catch some cash might have had little credit but a recent case about one iconic image has a lot more justice on its side and offers a number of lessons for photographers.

The photograph at the center of the case dates to 1991 and shows University of Michigan’s Desmond Howard striking the Heisman Pose after returning a 93 yard punt for a touchdown. The shot was taken by freelance photographer Brian Masck who initially licensed it to Sports Illustrated.

Last month Masck sued a long list of targets, including Sports Illustrated, Nissan, Getty Images, Champions Press, Photo File, Inc., Fathead, Wal-Mart, Amazon.com, and even Desmond Howard himself for violating his copyright, either by reproducing the image without his permission or for selling unauthorized copies.

Law professor Eric Goldman has written about the suit and noted that it raises a couple of interesting issues.

The first is that because there were three photographers at the game, and all captured the image in slightly different ways, in 2011 Masck altered the image so that he would be able to track its use:

He added two tells to the photograph. First, he removed the branding from the glove on Desmond Howard’s right hand. Second, he extended the lettering on the football. These small alterations do not appear to the untrained eye, but assist Brian Masck in tracking infringing uses of his photograph.

That’s an interesting little trick that other photographers would do well to emulate especially when they’re shooting the same scenes alongside other photographers. Watermarks can be removed but these small “tells” are much harder to hide.

The second point concerns the importance of registering images with the Copyright  Office. Blaming bad legal advice, Masck didn’t register the image until 2011. That’s an error which would cost him the higher rate statutory damages.

Even without those damages though, Goldman believes that the actual damages and infringer’s profits should be both high enough and hard enough to prove for the parties to settle out of court.

That might suggest that turning to a lawyer when you think your copyright is being infringed is a good idea. Sometimes it will be. But street photographer Brandon Stanton come up with much more elegant response to an example of copyright infringement.

According to PetaPixel, Stanton was approached a few months ago by clothing firm DKNY who wanted to license 300 photos from his Humans of New York site to decorate its stores worldwide. The company offered a flat fee of $15,000. Believing that $50 per photograph was too low, Stanton rejected the offer.

That should have been the end of it. And it was until one of his fans sent Stanton a photograph of his images used to decorate a DKNY store in Bangkok.

Instead of demanding payment or calling his lawyers, Stanton told his Facebook page and asked his followers to share his demand that DKNY give a $100,000 donation to the YMCA in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The company responded within 24 hours. The images, it said, had been used in an internal mock-up which that store had used by mistake. It apologized and donated $25,000 to the YMCA in Stanton’s name.

That’s not a decision that the lawyers will like but it should make photographers and social media fans happy.

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Image: Pongsatorn Sukhum

Pongsatorn Sukhum was on his way to becoming a professional photographer. A long-time camera enthusiast, he took a year off college while studying in the UK to work in a studio that shot advertising photography. He then moved into editorial photography, shooting for travel magazines and building up a collection of underwater stock images that combined his love of photography with his passion for Scuba diving. In the mid-nineties, his work was shown in a group exhibition in his native Thailand. Today, Pongsatorn runs an engineering business in Bangkok but his continued work in underwater photography, and in particular, his images of World War II wrecks off the coast of Thailand are an example of how talented enthusiasts can keep their professions while maintaining their passion for image-making and even contributing to the preservation of the subjects they love to shoot.

Pongsatorn now produces fine art prints of his photography which he sells through his website. But publications call him whenever they need images to complement their editorials on wrecks in the region and he is still commissioned occasionally for advertising work. If he’s not working on an engineering project, he’ll dive one or two weekends each month and when he’s not on the water, he’ll find time each week to process images and research ships.

Artistry Meets Expertise

That demand for professional imagery from a photographer who only works in the profession part-time continues for a couple of reasons. The quality of Pongsatorn’s photographs is certainly one factor. Pongsatorn may not be a full-time photographer but his images are professional quality. He shoots in black and white to convey the sense of being in an environment in which color has been stripped away by the water, and to convey the mood at the depths where the ships rest.

“I feel that the characteristics of high-speed b/w film faithfully capture the light and ambiance at these great depths,” he told us by email. “I also believe that entering the water loaded with b/w film is a mindset.”

The result is a collection of atmospheric shots in which the fragility and graceful lines of the diver are set against the solidity of a slowly decaying steel hulk placed in front of a backdrop of silty grays.

But the continued demand among buyers for Pongsatorn’s skills can also be put down to his expertise. Underwater photography is demanding. Photographers have to be skilled in diving as well as in image-making. They need to understand their equipment and the environment as well as the subject of the shoot.

“Underwater, we can’t change lenses, add filters, or replace batteries so advanced planning is required,” says Pongsatorn. “Familiarity with the layout of the wreck is crucial to avoid delays associated with orientation.”

Pongsatorn keeps a collection of construction blueprints related to the wreck he’s about to shoot, as well as sketches that he updates regularly. Before the dive, those plans are transferred to a waterproof slate for use underwater so that he’s not trying to communicate a new idea to a co-diver or assistant while they’re swimming. The choice of shots, too, poses a range of different problems. Wide angle images mean keeping other divers and their bubbles away from the scene long enough for Pongsatorn to get his shots. That’s not usually an issue when shooting wrecks that aren’t popular dive sites but for well-known locations, Pongsatorn usually pleads for a ten-minute head start. Before some shoots, he’s even asked the Thai Navy to cordon off a wreck for a day.

While underwater photographers don’t have the same daylight worries as landscape photographers, they do have to cope with other challenges. Weather conditions can restrict accessibility to remote sites to certain times of the year, and sediment raised by the actions of a swimming photographer can reduce visibility.

“This happens frequently as the wrecks are naturally on the sea bed (with the exception of the so-called vertical wreck) where there is a great deal of sediment just waiting to be disturbed,” says Pongsatorn. “Diver buoyancy control and proper finning techniques need to be practiced.”

Learn How to Fin

Often, the constraints of time and the limitations of depth mean that Pongsatorn can only make one or two dives to a low-lying wreck on any given day. Some dive profiles, he says, are so deep that he’ll only be able to stay at the site for as little as five minutes.

“As you can imagine, deep wreck photography is a very low-yield activity. However, these challenges make it exciting and create opportunities for some truly creative work.”

For other photographers looking to specialize in underwater photography, Pongsatorn notes that while no official training is required, there are numerous basic courses and workshops available that will explain how light behaves underwater and how to set up and look after equipment. Photographers who happen to live in tropical areas can start by photographing clown fish, he recommends, as they’re easy to find and tend to stay in one place. Once they’ve mastered finning and have control over their stability, photographers can pick a subject and study its behavior.

Most important though is to respect the environment in which you’re shooting. On his blog, Pongsatorn has highlighted campaigns for shark preservation and attacked dive operators who remove artifacts from the wrecks they visit.

“There are several operators who specifically set out to loot. It’s in their literature. They abuse the legal loopholes and lack of enforcement. It’s sad to see all these artifacts being hauled up day after day. These people need to be educated.”

Similarly, divers who venture into a wreck exhale bubbles which can get trapped below decks and under bulkheads. In time, these air pockets corrode the metal and exert an upward pressure on the metal plates, causing them to collapse, Pongsatorn warns.

It’s that kind of knowledge and that level of concern that combines with creativity and artistry to produce images that are attractive to buyers — both of art prints and for commercial use. Find a subject for which you feel passionate enough to want to study and understand completely, bring to it your photography skills, and you also won’t need to give up the day job to earn money from your photography.

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Wedding photographers who aren’t using Pinterest are missing an important opportunity to both inspire current clients and to win new brides. That’s the opinion of a number of leading wedding photographers who have turned to the picture-heavy pinboard to show off their work and market their businesses. They’re shrugging off concerns about the uncontrolled spread of their photos and the site’s reliance on sharing copyrighted images, and are enjoying the benefits of building contacts with engaged women looking for photographers and with clients looking for wedding ideas.

That those benefits can flow on Pinterest to wedding photographers in particular isn’t surprising. The site’s demographics are about 70 percent female and the 25-34 age range is the most common, making up about 27 percent of the site’s users. With more than a quarter of those users in households with incomes of over $100,000 per year, those twenty-something and thirty-something women are a prime market for suppliers of wedding services, including photography. And they’re buying. According to one study, 70 percent of Pinterest’s users say they turn to the site to get inspiration on what to buy and 43 percent want “to associate with retailers or brands” with which they identify. The site reports 10 percent more purchases than any other social media platform, including Facebook.

That reach and those statistics are pulling in wedding photographers. A search on the site for “wedding photography” boards produces an apparently endless stream of images.

Create a Board Before the Shoot

Lisa Devlin signed up last year after noticing that a number of her clients and other people she know in the wedding industry were already using it. A UK-based, former music photographer who has worked with acts as big as Eric Clapton and Boyzone, Lisa switched to wedding photography after shooting her agent’s nuptials. Her quirky wedding shots have won her the title of British Journal of Photography and Wedding Magazine Wedding Photographer of the Year. She now also runs workshops at PhotographyFarm on the outskirts of London and develops Photoshop actions for photographers.

Lisa’s initial goal in joining Pinterest was to collate and share her ideas with stylists for PhotographyFarm. They start a board which evolves as the themes for the workshop come together. Those goals, though, have developed too. Creating a board is now the starting point for any shoot that Lisa is involved in. In 2012, for example, before a shoot in Nevada with leading bloggers Rock n Roll Bride, Gala Darling and Nubby Twiglet, Lisa started a board called Vegas Baby to share concepts between everyone involved.

“It’s a great tool for bringing visual ideas together so I also run some general inspiration boards for anything I see online that inspires me,” says Lisa. “It might be processing, concepts, fashion or quite obtuse things that appeal to me in some way.”

Inspire Current Clients, Win New Ones

Leeann Marie uses Pinterest in a similar way. Like Lisa Devlin, the Pittsburgh-based wedding photographer has also been on the site for about a year. In addition to seasonal fashion boards, she has a number of more professional boards that include montages of wedding details  and color-themed weddings.

The content that Leeann posts to Pinterest from her blog and website is primarily intended to get new brides talking, but she divides her audience on the site into two. For people who have already made a booking, the ideas that Leean shares become a precursor to the photography experience, an opportunity for brides to get excited about the prospect of being photographed looking their most beautiful. For engaged women wondering who to hire, Pinterest provides an outlet to meet photographers and understand their style.

“Think of how you can use Pinterest to appeal to current clients and future clients,” advises Leean. “Those are two different markets. Your current clients need ideas to inspire them and help them through a session. Your future clients need you to remain in their minds and be interactive.”

Photography: Leeann Marie

The approach is paying off. Not only has Leeann seen one of her detail collages repinned more than 100 times to different wedding inspiration boards; she is also aware that her efforts on the site have translated into new bookings. A bride whom she photographed in October 2012 was a keen Pinterest user and was very excited to see her own wedding images appear on the site.

Not all clients may be that generous about their photographs being spread across the Internet, however, and the same is true of many photographers. One of the biggest criticisms of Pinterest is that it encourages the unauthorized publication of images owned by their creators. The site has responded to the criticism by rolling out a “no pin” feature that websites can install on their pages to prevent their images from being placed on a board. Flickr is one company that has applied the function to all the pictures on its pages. The assumption that photographers approve of sharing unless they take action to prevent it, however, may be worrying to some.

As far as Leeann Marie and Lisa Devlin are concerned, though, there’s little point today in worrying about where images placed online end up. Lisa invested money in enabling Pinterest on her site and instructed her Web developer to produce the first Pinterest-compatible lightbox. A “pin it” button now appears whenever a user hovers over an image on her site.

“We are in a digital age of online sharing. If you are overly concerned with your images appearing anywhere on the internet then do not post them on there yourself,” she says. “My attitude is that we should embrace this brave new world and be flattered that anybody else takes an interest in our work.”

The result, she notes is that only Google is a better source of traffic to her website, outdoing Facebook, Twitter and even her paid advertising.

“Brides have embraced Pinterest probably more than anyone else so if you are a wedding photographer and not active on Pinterest then you are missing out on a great marketing tool.”

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Contributors to iStockphoto are planning to pull their portfolios from the microstock site following the discovery of a new distribution agreement with Google. Users of Google Drive, the search company’s cloud-based productivity app, can now insert stock photos drawn from Getty’s inventories into their Google documents without paying a license fee.

The images aren’t promoted, nor are they obvious but they are available. Users of Google Drive must first press “Create” then choose one of the productivity apps, such as the text editor, Document, or the slideshow creator, Presentation. If they then choose Insert Image from the menu, the last option allows them to “Search” the Web for pictures. They can look on Google, browse a collection supplied by Life, or choose “Stock Images” to bring up pageloads of commercial photographs. Selecting an image pastes it directly into the open document.

At no point are users asked for a fee, and the images arrive uncredited and stripped of EXIF data.

According to Sean Locke, a top microstock photographer and one of the first to discover the program, the 5,000 stock images available on Google Drive appear to  come largely from Getty’s Vetty and Agency collections which are drawn up from iStockphoto to Getty Images. Some photos though have been reported to come from Getty’s Flickr collection and others have from a range of collections owned by Getty. iStockPhoto has said that around 700 of the photos in the collection came from a group of 490 contributors to the microstock site.

$185 on Getty, Free on Google

Google is believed to have licensed the collection through Getty’s Premium Access program, paying between $60 and $100 for each photo. That rate would net the photographer a flat fee of around $12 for an image that can be used multiple times by Google Drive’s 10 million-plus users. That’s a much lower price than many of the photographers would have earned from a single sale. This image of baubles in the shape of a Christmas tree decoration, created by Martin Poole and drawn from Photodisc, for example, can be used on Google Drive for free. On Getty Images, a royalty-free license for the same picture at a similar size is offered for $185. Locke has found six of his photos on Google Drive so far.

The search results come with a note from Google that all of the images are “labeled for commercial reuse with modification.” A link takes users to a reminder that “usage rights come into play if you’re looking for content that you can take and use above and beyond fair use.” Nowhere, though, are the usage rights for the images spelled out. Users aren’t told how they can use the images, where they can display them or for how long they can make use of them, let alone who created them. As Sean Locke notes, there is nothing to prevent a Google Drive user from saving the images, free of watermarks, onto their hard drives and using them in any way they wished.

“With these image available for full commercial use for free, why pay for a license?” he asks.

Not surprisingly, the availability of the images on Google Drive has caused some consternation among iStockphoto’s contributors. Using the site’s forum, contributors questioned whether the images were being offered for free without permission and why Getty wasn’t protecting their property.

The initial response, posted by a “mr_erin” and later backed up by Claudia Micare who manages Contributor Relations at Getty Images, was to apologize for the lack of information but confirmed that Google did pay for the images. A clarification published on the iStockphoto forum said that the company had met with Google to “to refine the implementation which we believe will address some of the concerns raised over the past several days–including copyright ownership.” The site also explained that:

“Google has a bespoke EULA to allow these images to be used by Google users through the Google Drive platform. Users of this platform are granted rights to place this imagery in content created using Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Presentations and these end uses can be for commercial purposes; however, users are not granted rights to use this imagery outside of Google Drive created content and Google users have no rights to redistribute image files outside of the context in which they’re used.”

We have asked Getty to explain those limitations in more detail but hadn’t received a reply by time of publication. If the company does reply, we’ll add it to this post.

Planning D-Day

Photographers, however, remain angry at what they see as Getty’s appropriation of their copyrights and the devaluation of their images. A thread running on Microstock Group, a forum for microstock photographers, is calling for D-Day, or Deactivation Day, to take place on February 2, Groundhog Day. Photographers taking part in the initiative have promised to remove their images from the site on that day. Photographer Lisa F. Young, for example, has promised to deactivate 500 files and may remove as many as 1,000.

“It is really important to take a stand to let the agencies (in this case, Getty the biggest in the world) know they cannot bully us and violate our copyrights with impunity,” she told us. “This is an important issue to protect copyrights for all photographers, as well as other artists.”

While it’s not clear exactly how many images will be removed from the site in protest at the Google agreement, the latest projected total puts the figure at over 20,000.

Other photographers, though, are more skeptical. Yuri Hahhalev, doubted that deactivation would help unless it affected at least 10 percent of iStockphoto’s files,  and even Sean Locke told us that he plans to keep working with Getty “as long as we can discuss and resolve this issue.”

That may be unlikely. This isn’t the first time that iStockphoto images have been distributed through a tech company. In 2007, iStockphoto sold extended licenses to Microsoft that let Office.com users download and use stock images. Then too, usage rights prohibited distributing copies of the content outside of projects and documents created with the Web app. And yet, some of the images were tagged with a “public domain” copyright status.

A number of photographers may pull their images from iStockphoto on February 2 but whether the boycott will move Getty remains to be seen.

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In an environment as competitive as the photo industry, photographers need all the advantages they can get — including specialized knowledge. Expertise in f-stops and exposure times is pretty common and while talent might be rarer, there’s no shortage of enthusiasts who can shoot great pictures time after time. Now that they can make those images available online, through stock sites, their own sites or even through Flickr, anyone looking to make money from their images should be wondering what else they can bring to the market that can help them win customers.

Fortunately, the photography world is filled with examples of people who matched a passion for a field outside photography with a love of picture-making to enable their images to reach a niche market.

Sometimes, that passion doesn’t have to be much more than membership in a particular community. CreationSwap, for example, is a stock site with a number of unusual features. Its inventory is a mixture of free images, stock images that usually sell for between $1 and $6 (although some images may cost as much $20), and a print-on-demand service that returns $10 to the artist for each print order. Royalties for contributors begin at 50 percent but rise by between 1 and 5 percent for each approved item submitted to the site’s free gallery to a maximum of 70 percent.

That incentive, as well as the print option, are unusual enough, but as the site’s name suggests, CreationSwap is appealing to a particular kind of market — and to a particular kind of photographer. The inventory is aimed at churches and religious groups, and the site looks for contributions from Christian artists worldwide.

Clearly, there’s no way for the site to be able to check the faith of its contributors but members of Christian communities and consumers of church media are more likely to understand the sorts of images — the Fourth of July, Easter, Christmas and Sermon Series shots — that churches need.

There may be millions of Christians who know how to use a camera but by combining knowledge of the community to which they belong with their understanding of photography, religious photographers have an advantage when it comes to supplying the media that serves that community.

Both Creation and Evolution are Good for Photographers

Science and religion are usually portrayed as antagonists but when it comes to photography, they have a lot in common. Just as religious photographers have an advantage in some areas of the photography marketplace, the same is true of those photographers with an understanding of science.

PhotoResearchers is a stock site that specializes in scientific imagery. Its clients are mainly publishers of science textbooks as well as marketing companies looking for images to promote science conferences and other events. From those with a good understanding of science though, the site requires two kinds of assets that are otherwise hard to find.

Knowledge is one. While a picture of a flower on a stock site might be described solely as “Purple flower in a field,” the same flower on PhotoResearchers is more likely to include the flower’s name, Latin name and any special features. This flower, for example, is described as:

Bladderwort, Utricularia dichotoma, flower. This aquatic plant has underwater “bladders” that trap and digest small aquatic organisms.

That picture used for a week in a quarter-page event ad to be seen by up to 5,000 people would cost $569 — far more than a small shot of a purple flower would fetch on a microstock site. For images like these, it’s the knowledge as much as the photography that gives the image its value.

The same is true of access. Many of the PhotoResearchers’ photos show either expensive scientific equipment or the results of using that expensive scientific equipment. Those kinds of photographs can only be taken by people who have access to laboratories and can obtain the permissions necessary to shoot in them.

Again, like Christian photographers, there’s no shortage of scientists who are keen on photography but when they combine their two areas of expertise they bring photo buyers a quality of imagery that gives it extra value.

An Eye for Fashion and Photography

Sometimes though, you don’t even have to try to combine a passion for a non-photography field with expertise with a camera. Scott Schuman was a director of men’s fashion when he took time off to care for his daughter in 2005. Taking his camera with him on walks around New York, it was only natural that he would find himself pointing his lens at the people on the streets with the most impressive dress sense. He’d put their pictures on his blog and add a few comments about their sense of fashion. The aim, he said, was to try to shoot style in the way that most designers hunted for inspiration.

His blog, The Sartorialist, soon became essential reading for fashionistas, and Schuman found himself in demand from a number of fashion companies hoping to use his style of photography. He’s produced advertising campaigns for The Gap, DKNY Jeans and Burberry, has worked with Vogue and style.com during Paris Fashion Week as well as with a number of businesses outside the world of fashion such as Verizon and Nespresso. An anthology of his favorite shots was published in 2009 in a book entitled The Sartorialist.

Schuman’s success may owe something to the zeitgeist for shooting anywhere and anytime but mostly it’s down to his eye for style and fashion and his ability to capture them in an image.

To make money from photography, you always need to know how to handle a camera — and you need to have right camera to handle. You’ll need talent and a photographic eye but all of those things are relatively common. If you can also add knowledge, access, experience or expertise that’s rarer and harder to find to your skills as a photographer, you should find that it’s a lot easier to turn your photography ability into cash.

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Photography: Gavin Hookaway

When it comes to getting their work noticed, professional photographers have all the breaks. They have the best equipment, the time to practice and perfect their skills, and the contacts that can put their portfolios in front of buyers and their photos on the walls of galleries. At least that’s what enthusiasts think as we stroll through another exhibition of works created by a professional photographer. And yet, sometimes, those shows aren’t organized by someone who gets paid to head to the wilderness and create beautiful landscape images. The pictures are shot by a camera enthusiast with a regular job, a passion for photography, the talent to produce photographs that people will want to see and the determination to push themselves to be better, build those connections and show their work.

Gavin Hookway, for example, has been practicing photography since 1981. His love of art won him a place at Portsmouth Art College in southern England but at the same time, he was also offered two engineering apprenticeships. In the end, he chose a career that he believed would provide good training, job security and a steady income. He didn’t choose photography. It was that job that enabled him to purchase his first camera. He now lives in Scotland where he works full-time in the health sector but manages to devote between eight and twelve hours a week to photography, time that has to include capturing images, processing them and printing them.

So far, though, Gavin has shown his works in two exhibitions and has two more planned for 2013.

Professional Photographers Provide Advice and Open Doors

Gavin’s first show took place shortly after he took up photography. He had asked a well-renowned portrait and wedding photographer in his area for a review of his work; the photographer had suggested that he mount an exhibition and gave Gavin the name of a contact at the nearby Mountbatten Gallery. After calling for an appointment, Gavin showed the gallery a small portfolio of the work he wanted to exhibit.

“They obviously liked what they saw as I got a space booked for around six months later,” he recalls.

The exhibition lasted for seven days and included a special evening viewing for friends, relatives and work colleagues which, says Gavin, “went very well.” So popular were Gavin’s photographs, in fact, that on the fourth day of the show, he received a call from the gallery informing him that someone had peeled eight of the images from the mount boards on which he had stuck them as a way of saving costs, and taken them away. None of the images were for sale so Gavin was able to feel flattered that someone liked his work so much that they were willing to steal it.

The second exhibition took place in September 2012 at Eden Court in Inverness, and was held jointly with Nicki MacRae, an artist and Gavin’s friend. Again, the exhibition was a result of a critical review. In February of last year, Gavin attended a weekend seminar hosted by professional photographers Joe Cornish and David Ward. Ward looked over Gavin’s images, helped him to plan his photos and suggested new directions in which he could take his photography:

“Having your work reviewed in this manner can seem very daunting at first, but the advice, support and confidence that David gave me allowed me to ‘see’ my work in a different light,” says Gavin. “For me, the advice allowed me to refocus on what it was I was trying to say in my images, and what I wanted the audience to ‘feel.’”

The result was that when Gavin came to shoot the pictures for his Ruin exhibition, instead of simply taking pictures of ruined crofts and standing stones in a standard landscape format, both he and Nicki looked at the subject more closely and with a stronger emphasis on the details.

For the show, Gavin produced twelve photographs. Six were conventional shots of ruined sites across the Highlands of Scotland, one showed a croft door and window, and five were abstract pieces that looked at rusting machinery, stone circles and croft buildings.

“Many times I have walked through a ruined building, or a stone circle and seen nothing else but that. However, if you start looking closer at the texture of the croft building, or the stones themselves – you start to see things that your senses have completely overlooked before.”

Keep Learning

Gavin’s ability to cross from the kind of activities that photography enthusiasts usually perform — driving out to the wilderness and shooting landscapes — to the sorts of shows more usually put on by professionals has come about largely through his willingness to continue learning. In addition to the weekend seminar that helped him to produce his Ruin exhibition, Gavin completed a Diploma of Photography at the Photography Institute in 2011, a course which enabled him to relearn some old skills and pick up some new ones. Most importantly, he says, it also showed him how to create a business plan that would enable to him to set up as a professional or semi-professional photographer. That is a move that so far his confidence, a lack of belief and an awareness of the large number of talented professionals out there has prevented him from making.

Even if Gavin doesn’t make the jump to being a professional photographer, he is able to come close by acting like one. Prints of his works are available from his website and asked what other photographers can do to increase their chances of putting on shows and selling pictures, he sounds every bit like a 9-to-5 photographer.

“If you are considering exhibiting your work, think about setting up your own website – keeping the image numbers to a reasonable size – quality not quantity,” he advises. “Set up a Facebook and/or Flickr dedicated site for your work. Have business cards made, and visit local galleries with your portfolio – having made an appointment rather than cold calling.”

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