Editors of top photography blog reveal their best money-making tips in 340-page book now available on Amazon.

New York, New York (PRWEB) June 9, 2009 — Photopreneur, the photography Web site (http://blogs.photopreneur.com) offering information and resources to help photographers make the leap from artist to entrepreneur, has released its first book, “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos.” The 340-page softcover book is available on Amazon and by visiting the Photopreneur site at http://blogs.photopreneur.com/99-ways-to-make-money-from-your-photos.

Packed with insider tips, practical strategies, and case studies, “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos” shares 99 creative ways to make images that generate cash. Each chapter reveals what to shoot, how to break in, and where to go to generate sales. Readers will learn how to sell stock, approach galleries, host their own exhibitions, earn money with Flickr, shoot for social networking sites, create and market photo products, form joint ventures, upsell their event photography and much, much more.

From beginners to enthusiasts and from hobbyists to professionals, “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos” (http://blogs.photopreneur.com/99-ways-to-make-money-from-your-photos) can help anyone turn their passion for photography into a reliable source of income.

Leading executives, entrepreneurs and photographers praise the book:

Oleg Tscheltzoff, co-founder and president, Fotolia –

“An excellent guide to both novice and experienced photographers. Whether you’ve just invested in your first digital camera or you’ve got an image library spanning years, this book will give you a step-by-step resource for capitalizing on your images.”

Jeff Beaver, co-founder, Zazzle.com –

“’99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos’ is a great resource for any photographer serious about turning their passion for photography into real money.”

Andreas Reinhold, engineer and freelance car photographer –

“A great guide for those who want to start earning money with their photos. Several of the shown ways to earn money with photography (http://blogs.photopreneur.com) work for me and some of the given hints were new and proved to be successful. This guide is so comprehensive that any photographer should be able to find a good starting point to get his business going.”

Authored by the editors of Photopreneur and published by New Media Entertainment, Ltd., “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos” has a list price of $34.95.

Note to media and bloggers: Please contact Cathy Baradell if you are interested in a review copy of “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos.”

About Photopreneur

Photopreneur is one of the Web’s top photography sites (http://blogs.photopreneur.com/about-the-photo-community), featuring stories, interviews and expert marketing advice. Its editors bring together decades of experience at the highest levels of professional photography. The Photopreneur team combines rigorous research, marketing creativity and a deep understanding of the photography business to help photographers – professional, enthusiast and occasional – earn income from their images. Photopreneur is owned by New York City-based New Media Entertainment, Ltd (http://www.nme.net/). Check out Photopreneur at http://blogs.photopreneur.com.

I have spoken about the business project we have been working on in a few posts here on Pixebian.com. Well all the hard work has finally amounted to the official  opening of the website for Shutter Tours.

The company was born out of a trip my wife and I took to New York in 2008. We wanted to get out and see the city, take photos and hit all the iconic locations in New York. Problem was, none of the vehicles stopped at any locations and if you wanted to take photos, well there was the opportunity to shoot through tinted windows at 30 mph. So we started researching the idea and spent countless hours developing the format, dealing with all the paperwork and permissions required to create a tour. We also did sample walk throughs to make sure it was interesting enough and that people learned from our walk.

With a light history lesson and lessons on composition ideas and skills, Shutter Tours will be starting May 1st in downtown Seattle. If you happen to come to Seattle for a vacation or a weekend, check out a Shutter Tours walking tour designed for photographers.

Disclaimer:This photo in no way represent Coldplay management, but it could be close.

First there is the three song limit with crappy lighting until the photographers are out of the pit, now bands and their management are getting more aggressive on demanding all rights from photographers.

“Coldplay has been accused of grabbing the rights to photographs taken during its concerts.

The chart-topping rock band has introduced a new contract for professional photographers that gives ownership of all the images to Coldplay’s management. Photographers who refuse to sign the contract will be denied access to the band and its gigs.”

So the question begs, why would a photographer sign a contract like this? Why not bring a 12 mega pixel point and shoot, pay for a ticket and get your own images without a contract? I understand the idea of having the photographer sign the contract and say its only for editorial use. I signed these type of contracts when I shot the Molson Indy Racing series. But no one ever said they owned my work.

If you work for a newspaper or magazine, chances are you won’t own the images anyway. Does a photographer have the rights to give away the rights of the newspaper when he shows up at the venue and the contract is thrust into his face?

This thread has an interesting comment about how this contract can negatively impact the fans and publications.

“I ran into a version of this contract with Coldplay in November of 2008. My paper had planned to give the show a big ride in both print and online.

We have to deal with contracts all the time, but this one was so tight and demanding it was horrifying.We attempted an amendment to the contract but it was rejected by Coldplay’s tour manager … so there went the planned photo gallery linked with the story.

After some discussions with my director of photography we opted for me to sign the contract and just get one photo we could use as a cut-out tease refer on the front of our local section.
However, because of the contract, there would be no photos online, including a gallery and we didn’t run any photos with the story in print outside of the teaser cut-out referring readers the the story.

I got some good photos that their fans here will never see because of this contract.

Also, we were allowed to shoot songs 2,3, and four, which is about standard. However, the position that was given to all of us covering this event was so far and off to one side of the action it was almost impossible to get a nice clean shot of the performance taking place. And, songs 2 and 3 were under such a dim red light I was actually trying to shoot a 300mm 2.8 hand held at 1/10 of second and they were still super under exposed( and not sharp) under a red light that would never reproduce on a cmyk press. All of my photos that we considered from this event came from the last 20 to 30 seconds of the last song we were allowed to shoot when the performers came anywhere near where we were told to stay.

Just my two cents.”

Gone are the days when you could get some real shots of real performances, not the pre proceesed “Cheese Whiz” type of stale images. 

Read more on BJP-Online.com

We are all looking for the holy grail to help our work get noticed, so I thought I’d put together a list of ideas that might help you  bring your company to the next level. You may not be the next Chris Buck or Terry Richardson, but you’ll being doing what 95% of the other people are not doing. 

First, you need to sharpen your game. There is no better advertising than that of having stunning work that rocks the socks off of a potential client. When learning to photograph, we all go through a growth period to define who we are as a photographer. After shooting tens of thousands of photos, you’ll soon find out what works for you and what doesn’t. This is the early stages of developing a style that will start to define you as a photographer. The photos that you get excited about, will probably be the ones that start to define the little niche you are trying to build. So this is probably the first and most important thing you need to do decide, who you are and what you will shoot?

Develop a Web Presence

You have to have a website or images hosted somewhere that people can find them. Even if you use Flickr.com or some other free site, you need to get your work out there to prove your abilities.

If you are going to build a site on your own, there are a number of great options, probably the best being WordPress with tons of plugins and both free and premium themes available. WordPress is easy to optimize for Search Engine Optimization with plugins like the All in One SEO pack and the Google XML Sitemap Generator.

Of course you’ll need hosting for your site. Do not use a free hosting service, they are terrible and loaded with ads that just detract from a professional image. Also be wary of using shared hosting that may have thousands of other sites clogging up the datapath to your site. At one point Pixebian was on a shared hosting site with over 4,500 other websites sharing the same IP address . Look at this chart below from our crawl stats for the site, before we moved to Westhost.com. This is the time in milliseconds that it took for Google to crawl Pixebian.com. Now you know why we went to a reliable hosting company. As of this writing, we have not been crawled since we changed hosting, so I hope the slow speeds did not impact our SEO effort. 

Once you have your hosting service, then you need to decide on design options. From my personal experience, forget the fancy flash intros and music. You can still use flash as I do on TerryDivyak.com, but keep it to a minimum. Editors and clients only have so much time to browse your site and if it’s slow or kludgy, then they move onto the next photographer. A well designed, easily navigable website with a short easy to remember domain name will keep viewers  focused.

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This is a must read for all freelancers and pro’s alike. Tony Luna has put together a four part series titled “Lifecycle of a Freelance Photography Job“. Hey lays everything out from marketing, to working with clients to billing.  A couple of the key points: “Your portfolio must be more than a box filled with pretty pictures. It must convey how you uniquely see the world and what you have chosen—out of a universe of options—to affix the rectangle of your viewfinder to and catch a moment in time.” “Most people want to be everything to everybody but you stand a greater chance of being noticed if you sell your services to a segment that needs what you love to shoot” “Very importantly, you will have to commit to creating marketing campaigns that will reinforce your unique viewpoint and your development as an artist.”

It seems that everyone wants to be a photographer and the competition is fierce and the amount of pay is so low that one can make more money at McDonalds, than starting out as a photographer.

So what are some ways to hit the jackpot and put some green in your pocket ?

Specialize

If you really want to make money as a photographer, you need to put yourself into a niche. Trying to be all things to all people makes you look like millions of  other people that are trying to make money in photography as a side income. You really have to become the absolute best you can in whatever niche you choose. Elevate yourself above everyone else is one of the secrets to making money in photography.

A friend of mine made some pretty good money taking photos of a construction site. A big condo project was going in close to his place, so before they broke ground, he setup a tripod and a small point and shoot. Everyday he took a photo of the site for a year and when the project was finished, he showed the progression to the company and was able to sell it for thousands of dollars for use in their marketing.

Some ideas for specializing

Dave Tejeda specializes in annual report photography and has built a pretty good name for himself based on what I see on his blog and the amount of work he is doing. He is also able to teach seminars for added revenue stream based on his experience.

Specialize in sports. This is a really tough nut to crack and everyone wants to stand on the sidelines and capture the action of a football game and feel the glory of a perfectly executed shot. The reality is, you’ll have to start in a poorly lit, high school football stadium or gymnasium, to cut your teeth in sports. You’ll also have to compete with all the parents and their shiny new SLR’s that will shoot for free while you try to figure out how to make money.

I would shoot my daughters lacrosse games and I was the only parent at the time who was shooting at the games and ended up doing the team pictures as well. This experience led to other opportunities like shooting the Molson Indy Series of races in Vancouver Canada and the women’s all-star soccer game in Seattle for a stock agency that needed coverage. At the end of this article, I’ll show you some ways to market your child’s sports team photos and make money using Zenfolio. Check out Sportsshooter.com for sports photography.

Specialize in a technique. Specializing in a particular technique can be a great way to become an expert and develop an income. When I think of HDR photography, I think of only Trey Ratcliff, who has built a great website Stuck in Customs. Or how about the young Joey Lawrence who developed a technique similar to the Draganizer style of post processing and at 17 started shooting for major advertising campaigns.

A few other ideas:

Use a Gigapan system to create ultra large images for websites and murals for building interiors.

360 degree photos using a product like the Giroptic sytem. Great for real estate or travel websites.

Kite aerial photography. This would be perfect for real estate or event promotions where there are large crowds.

Become a pet photographer

Specialize in taking photos for people using dating sites like Match.com and True.com. You could easily charge $75 for a series of images that help people market themselves on these sites.

The ideas are endless, you just need to look for an unmet need in your area. Work your tail off to refine it and become the best in your field.  This way you’re not competing with millions of others and using price as the sole consideration for customers using your services. Also, make sure your website screams professional.

Senior Portraits

This is probably the one area where I have made the most amount of money with the least amount of shooting time. Through shooting my daughters lacrosse games, parents would see my work and then ask me to shoot their senior portraits as well. I was always shooting candid portraits at the games, which helped parents see my style in portraiture as well.

A great way to market senior portraits is to start working with some of the more athletic kids, since their social circle tends to be larger. Word of mouth will take off and as long as you do quality work, siblings and other friends that may graduate in later years will seek you out. My only caution is, make sure you use a professional printer for prints. Nothing is worse than an ink jet print for a once in a lifetime photo that will fade after a few years.

Create unique canvas prints

If you have the ability to paint as well as take photos, then why not combine the two? Using a printer like Canvas on Demand, have your photos printed on canvas and then add your artistic personal touch. By using oils to create a painting you can create your own style with photography, ala Thomas Kincaid.

Get Sponsorship

I’ve never seen anyone talk about this idea before but it was something I thought about a few years ago when I was doing a lot of travel photography. If you have a unique style that people are drawn to, why not ask them to sponsor your work?

How does this idea work? Starting at the beginning of the year you will ask your benefactors to make a commitment to your work for twelve months. Using Paypal, you can setup a recurring charge to charge people, say $25 a month on a subscription basis. At the end of the year, they will have invested $300 as supporters of your photography. At the end of the year, take your best 10-15 photos you shot that year and let the subscribers pick one image they can have framed and mounted as a benefit of the subscription. Keep these images to a very limited amount or make them unavailable to the general public.

Buy your frames wholesale to keep your costs down and you should be able to net close to $250 a year, per subscriber.

EBAY

Everyone is trying to make money on Ebay and as a photographer there is one way you can, Artistic nudes with a twist. First Ebay is saturated with all types of these photos, but what I did was a bit different.

First I hired a model between the ages of 18-22 to work with me for 4-5 hours. I made sure I had a model release as well as a scan of her drivers license and social security card to verify her age. You can find artistic models on Modelmayhem.com and Onemodelplace.com. I had them bring all types of different clothing and had some myself so we could do lots of changes and looks.

During the session I shot some digital, but mostly black and white film and Polaroids. The film was then developed into contact sheets so I was able to see the results of my shooting. I then chose what strips of 6 frames I did not want to keep and sold these negatives to collectors of artistic nudes. I made sure I scanned each roll before selling them, as I retain all rights to the images and the collector only gets the negatives for personal use. The scanned images were also used to market the photos on Ebay.

The costs were minimal, about $12 per 36 exposure roll to shoot and have a contact sheet created. Collectors were paying as much as $35 per 6 frame strip for these negatives. I even had one complete roll go for over $200.

Two important things I found when selling these, the models who have the girl next door look sold much better, as did images that were shot on high ISO film. I guess because the high ISO gave a more artistic feel to the shots.

The Polaroids were also a big hit, but went for less than the film strips.

Create Custom Ceramic Tile Murals

Using a company like Sierra Custom Design, you can have your images or artwork made into custom tiles. You could market these to restaurants or companies that remodel bathrooms and kitchens.

Stock Images

You can also try to make money in the over saturated stock photo market. I personally would stay away from istockphoto.com and the other micro-stock sites, if you are trying to market your images. Not that they are a bad company, because I occasionally buy from them for this blog to keep the content rich when I don’t have an appropriate image. Because I think my work is worth more than .20 cents or so for each web download.  Time Magazine did source and image for a cover, so if you are interested more in the glory than being paid, it might be a good solution.

So a few sources  to market stock images are Photographersdirect.com which has been good for some sales of my images that allows you to make 400 times more on a sale than a micro-stock site.  Alamy.com has been able to weather the failures of their competitors. Keep in mind, both of these take a commission, so if you want to market images yourself and do the heavy lifting, Zenfolio.com has a great solution.

Zenfolio has two great benefits. First, you can upload your full resolution images with unlimited disk space. This allows you to sell your images whether they are prints (provided directly from your uploads to a third party printing facility) or downloads. The downloads can be setup with multiple sizes and licensing options that you control and after the order has been processed, the client gets their files. This gives you the flexibility to price your images based on size and use.

The second advantage is you can password protect you galleries for your clients and they can order prints and files from you without further work of the photographer after the order is placed. Images either get downloaded automatically or are printed and mailed directly to the client.

Check out Zenfolio.com and use code 5V5-2VC-XYR to save on your subscription. If you want to see how the check out process works, go to http://divyak.zenfolio.com/p299717714 and you can download a websized image from my shoot with Rane Stone.

Other stock options are Shareapick.net and if you still want to go the Microstock route, read the http://www.microstockdiaries.com/

Travel

One way to create a nice annuity for your future is to travel and create iconic photos of various locations. The key here is to have images that will be timeless in their look, so they can be sold years down the road. My image of the ruins in Tulum is still a great seller, years after it was taken. You can use the various stock sites listed above to market these images.

Weddings

Weddings are a fantastic way to make money, but you better know what you are doing. I have shot a number of weddings for friends and even then there is lots of pressure and you only get one shot at creating these images. Make sure you always backup your files, you don’t want this type of mess on your hands.

The absolute best source of info I have found for wedding shooters is at http://digitalweddingforum.com/

Blog

Lastly you can create a blog to share your knowledge and make you an expert. David Hobby of Strobist, who claims to be making an income in the six figures, should be your model for a great blog. He specializes in a particular area, low cost lighting.

Conclusion

In todays business environment, it is extremly tough to make money as a photographer, but if you find your little niche in the world, it can be done. I know I have missed a ton of other ideas from greeting cards to creating a book and who knows what else. If you have ideas you want to share, leave a comment here so others can see opportunities that may have helped you.

Click on share this below to email to a friend or Digg

Additional resources:

• Photoprenuer
• Dan Heller
• Business Photography Forum on photo.net
• Nikonians
• Canon Digital Photography Forums
• A Photo Editor

For those of you in the UK, welcome to the new world order.

What the new law says
Section 76 of the newly introduced Terrorism Act 2008 states: ‘A person commits an offence who elicits or attempts to elicit information about an individual who is or has been: a member of Her Majesty’s forces, a member of any of the intelligence services, or a constable, which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or publishes or communicates any such information.’ The law adds that a person found guilty of such an offence faces up to ten years in prison or a fine, or both.

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Pixebian.com is soon going to have a major overhaul of the design of the site. I will be moving it to a new server that is not hosted with 4,000 other websites on the same ip address. Yes, that’s why this site can be real slow at times. I am moving it over to Westhost and completely revamping the look by using a WooTheme.

Though the current theme worked well for the initial launch of Pixebian, I think an upgrade is needed to take it to a new level.

Back when I was in high school, we had a coworker who was almost like the “Screech” character in Saved by the Bell. There was one funny line that he said, that stuck with him for years afterwards. I don’t remember if we were out cruising or just hanging out, but he blurted out  in a screech like voice, “Alright chicks” It was one of those moments where you probably had to have been there, but I can almost picture these two photographers saying the same thing while walking at a resort area with a reflector and large telephoto lens.  Probably helped that I watched the video the first time without sound.  So I could make up all kinds of things in my head as to what they were saying.

But onto the video, they are demonstrating the California Sunbounce Cp09, which is a great little setup for shooting at the beach. I could definitely use one of these with an assistant when shooting swimwear. The light really fills in the shadows and gives a natural feel without flash.

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube DirektCP09 Sunbounce

See the images shot in the video on Bert Stephani’s website. He’s a really good shooter and I’m joking on the picking up chicks part. I’m sure he’ll help sell lots of product based on his shooting abilities. At almost $300 for the bounce and flash bracket, it is quite an investment.

California Sunbounce Micro Mini 2′ x 3′ Frame with Shoulder Bag.

Vivitar 285HV Auto Professional Flash

California Sunbounce Flash Bracket, for the Micro Mini, Mini and Pro Sunbounce Systems.

PocketWizard Plus II Transceiver 801-125 Relay Radio Slave Transmitter Receiver 2-piece Bundle With 2 Pieces of Hildozine 1001 Transceiver Caddy

I’m always on the lookout for new ideas for shooting and happened to run across Zetson’s Flash Frog. I love his commitment to being creative and even his profile on his blog lists his real job as a spare time interest.

“I’m Zetson. I live in Norway and photography is my main interest nowadays, in addition to playing guitar and singing. In my spare time I work as an air traffic controller.”

Like the Strobist.com site, he breaks down images like the one above and walks you through the steps of creating them. The great thing is that he uses simple items like light bulbs, sockets, etc. to create some great work that makes it seem so easy.

I think i’ll give his “Warhols Lightbulbs” idea a try.

Check out Flashfrog