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.

From PDN “Nearly 200 photographers responded in February to PDN’s first survey of emerging photographers, providing us with a snapshot of how photographers are getting their training, how they are paying for it, and other information about how they are launching their careers. ”

Link Here

 

Underneath a star by Jaewalk licensed under CC

Getty Images and Flickr launch first-of-its-kind creative imagery collection

SEATTLE and SAN FRANCISCO, March 11, 2009 – Getty Images, the world’s leading creator and distributor of visual content and other digital media, and Flickr®, a Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) service and one of the world’s largest photo sharing communities, today announced the launch of the Flickr Collection, a creative imagery collection now available exclusively on gettyimages.com for commercial licensing. With the debut of this first-of-its-kind collection, customers can easily access and license the inspirational and unexpected photographs for which the Flickr community is known.

“We are thrilled to provide our customers with this ground-breaking collection,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and chief executive officer of Getty Images. “We are impressed with the talent from the Flickr community, and are proud to once again lead our industry in this exciting new direction. We are eager to hear what our customers think, and look forward to their input in shaping this ever-expanding collection.”

“This collection reflects the unique perspective Flickr offers as the ‘eyes of the world’ and is testament to our community of photographers, who have shared their authentic visions with the world through Flickr,” said Kakul Srivastava, general manager, Flickr. “Providing our members with a way to bring their imagery to Getty Images’ worldwide customer base through this partnership has been an important step for us and we look forward to seeing the collection evolve over time, just as Flickr itself continues to do.”

Photographs for the Flickr Collection were selected by Getty Images’ editors based on their expertise in licensing digital content and insights into customers’ needs. The collection features a variety of conceptual imagery, such as everyday scenes and believable subjects, and original and regionally relevant content. It is a living collection, with thousands of new images added each month to meet the evolving needs of Getty Images’ customers. Images from the Flickr Collection are available in both royalty-free and rights-managed licensing models.

“The Flickr Collection is determined by the lives of those who contribute to it,” said Andy Saunders, vice president of creative imagery at Getty Images. “The collection changes the definition of ‘stock’ photography by making it even easier for our customers to find and license imagery that is unexpected, genuinely original, and created by an untapped imagery resource – people everywhere.”

Getty Images will continue to build this collection over time by inviting select Flickr members to participate. Members who choose to participate will benefit from the global reach and distribution power of Getty Images to help market their images, as well as its unmatched expertise and experience in rights and clearances of digital media. Please visit the collection at www.gettyimages.com/flickr.

About Getty Images
Getty Images is the world’s leading creator and distributor of still imagery, footage and multimedia products, as well as a recognized provider of other forms of premium digital content, including music. Getty Images serves business customers in more than 100 countries and is the first place creative and media professionals turn to discover purchase and manage images and other digital content. Its award-winning photographers and imagery help customers produce inspiring work which appears every day in the world’s most influential newspapers, magazines, advertising campaigns, films, television programs, books and Web sites. Visit Getty Images at www.gettyimages.com to learn more about how the company is advancing the unique role of digital media in communications and business, and enabling creative ideas to come to life.

About Flickr
Flickr is one of the world’s leading online photo and video sharing communities where people explore, find and manage pictures and video clips of life’s daily moments with friends, family and the world. With 73 million worldwide visitors each month and more than three billion photos stored by 35 million members, Flickr serves as the ‘eyes of the world’ and has revolutionized the sharing and discovery of what people see and experience through digital imagery. Flickr was developed by Ludicorp in February 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in March 2005. To share and explore the world’s photos and videos, visit www.flickr.com.

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For more information, please contact: 
Bridget Russel, Getty Images, 206-925-6405, bridget.russel@gettyimages.com 
Alison Crombie, Getty Images, +44 (0) 207 424 8081, Alison.crombie@gettyimages.com 
Meaghan Smith, Edelman for Getty Images, 212-704-8196, meaghan.smith@edelman.com 
Kryssa Guntrum, Yahoo!/Flickr, 408-349-3351, kryssa@yahoo-inc.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

One of the great things for models is they get to play “dress up”, when working in various shoots. As a photographer, I am always on the lookout for interesting clothing and accessories to shoot with. Take for example the middle photo of Sarah. I had been searching for early sixties style clothing to work with as I like the sophistication that Jacqueline Kennedy brought to that era with her clothing style. Hitting eBay, I slowly started gathering lots of clothing from that era and it is quite inexpensive. Everything in that photo maybe amounted to $30 and the great thing is I can resell it on eBay since it is vintage wear and still retains some value. It also allows me to create a photo that doesn’t look the same as every other photographer is shooting as far as styling.

As Sarah and I were shooting in downtown Seattle by Pioneer Square, Tina, the owner of Synapse 206 asked if we wanted to shoot with some of her great clothing and of course we agreed. Her store features one of a kind designs and it was great to experiment with the various styles, especially that blue dress in the first image. We basically had the run of the store and Tina was a great help in picking out styles for us to match with various accessories. Though I wasn’t too hot on the hat in the third image, I went with it.

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Ocho Tv finished production on a special hosted up on Ujena.tv. You can see a short interview with me at the 13:10 mark.

Ok, first to get your attention I needed to post a photo I edited last night of the lovely Caro. Caro is from Guadalajara and was just an amazing model to work with. One of those models who was enthusiastic in front of the camera and has a great spirit. She has also been chosen to be in Maxim Espanol, so you know she is a beautiful and capable model.

This shot was taken in Todos Santos, a small village about an hour north of Cabo San Lucas. It was the picture perfect town to shoot in, with the dirt roads and authentic architecture. It was pretty fun to watch the town transform as the photographers and about 15 models show up and start shooting. There is no getting permits, property releases and all that goes with shooting in the states. You show up, grab your camera and shoot away. I guess that’s what makes Mexico so much fun, plus they have amazing beaches to work with. We had every male from about 14 to 25 in town, circling in cars and motorcycles, as we shot. The girls were really rock stars that day.

Dan Heller is not quite as cute as Caro, but he is just as vital to Photographers as any good model is. He is a champion for the industry and is a very succesful author with three book on Photography. He just posted a great entry on his blog regarding copyrights and his idea that we should allow other companies to help facilitate the registering of copyrighted material. But the best part of his post is he explains the how and why’s of copyrighting your images. He is very detail oriented and his research and analysis is to be trusted. I have not had a chance to read the complete post, but will do so this weekend.

Here’s a snippet:

“The Role of Copyright
Copyright is the mechanism that provides accounting, accountability, and protection by way of copyright law. This is because only works that are registered with the copyright office can be protected in a manner that has any real, economic leverage and protection for a company to build a business representing such works. Under copyright law, only registered works are eligible for statutory damages. Here, if someone “steals” a work, fines start at $750, and can grow to $30,000, per infringement. In fact, they can rise to $150,000 if the infringement were deemed to be willful. (This particular deterrent will be important to remember later.) By contrast, the fines for infringing on a non-registered work is whatever the prevailing rate would be if it were properly licensed in the first place. (Ok, there are other values that can be calculated, but that’s besides the point in the bigger picture, since those are more rare than common.) Since we’re talking about micro-valued works such as songs and photographs, a “prevailing rate” of $.99 (or less) per unit is too minimal to justify the legal effort in pursuing infringements. It was for this reason that statutory damages were created in the first place; it’s the only way to give meaningful protection to micro-valued works as a disincentive to steal them. Without statutory damages, protecting the underlying asset is impractical, thereby making investing in building a business unlikely, if not impossible.”

A few months ago Dan and I had a conversation on the phone and I have slowly been transcribing the content, but I think for the sake of getting it to the net, I’ll post it as a podcast. That will be on my to do list for this weekend.

Optimizing your website for Google can seem like a daunting task, but if you take your time to put your site together and always think of how Google is going to look at your new window to the world, you’ll soon be on your way to a high Page Rank. First and foremost, you want to determine what your theme is going to be for your website. Are you going to share with the world all there is on how to take photos of cats? Maybe you want to have broader appeal and include all animals. Just remember, the more focused you are, the better you are able to bring your website to the forefront of the search results. David Hobby and his Strobist.com website is a great example of focusing on one particular aspect of photography, lighting with small portable flash. As of this writing, Hobby now has 200,000 mostly amateur photographers as devoted readers. His site attracts 1.6 million page views a month. His reported income is close to six figures, after only a mere 8 months.

So in thinking about your theme, it should always express the particular niche you have chosen for your website. One example is to have your title description describe your site. An example would be if you live in Cleveland and are promoting stock photography, you might want your title to not only have your website name, but the the following, “Stock photographer in Cleveland, Ohio”. Now that’s just a simple example, but you get the idea

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