My reasons for coming back to photography were really two fold from the start - a love of the outdoors and capturing landscape images and to make money. I'm not greedy - this is a long term goal and things take time, but in the period between postings, this is where my time has gone.
Making money from your hobby is a tricky and perilous thing! The business can take over and destroy the pleasure - before you know it, the thing you loved to do in your spare time has become the thing you hate to face on monday morning. Or worse - it doesn't take off and leaves only disappointment. There are many ways to make cash from your images, but I'm targeting 2 distinct streams to begin with and starting small. The money I've made has funded equipment purchases which in turn have led to more images - so it seems to be on track.
Landscape photography is difficult to sell - a lot of people are doing it and creating great images but at the same time, the perceived worth of these images is low. Most people can get an interesting image out of their smart phone so they think twice about spending £15 - £25 on a print - they see it as something they can do themselves. In reality, the photographer has driven for 3 hours and slept in the car and walked 4 miles to get that image of a mountain sunrise, then spent an hour processing the RAW file to get it to pop. Looking at the websites of established big names in the landscape genre, even they seem to make the bulk of their living running courses - I guess people are happier to pay to be shown how to do something than to buy images.
I have been a contributor to a couple of royalty free stock sites for a few years - initially I produced vector illustrations and uploaded those, but last year I decided to broaden my portfolio to include photographic content. If you're unfamiliar with these library sites, they take uploaded content from their roster of approved contributors and sell it on their site - you get a pre-agreed percentage of the royalty. The plus points with this are that your image copyrights are protected, you can sell an image as many times as possible and the library looks after everything else - you just take your royalty payments. The downside is that they take a fairly hefty percentage cut from your sales for all that, so you need to make a lot of sales to get rich!
Also - to become an approved contributor to these libraries, you have to go through an approval process, submit test images and if these are accepted, you're good to go. I had assumed this would be easy, but in reality, it turned out to take longer than I'd first thought it would. In hind sight, this is as it should be - if anybody could pick up a DSLR, shoot any old thing and get approval, it makes a mockery the skill and craft of people that have spent years refining their art. My fists submissions were batted straight back to me with an invitation to come back with something better!
Instead of re-submitting as soon as the 14 day time limit had elapsed - I decided to wait a while, and work at being a better photographer - I'm no Bailey or Rankin, but I've worked steadily at it and got steadily better. After waiting around 8-9 months from my first submission - the second one was approved within 6 days. It goes to show that if you want to be good at something, time spent going away and just doing it is never wasted.
If you're looking to make some money from your images, the stock library route is a reliable way to go. To start with the sales are slow, but this is a long game and the more images in your online portfolio - the more sales you'll pick up. Eventually the income will build and even out to become more reliable - you just need to find that image that will sell like hot cakes! Also - it's a different discipline to shooting an image just for yourself - many times the image will need to work with text added or be shot on a white background to be cut out - these are not really impulse snaps - they need to be planned for an end use, pin sharp and not over filtered or processed.
So that's what I've been busy with - I've been shooting a lot of food photography and still life images (see chili image above) and not getting out much, but every shoot there's something to learn and it's all interesting. Give it a try yourself - by having your work scrutinized by industry experts forces you to raise your game and your images will definitely improve, which can't be a bad thing - and you may earn some beer tokens!
Now that the weather has finally got better - it's out into the wilderness for a summer of landscape action - watch this space for future postings.
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