Making Money in Photography

Making Money With Photography — 10 Surefire Ideas To Help You Make Money With Photography

February 1, 2011

in Photography Tips

Money

Here are 10 ways to make a good start at making money with photography. Some pursue photography as a hobby or interest. However as any other field of art, photography is a good way to make money while you are at it. It may not be one of the most promising and money making stream to choose as a career, done wisely it can prove to be a stable and reliable income stream . In the days of film, the number of people pursuing photography as a career was limited to few gifted people, but in the days of digital photography, the art of photography has reached its zenith. It has become a promising income stream with some effort involving internet marketing and creativity to blow-off the common man’s expectations with outstanding photographs.

1. Make Money With Event Coverage

   Events are a huge source of making money with photography. Be it weddings, sports events, company meetings, graduation ceremony, school activities, etc all require to be documented in forms of photographs. The organizations hire the professional photographers for covering the events and pay them like anything. On an average basis, a wedding photographer charges $2000 to $5000 per wedding. Similarly, sports photography is also a huge market of making money.
   
   

   Sports Photography

2. Make Money Online

   One of the best ways to make money with photography is to establish online presence as the photographer. Internet is the easiest source of reaching to large masses and gaining popularity (and eventually gaining the benefits of “word of mouth”). Become the part of the viral internet marketing through:
   
   • Stock Photography: Stock photography provides an excellent platform to the buyers and the sellers of the photographs. The stock photography sites encourage the photographers to submit their best works (and maintain the online portfolio) and provides the best deals to the buyers.
   • Building Web Gallery: The other smart way to showcase your work to the world is to create a web gallery. You can either build your own website or a photo-blog to display your photographs or can choose from Picsengine or Wix.com which help in building the online portfolios without the hassles of maintaining the website.
   • Social Networking And Sharing Sites: Social networking sites are an effective way of gaining popularity. Upload your photographs to the social networking sites and offer the photo-services to attract the potential customers. Apart from the social sharing sites, there are some sites like Demotix.com which pays you for submitting the newsworthy images.
   

   Life On The Road

3. Specialize In “What Sells”

   To make money with photography, you need to look at the commercial aspect of photography. Get an overview of the market stats to know what sells the most. You have to be thorough with this one. Find out what sells the most not only in terms of the subject, but in terms of image quality, concept and license (royalty-free, rights-managed or copyrighted images). Once you are done with the ground work, you gain an insight into what is favored by the audience and likewise you can start working in that direction for providing the photographs which  are liked by the masses.

4. Creativity Is The Key To Making Money

   Your creativity, vision, imagination and the presentation skills provide you an edge over the other photographers. The stock photography sites, the web designers, entrepreneurs, advertisers, etc mostly avoid picking up the common photographs. The photographs they pick and choose reflect the brand and convey some specific message and thus, each of them is looking for something unusual, different and striking. If you can offer the creative photographs which convey the message or highlight the concept, nothing like it. So, even though you specialize in what sells the most, the one thing which gives you an edge over the others and of course help you draw money is your creativity.
   
   

   Here Comes The Sun

5. Post-processing As A Medium For Making Money

   In the course of learning photography, the photographers eventually turn out to be the masters of the post-processing skills. Right from making some crucial post-processing adjustments for correcting the color cast, contrast, saturation, sharpness, etc to introducing some special effects in the photographs, the photographers can make a good income by utilizing their post-processing skills (also termed as the photo-finishing skills). You can easily make money by offering post-processing services like creating a realistic torn photo-frame effect, converting the colored photographs to black and white, restoring the old pictures (and resurrect the faded color in Photoshop), etc.

6. Photo-Journalism Is A Great Source Of Making Money

   Photography is as diverse as its applications. Ranging from street photography to conceptual / story telling photographs, you can make good money by offering your photographs for editorial purposes to magazines and newspapers. This gives you an opportunity to make money as a freelancer (as a hobbyists or an enthusiast). Instead of just offering the photographs to the magazines, you can earn a good income by selling the stories with the photographs shot by you. All you need to do is to invest in some creative effort to wrap the photographs around the content like photographing streets, customs, traditions, buildings, people, etc when traveling to some distant city / state with the intent of presenting it as a documentation sells well with the magazines.
   
   

   Family Cycle Train

7. Shoot For The Advertisement Campaigns

   Marketing is the evergreen stream of income and shooting for an advertisement campaign alone can help you make good money. But getting the offer for an advertising campaign requires a lot of effort on your part; where the major role is played by the contacts at your disposal and the richness of your portfolio. It requires you to be a technical expert (having sound knowledge of the basic concepts of photography and command over the equipment) to produce the sharp, creative and impressive photographs required by the advertising agencies.

8. Join A Professional Photographer As An Assistant

   Joining a professional photographer as an assistant serves a dual purpose. Firstly, it enables you to make a living with the salary offered by the photographer and secondly, it helps in gaining experience and exposure. Working on various projects with a professional / freelancer photographer comes in handy for understanding the issues between clients & photographers and helps you in exploring the opportunities as a beginner.

9. Make Money With A Home Studio

   Economically speaking, the best of way of earning money is to cut down the costs. Instead of investing in a full-fledged studio, its better to maintain a simple home-based studio with bare necessities. It just takes a DSLR, a tripod and the artificial lights to get started with a decent business with home studios. This kind of set-up comes in handy for photographing the table-top products ranging from a pencil or pen to the textured walls (and balls, fruits, etc) which help in contributing to your online portfolio with stock photography sites (or can make way to owned website galleries). A home studio set-up opens up the opportunities for experimenting with various subjects at your disposal.
   
   

   Pencil

10. Find The Business Interested In Your Kind Of Photography

    Every business needs photos for various purposes —for brochures, websites, company events and meetings, advertisements, etc. These photographs reflect the brand of the company and gives recognition to the products and the services they offer. Owing to the above said facts, the companies tend to hire the photographers permanently and pay them huge sums for the photographs which speak about the company at large. Apart from this, the businesses dealing in real estates also offer good deals to the photographers for photographing the property and portraying the houses and flats as attractive as possible.

Which one of these works for you the best?


*Re posted from APN
10 Surefire Ideas To Help You Make Money With Photography


Posted by Monroe Ohio photographer Vincent Rush, Cincinnati Sports Photography and Dayton Sports Photography of Monroe Ohio. Vince Rush can be contacted by phone at (877) 858-6295 or by email at vrush@rushintl.com or visit http://CincinnatiSportsPhotography.com Check out my about.me profile!