Okay, you've done it! You've taken some really outstanding photographs that are worth sharing with the world. Your photographs are sharp, perfectly exposed and composed, and best of all, eye-catching and unique. What to do? In addition to making your slides into high-quality prints for your family and for photo exhibitions, you can publish your great images. Keep in mind that the competition is stiff, but don't let that stop you. Here are a few beginning tips.
What to Photograph
Go ahead and take photos for yourself. Photograph those great sunsets, flowers and puppies, but if you want to SELL, you must think completely differently. Nowadays, with the glut of generic subjects available on computer CD-ROM for little cost, the only way you can succeed as a published photographer is to specialize. Do you have a career or hobby specialty, a subject you know and care about? Whether your profession is mountain climbing, child care or meat packaging, there are plenty of markets for specialty work. Once you become known in a specific area, those specialty clients will keep coming back to you.
If you like taking scenics, including people in them makes them more marketable. They add scale and often color. Take vertical photographs in addition to your horizontals in anticipation of magazine covers. Leave empty/neutral space at the top of the photograph for the magazine's masthead and sell lines. Or think in terms of a story or theme.
If you're working in color, shoot fine-grain transparency (slide) film unless you're doing specialized photography that requires high-speed film. Fujichrome Velvia is a favorite because of its ultra-bright colors and fine grain. A few publications use color prints because of their scanning equipment, but this is still the exception rather than the rule.
Digital photography has changed the way we take and market photos. It really pays to be knowledgeable about this medium. Only high-quality work is used here, so you need to be aware of limitations and minimal standards, which vary according to the publication. The industry standard software is Adobe Photoshop. In addition, you should have some kind of cataloguing software as well as basic business software.
If you happen upon a great photographic situation, take lots of photos. You'll not only have similar photos of the subject ("in-camera dupes") so that you can market to several publications simultaneously, but you'll photograph the subject with different lenses and from different angles. Film and processing are cheap compared to travel expenses. Of course, with digital, it's easy to send out duplicate files of your high-quality originals.
If you're shooting digital, shoot in color, unless you're extremely limited in computer storage. You can always convert to black and white later, and there are many wonderful ways to do this using programs such as Adobe Photoshop.
Start small. Publishing in National Geographic magazine is like winning the lottery; the odds are against you. Start with small publications in your specialty area and you'll collect samples (known as clips or tear sheets) of your published work and slowly build your portfolio. Writers' Market and Photographers' Market each list thousands of magazines, calendar companies and other sources. Photo guidelines and rates are often available via the publishers' websites.
Maintain high quality standards of quality with the images you send to a publication. You will be judged by your worst image. All images should be sharp, well-exposed and well-composed. Scans and digital camera images should be color-balanced. Try to find fresh angles on clichés, but don't get too gimmicky; most clients don't like this.
If you can work with medium or large-format equipment, so much the better. Art directors will love you because of the higher quality. However, the extra weight of this equipment makes shooting this format more difficult. As digital technology advances, all this is changing very quickly. Carefully crafted 35mm transparencies suffice for most uses (except food photographs, which are nearly always taken with 4" x 5" view cameras or very high-res camera backs).
Model Releases
If you want to sell a photograph of a recognizable person (or a person who can recognize himself/herself in the photo), you must have the person sign a release for advertising usage. Photos used as editorial content (to inform or educate) do not need a release. Also, get a release in questionable situations. Or if it's implied endorsement, such as the cover of an airline magazine. The same goes for property releases.
Stock Photo Agencies
Make sure the agency's reputable. Where do you find stock agencies? Check Photographer's Market for listings. The Internet features many web sites from agencies. Look at magazine credit lines. The name of the agency is often there with the photographer's name.
Getting represented by an agency can be difficult. Often the agency will ask for a sampling of 200 or 300 images. Remember that you are judged by your worst image. These images should be ones you can let the agency keep for a number of years, or forever. Sometimes the agency will contract with you to have reproduction-quality dupes made that they can keep on file while you keep your original.
An agency generally takes a 50% commission. The commission is well worth it. They'll find markets you never dreamed existed, and they're good at negotiating higher rates for your work.
Promotion
Promotion is an ongoing task. To succeed in publishing your photos, your name and images must be regularly in front of busy photo editors. With postage as expensive as it is, this can get costly. Anytime you're communicating with publications, maximize that one-ounce postage stamp. Include clips of your work, stock lists, etc. With the advent of inexpensive yet high quality color printers for your computer, you can customize lists and samples.
The Internet is another source of marketing. Design a web site and get it out there! List your photos with an online database such as PhotoSource International or Oz Images. Many additional websites offer opportunities for high-quality, online portfolios. This medium is proving very effective for many photographers.
Packaging
A professional appearance is important. Get letterhead and business cards, and include a business card with every correspondence. If you're on a budget, computers make this task fairly inexpensive. You can buy high-quality stationery paper for a fraction of the price a printer will charge you if you look for manufacturing close-outs and overstocks at paper supply companies. Also, many office supply houses and mail-order sources feature beautiful preprinted designs. Finally, you can have four-color cards that reproduce a favorite photo made fairly cheaply these days. (Country Color in Placerville is one source.)
Carefully label all your transparencies. A typewriter used to do this job; now computers make this chore much easier. One such program is bundled with a stock photo business program called Fotobiz. Some photographers use bar coding for easier tracking. Your transparency should at least have the following: a file number, subject, where photo was taken, and a line that says © year/your name (e.g. © 1999 John Doe). Digitally, you can add this information in the "file info"/IPTC section of your software, such as Adobe Photoshop and many other photo-related software programs and online databases support this data entry. Good captions often make the difference between a slide that sells and one that doesn't. Make sure to get the names of people that figure prominently in your image. If you don't have the budget for any of this, at least get a rubber stamp with your name and copyright that you can stamp on a slide.
How to file? You can use a simple chronological system if you don't have very many photos. But if you have a large collection, then file by subject, then cross-index. Each photographer's filing system will vary according to his/her specialties. For example, if you have 2,000 photos of hummingbirds, you will want to subdivide your photos into species, behaviors, etc. If you only have three photos of hummingbirds, you can lump those photos together with your other bird photos.
Computer database programs make cross-indexing easy. Even better are those programs that incorporate graphics. Extensis Portfolio is one program that is popular because of ease of use and the fact that free "readers" of this software are now bundled with many other software programs. Another favorite is iView Media. In this way if a client asks you for your photos of the bird species known as Anna's Hummingbird, you can do a keyword search and e-mail the client thumbnail versions of the scanned images for easy screening. iView Media Pro can quickly organize your images into uploadable html galleries if you happen to have a website.
How do you physically store your images? There are all kinds of systems, some simple and some expensive. You can leave them in the slide boxes and label them, but finding a slide in this way gets tedious. One effective system is to file your slides in clear plastic sheets that hold 20 slides each. Make sure the plastic is archival, meaning that the plastic contains no PVC which will rot your slides. You can then store this slides in binders or in hanging file folders in a metal filing cabinet (wood cabinets emit harmful chemicals that can damage the slides). Keep your slides away from high heat, high humidity and dust. When filing slides, throw away slides that are technically poor. Storage gets expensive after a while. Lightworks is a mail-order company that specializes in archival storage supplies for photographs, digital media and artwork.
When sending slides to a client, make sure that each slide is not only protected in the 20-sheet pages, but also by 2" x 2" clear plastic sleeves that go right over the slide. Make a photocopy of your slide pages so that you have a record of which slides have been sent. Also include a delivery memo that specifies reproduction rights and length of time the client may hold the image without incurring late fees. Also include a cover letter that indicates number of slides and project for which they're intended. All of this goes into a high-quality cardboard mailer (Calumet Carton in Chicago makes excellent inexpensive mailers) and is shipped either by private carrier such as FedEx or UPS or via certified mail (with return receipt). If you are mailing slides that a client has NOT requested, be sure to include a self-addressed, stamped return mailer (a slightly smaller cardboard mailer that will fit inside the other one).
Digital media is an entire new world when it comes to storing media. As you load your images onto your hard drive, quickly find a way to delete bad photos. Then soon, back up your images to whatever system works for you: CD-ROMs, DVDs, your computer hard drive (although this can fill up quickly, given the serious hard drive needs of most digital images) or an external hard drive. Fortunately, with digital media, we photographers can retain our original media while sending high-quality images to our clients. Always, back up as soon as possible after you've downloaded your images from your camera.
Digital photography is now a part of nearly every aspect of publishing. Because of liability issues, many publishers now ask only for digital files, which means the photographer must scan transparencies if necessary. In a typical workflow, the photographer posts a gallery of low-res images on a website and if an image is chosen, sends the high-res version via FTP or on a CD. Controlling use of digital images can be problematic as files can be easily duplicated without loss of quality. Although higher-end publishers understand the importance of copyright, this is sometimes not the case with some local or lower-end clients. Be vigilant.
Money and Photo Rights
There are two ways of selling images these days: RF and RM. RF stands for Royalty-Free, which means you sell all rights to a client. Usually you get big money for these images, although a number of companies have specialized in producing image banks of low-cost RF photos. RM stands for rights-managed, which means you are selling a specified usage to a publication. This means they lease use of the image for a particular project.. Photos used for advertising purposes bring the photographer substantially more money than photos used for editorial purposes. Rates vary widely according to the size and placement of the photo, publication's circulation, whether it's part of a large photo package and how often the photo will be used. Typically, magazines pay set rates that are pretty much non-negotiable. Negotiating prices can get very complicated. ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) publishes an excellent business guide that deals with this issue. FotoQuote (bundled with FotoBiz is a small but effective computer program that not only gives rates but coaches you on negotiating strategies. In general, common images such as flowers and sunsets command little money. Calendar and postcard companies pay notoriously poorly.
