Making money from photography/Setting up a website/Photium - Amateurs

[Dman77]

Sorry, three questions rolled into one to save starting numerous threads!

Has anyone ever made any money from their photography as an amateur? I'm not expecting to do so but have been looking at Picturenation and Photium and they seem to be a good idea, put your pictures up and maybe one day you may sell one or two.

I'm thinking of setting up a website anyway, I'm new to photography and would like somewhere to showcase anything half decent that I may do. I do have Mobile Me and iWeb/Dreamweaver, but I don't know how easy it is to set up a shopping cart if anyone wanted to buy anything.

Anyone got any experience of this?

 

[TheReef]

If your uploading to stock photography sites you'll need a lot of photos, thousands to make a descent amount of sales.

Heh, I'm starting this too - I've got 4 of my best up so far and obviously haven't made any sales, they've been on for about a month and have no views to give you some perspective. You'll read about people making their first sales after they've uploaded around 500 images sometimes. I hope to reach that by the end of this year it takes time

Note a shopping cart system requires some form of scripting, eg PHP which MobileMe has no support for. The best you could do with MobileMe is a showcase gallery type thing and organise sales some other way.

 

[joro]

When I first started I had a rather large collection of a couple hundred photos that I had taken with various cameras from a basic Sony Cybershot up to a Digital Rebel XT. Using those photos, I started a small website, built it through iWeb, and launched it with a list of services and different types of photography I did. I was surprised in only about a month or so I started receiving calls mainly for commercial shoots such as insurance photos, website photos, etc. I’ve since built things up and I’m now getting into the wedding photography side with some dates booked later this year! One other thing I did was frame some of my best pictures and put them up for sale at coffee shops and similar sites who would let me do it for free.

In terms of stock photos, I have played with posting some on the big sites; however, I have decided against it because as someone else pointed out you need to have a collection of thousands and thousands of pictures to make any money from those types of sites – at least from what I’ve heard from fellow photographers.

Good Luck!

 

[Dman77]

When I first started I had a rather large collection of a couple hundred photos that I had taken with various cameras from a basic Sony Cybershot up to a Digital Rebel XT. Using those photos, I started a small website, built it through iWeb, and launched it with a list of services and different types of photography I did. I was surprised in only about a month or so I started receiving calls mainly for commercial shoots such as insurance photos, website photos, etc. I’ve since built things up and I’m now getting into the wedding photography side with some dates booked later this year!

Cool! Were you a complete amateur when you set up the site or did you have knowledge of photography and/or editing? Other than a digital P&C for general use with absolutely no editing other than red eye, I'm pretty much a complete beginner.

 

[compuwar]

Has anyone ever made any money from their photography as an amateur? I'm not expecting to do so but have been looking at Picturenation and Photium and they seem to be a good idea, put your pictures up and maybe one day you may sell one or two.

Stock is basically dead because 10^999 other amateurs think the same thing- and pricing is rock-bottom now anyway. Fine art sales are more likely to produce revenues, since you can advertise your pictures and then it's just how good a salesperson you are. The only thing I don't like about Imagekind is the inability to do coupons, but if you think random strangers are going to randomly find your pictures online and buy them, that's a pipe dream unless you have something really unique. You've got to do promotion and sales work to sell images online, and it takes a lot of time. You're much better off using a site to promote additional sales at off-line venues like cafes, galleries, offices, etc.

 

[joro]

Cool! Were you a complete amateur when you set up the site or did you have knowledge of photography and/or editing? Other than a digital P&C for general use with absolutely no editing other than red eye, I'm pretty much a complete beginner.

I actually was fortunate in that I had a knowledge of photography – my parents use to run a photography studio when I was younger – however, honestly, that knowledge was not a “working” knowledge. I think you have to start with something and then build off that knowledge to make it practical and photography, of all industries, is one of those that this is very important. I’ve found while some might argue you need to know how a camera processes an image or how to correct this or that, newer digital cameras do so much of the heavy lifting and minor errors can be fixed via aperture or photoshop when shot in RAW. So I would tell you to focus on composition, know what different apertures and shutter speeds produce results-wise and then just go out and play with the different settings.

The editing piece I had a basic understanding of but as with the technical knowledge, I learned a lot of it by doing as opposed to reading. I know everyone will tell you something a little different and everyone has a different path, so you’ll have to find one that works for you!