Is wildlife photography a good career? Who is a famous photographer? Is photography a skill or a talent? Who are the 7 important personalities in photography?
What camera do famous photographers use? Who is the best photographer in ? Is photography a dying career? Does photography have a future? How much do National Geographic photographers get paid? Is photography growing or declining?
What is the yearly salary for a photographer? It also needs a simple and businesslike web address ideally, just your name. Have some professional-looking business cards made, to dish out at lectures and events. I have mine made at www. Keep a portfolio of your work at the ready to show people your best work iPads and other equivalent tablets are an excellent way of doing this.
Edit the pictures ruthlessly so that you only include your very best shots. The trick is to make an initial selection — ideally two or three times as many as you need — and then get other people to have a look, comment and even make the final selection for you. Enter competitions.
Winning a competition is a great way to get noticed. A surprising number of professionals have built their careers on winning Wildlife Photographer of the Year, for example, since this is the standard everyone aspires to. But being able to say you have won any award will help to open doors it may make an editor, who might otherwise delete your email, take a quick look.
Read some of the articles I have written, on this website, about entering and winning Wildlife Photographer of the Year I chaired the judging panel for seven years.
Pick a subject. Some species sell better than others, of course tigers, elephants, penguins, dolphins etc but many more people are photographing them — so there is much more competition and you will need to shoot them better than everyone else, or at least differently. Do some research to find out where the demand is likely to be in the future: the terrible decline of much British wildlife, from songbirds to hedgehogs, for example. Bear in mind that it is easier to earn a living by shooting wildlife on your home patch than exotic wildlife further afield.
The costs are significantly lower no flights, for example and there is more demand for the images because home markets tend to want pictures of native wildlife more than any other. Shoot stories. Try not to think in terms of single images. That might mean a portfolio telling the story of the return of the osprey to England, in-depth coverage of shark finning, a selection of behavioural rather than simple portrait shots of black rhinos, and so on. Think commercially.
Try to frame your pictures with commercial and editorial requirements in mind. This is the trick to making the most money out of stock. Shoot verticals and horizontals, tight and wide, capture the whole animal, part of the animal, get its eyes looking straight into the barrel of the lens, looking to one side etc, to give end-users plenty of flexibility.
For example, they might need lots of space and a clean background to allow room for a headline and a small area of text. We all shoot plenty of mediocre pictures, of course, among the occasional prize-winners, but the trick is to hide them from the rest of the world — your reputation as a photographer is built on the images editors and everyone else sees.
Therefore edit your pictures ruthlessly so that picture buyers only ever see images that are artfully composed, beautifully lit and informative. Then, and only then, will they remember your work. Similarly, Radomir has been running photographic workshops since and estimates they provide up to a quarter of his income. Rather than focusing on destination photography, as is common in the industry, he sets thematic workshops around a certain animal or photography technique.
We normally focus on one species of animals, like ibex or chamois, for three or four days. Or I run really artistic workshops — for example in Switzerland I take people to focus on the shapes and colours of stones and mountains. There are now thousands of gorgeous wildlife photos online, so you have to be the best in the world if you want to reach success in this field.
Vladimir's accomplishments — from winning the Eric Hosking Portfolio Award at Wildlife Photographer of the Year in for his images of Banff National Park, Canada, through to chairing the Russian Union of Wildlife Photographers — have earned him recognition as one of his country's top nature photographers.
For him, success has come from resisting the urge to follow the crowd to the big nature spots and carving out his own niche covering wildlife and the habitats they live in, with an artistic flair. I discovered the niche of creative nature photography, on the verge of art and decor. I keep sales statistics, so I know what people like best and what they will buy. For instance, one of my most popular photos is In the Mirror of the Marshes. This information is extremely important for me.
People get attached to this emotionally and want to take a fragment of my story into their homes. They buy my photos, hang them on the wall, and then tell their visitors stories about me, about those shots.
An interior photograph is not just a mass-produced poster; it reflects our personality. You don't have to have the very latest gear, but new and enhanced features in new equipment could give you a competitive advantage, and investing in a new camera can be a smart move if it enables you to make your work stand out.
Its ability to shoot at up to 20fps in Live View mode with intelligent subject-tracking AF, she says, meant she could capture fast-moving wildlife and get shots she would have missed before.
Vladimir's prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year win enabled him to launch full-time into selling creative prints, as well as giving him personal validation. In financial terms, it is hard to reckon what I got from winning.
Someone might have bought my photographs on account of my win, but overall, my senses tell me that it brought me only direct prize payments. Vladimir stopped participating in photography competitions eight years ago, finding the market oversaturated. Neither does he now seek to earn money from magazines, where he made his first sales aged just 16, finding they tend not to suit his style of creative imagery and work better as a promotional tool for his exhibitions, prints and other income streams.
He does find professional satisfaction and financial reward in exhibiting his work, though. Running a good exhibition is expensive, but that's the only place where your customers can see the final version of the photograph as a product, remember those impressions for years and hopefully purchase something for their home.
Building on the success of his exhibitions, Vladimir has been exploring the growing trend for presentations by photographers discussing their shots on a large screen. With exciting stories, face-to-face contact, conversation and inspiration, it's really colourful and educational.
I'm confident that this format will become at least as popular as contests or exhibitions. It's a medium that Vladimir has been using through his involvement in the non-profit Russian Union of Wildlife Photographers, which has brought together more than leading photographers.
It's important for photographers to be capable of not just making pictures but also speaking and telling vivid stories. The first forum, Nature Photo Talks, ran in April and was supported by Canon — we had a full house. Viewing his images as "unique pieces of art to sell" has garnered Radomir success in selling his pictures to a range of publishers outside of traditional media.
The company asked me if I wanted to do it, and I thought, 'Why not? By thinking outside the box, Radomir has also developed a successful sideline making a passive income out of online photography product sales.
He says, "I work a lot with the photography industry, so when I see a cool idea or product, I try to get it to Europe and sell through one of my distribution clients. If you really know your way around your camera and can take a decent photograph, then this is something you could consider.
Day workshops offer clients tuition in photography, let them know your secrets and just help them to take a better photo and understand their equipment. The best thing about it is that you can set your own hours and choose when you work.
You can fit sessions in on the weekend around your full-time job, and have a little extra money coming in on the side. All of this helps to take the sting out the costs of new photography kit. There are different types of workshops you can offer. Some photographers partake in one-to-one guiding days, showing clients different locations for landscapes or wildlife sightings while imparting photographic knowledge.
The stock photography industry is depleting day by day, unfortunately. It used to be the case that you could make a five-figure salary, or more, from stock photography alone. Maybe not just as a nature photographer, but you could definitely make big bucks in comparison to nowadays.
But with the rise of microstock, photographers are seeing their earnings decrease. On top of that, many stock websites are taking increased percentages as a commission, leaving photographers with little left of the few sales they may still make.
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