By Laura Evenson and Dave Mazur
This post is sponsored by LicenseStream – the most advanced tools for photographers to license, promote, track and make more money from your work.
In today’s tough economic climate, it pays to be resourceful.
Battered by the Great Recession, an outlook for recovery that remains mixed at best, and a sea change in the media landscape, even those photographers who had a very steady stream of clients and projects have seen these dwindle over the past year or so. Several industry-specific trends have accelerated the decline, including the availability of quality Prosumer cameras, the low pricing and flood of royalty free microstock images (often produced by amateurs) and the proliferation of super-low-cost photographers on sites such as CraigsList as more freelancers hit the streets following the loss of staff jobs at many media organizations. All this makes for slim pickings. Clients increasingly are shooting projects “in-house” and sourcing generic royalty free images because they, too, are feeling the pinch.
We spoke with a handful of professional photographers to find out what strategies they are employing to generate new business and found some interesting ideas. Many photographers are using the enforced downtime to do what any creative or entrepreneurial type does in the face of constraints: they innovate.
This slow period has been welcome relief for some photographers who needed a break from tough daily schedules that allow little time to develop new artistic styles, create new bodies of work, or learn about new photographic tools and acquire new techniques in a digital age.
Take Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Deanne Fitzmaurice. Since leaving her job as a staff photographer at the San Francisco Chronicle more than a year ago, she has started creating multimedia projects for MSNBC and commercial clients that combine still photography with videos and audio.
“I’m still doing photojournalism in that I’m telling a story, capturing moments and being unobtrusive as I work,” said Fitzmaurice, “but new tools such as the Canon 5D Mark II, which allows you to shoot high-definition video with a still camera, has opened so many new doors by making it easy to do these multimedia pieces.”
Fitzmaurice said that with the help of photography consultants Amanda Sosa Stone and Suzanne Sease she has redesigned her website, Deanne Fitzmaurice Photography, to reflect both her editorial and commercial capabilities.
In addition, it hasn’t hurt that she and her husband, photographer Kurt Rogers, co-founded in 2005 the camera bag company Think Tank, with bag designers Doug Murdoch and Mike Sturm.
“We’d been friends with Doug for many years and we told him that the bags we need just don’t exist,” Fitzmaurice said. “Kurt and I were shooting a lot of football back then and it just doesn’t work to run up and down the sidelines with a big shoulder BAG. So we started designing the belt pack, which sits on your hips, and branched out from there. We now have more than 100 designs and it has definitely helped to have some kind of income base as I branch out with my freelance business.”
Some photographers have decided to travel, exploring new views on the world that they can bring back and market. For example, one couple who had planned a trip to Africa took an extra step in their preparations: they contacted some private doctors and non-profit organizations to see how they might help support documenting success stories, and raise awareness for these doctors who were performing surgeries to fix facial abnormalities and other health related issues in underprivileged villages. This outreach resulted in work that helped support a trip they were going to take anyway and created a new area of business.
Other photographers have found it pays to participate in local farmers’ markets, in gallery exhibitions, or to develop fine art products. Robert Bengtson, a Sausalito, CA-based photographer, has achieved success in marketing his love of architecture, details, and natural patterns in his photography, The Art of Detail.
“Even before the slowdown, I started thinking about how I could get to creating photography that was so stylistically mine that someone can’t just hire their Uncle Louie to do it,” he said. “I’ve been a photographer shooting commercially for 15 years and I wanted to create more images in the context of my career that thrill me. I always loved creating art out of photographic details and now I have something that is really marketable, having done projects for clients like Oracle and Marriott Hotels as well as many private home owners.”
Bengtson offers his photography both as a single-day rate as well as per image, depending on the project being either commercial or non-commercial. For shooting photos of a particular location, say a winery or home or beautiful hotel, Bengtson creates for the location’s owners a coffee table book or a series of limited-edition prints along with the ability to use images for a wide array of usage applications, all in one complete package.
While many photographers now have sites online that showcase some of their work, they remain cautious about putting all of their work online for fear of piracy. Photographer, writer and historian Joseph Sohm said that he has been able to offer only a subset of his images through stock agencies, which he says operate on the premise that a core set of images typically attract customers repeatedly. To address these problems, Sohm and other photographers have turned to ImageSpan’s LicenseStream to help them promote, track and create new revenue streams.
“LicenseStream empowers me to publish all of my photographs directly to my Web site and to global search engines, so that anyone can find my search-optimized photos online and pay for them with a mouse click,” said Sohm, whose “Visions of America: Photographing Democracy,” a book that offers a sweeping portrait of life in the American democracy via an epic photographic journey across 50 states, recently won the Gold medal for “Best Coffee Table Book” at the 13th annual Independent Publishing Awards in New York City.
In addition to leveraging LicenseStream to publish to major search engines and other Web sites such as Flickr, photographers also are turning to a range of social media channels to build relationships that help grow their business. As we’ve written about in the ImageSpan blog, many photographers are Blogging to Build Relationships, while others regularly stay in touch with clients and the photography community via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Others, such as commercial photographer Steve Castillo, are turning to liveBooks Inc., the leading provider of customized portfolio websites and marketing software for professional photographers, to refresh their online sites.
“The whole Web design process is overwhelming for many working photographers, and liveBooks has made it much simpler to work with a designer,” says Castillo, of Menlo Park, CA-based Steve Castillo Photography. “They’re flexible so I can make the changes that I need to make, and the cost is very reasonable.”
Castillo adds that he now meets regularly with other photographers to swap information about the latest technologies and promotional ideas. “These meetings are great for learning about new ideas and for reinforcing basic promotional techniques, such as sending clients reminders that you enjoy doing business with them, and finding ways to stay connected to them.”
In addition to staying connected to existing clients while creating new niche markets and products, photographers need to look at reducing expenses. Consider sharing workspace costs, equipment, and combining different talents to collaborate on projects and expand networking circles.
Thank you for sharing the insights and info. I agree with all of it and in a way it is “good” to hear that there are other photographers who are experiencing similar challenges with this downturn and that it is not only local here in the Midwest. It comes down to re-inventing oneself on a daily basis which can be a very rewarding yet challenging and scaaaryy process at times. But then… we are artists and creativity should be at the core of all that we do. Thanks again.
There have always been periods where epic changes sweep across the social and political landscape. President Obama, a skilled body surfer, rode this wave into the White House. Lesser skilled surfers are wiped out by the “big wave.” When these Tsunami waves sweep in, we are called upon to reinvent ourselves, ride the change or be drowned by it. A spiritual toughness is called upon, as well as being a bit of a “futurist” to sense what lies down the road. If we define ourselves as “Photographers” – then the above trends will find us as casualties. But if we consider ourselves communicators, artists or observers of life, we can discover the new tools to express ourselves. Clearly, we are all called upon in these times to reach deep within ourselves, and figure out a way to ride the waves of change into our own metaphorical White House. These waves can serve us or destroy us. The choice is ours to sink or swim. Good swimming in 2010.