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Making money off your photos

To most photographers, Photography is - and always will be - a keen hobby. Some of us, however, are burning to take the hobby to the next level, and want to start making some cash from it. Perhaps not enough to buy a Ferrari, or even enough to pay the electricity bill, but at least enough to be able to buy a couple of photography toys along the way. I worked as a photographer full-time for a couple of years, and ended up deciding that the lifestyle wasn't for me. Even though I jacked in my career as a photographer, I'm still making money off my photos. How? Well...

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The white balance of your eyes…

People have been thinking about how we perceive the world since the dawn of time. You can go all the way to ancient philosophy, with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, for example, where Plato wonders whether if you never saw the 'real' world, whether you would know. Or, indeed, even care. The senses are curious, because how would you know whether you see the world the same as somebody else? To me, for example, the rainbow never really made much sense: Sure, it looks the way I have always seen it, but that doesn't mean it makes any sort of logical sense. How do I know, for example, that what I think of as 'red' isn't what the rest of the population sees as 'blue'. Of course, I've been pointing at colours and naming them since I was barely able to talk, so it's pretty well-ingrained that 'red' is 'red', and that 'orange' is 'orange'... But what if they aren't? Deep philosophy about the very core of colour theory aside, I know for a fact that I don't see the world the same as other people. Specifically, I know that what I see isn't the real truth, because both of my eyes are giving me a different impression. Yes, really. Two eyes, two realities I noticed many years ago that my eyes are subtly different from each other: My left eye has a 'colder' colour balance than my right eye. I've spent a bit of time experimenting, and it appears that there is about an 800 kelvin difference between the two. That means that if I look at the left photo with my left eye, and the right photo with my right eye, these two look identical: It's been a bit of a curiosity for me for a while, and a while ago, I tweeted about it. As a result, I got a pretty big response, with the vast majority of responders saying something along the lines of "omg, me too!". That got me to thinking... Seeing as both my eyes are different from each other, there's a 100% chance that one of them is 'incorrect'. On the other hand, there's nearly as big a chance that both my eyes are 'incorrect'. Of course, white balance can be measured objectively, but ultimately, as photographers, we make a subjective judgement call on how we want to white balance our photos. How can you test it? Honestly, I have no idea how you can test it scientifically - but I find it's most noticeable when I'm indoors, in medium-to-low light (presumably because my pupils will be bigger, but I have no physiological explanation for why this might be the case). Hold a hand in front of one eye, then move it to the other. You'll see the picture 'jump' slightly to the side, but if your eyes differ from each other, you'll also see the colour temperature change slightly. Have you done the test now? Swell - give us your results here, so I can see exactly how much of a freak I am, in the grand scheme of things :) n{democracy:80} So what does that mean to me as a photographer? Nothing, I think. There are ways you can correct for your colour vision, apparently (you can wear slightly tinted glasses or contacts, for example), but ultimately it makes very little difference: Your eyes are absolutely incredible at capturing light, and your brain can handle colour balancing perfectly fine most of the time. In fact, your eyes / brain combination is vastly superior in this respect than a camera / computer combo. I just think of it as a curiosity, and secretly, somewhere deep inside, I'm quite pleased that nobody in the whole world sees their surroundings exactly identically to what I do.

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Framing in portraiture

I spend a lot of time giving feedback on photos. One of the comments that pops up again and again is that I'll feel as if an image is framed awkwardly. Some times, I'll find that an image is nigh-on perfect, but it fails to make the mark because it's difficult to understand the motivation of the photographer: What are they trying to achieve with this photo? It's true for all photography, of course, but it's more complicated with portraiture, as it isn't necessarily very intuitive. How, after all, can you connect a story to the way a portrait is framed?

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DIY Toy camera presets for Lightroom

Given the popularity of the Holga, Lomo, and the other toy cameras out there, I suppose it was only a question of time before some enterprising soul would release Hipstamatic, the app which lets you take cool, toy-camera like photos on your iPhone. There's something about that app which jars quite viciously with me, however: Unlike the 'real' toy cameras, this app doesn't actually alter the iPhone camera at all. And despite getting pretty awesome results (if you like that style of photography, of course), it's all post-processing. That got me thinking... It has to be possible to make my own post-processing presets for Lightroom, to turn my carefully lit, exquisitely sharp and ridiculously high-resolution camera RAW images into blurry, colourful, vastly attractive garbage. So I created a couple of presets for Lightroom 3 - and I'll walk you through the thinking behind one of them and I'll show you how to make your own. How's that for a double whammy of awesome?

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What went wrong?

A good friend of me recently posted on a social media site that a recent photo shoot he had done had gone horribly wrong; sure, some of the photos came out all right, but none of them fulfilled the 'vision' he was hoping for from his shoot. It's heartbreaking when a lot of effort doesn't pay off - but all you can do is to chalk it up as a writing experience. Analyse what went wrong, and then don't do that again. It's a slow way of learning things, of course, but things learned the hard way are generally learned properly - so there is a bit of a silver lining after all. What can you do when you feel as if you're properly starting to get the hang of photography, but you still want to learn more? There's a simple trick you can use... And it really works, trust me.

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Low-light action photography

Low-light photography is something that often confuses the metric bejesus out of photographers: It's very tricky to get right, and even if you do everything 100% correctly, often-time you'll find that your photos still don't come out as you dreamed of. Now, multiply that with the trickyness of photographing action, and you've got yourself a true cluster-copulation of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Everybody will sooner or later end up in a situation where you're photographing moving things in the dark. To concert, event and dance photographers, it's part and parcel of their chosen photography work. I'll be honest: I don't consider myself a very good low-light photographer (with the exception, perhaps, of my concert photography portfolio, but in those circumstances you've got an entirely different set of challenges. Today, though, I've got a wicked treat for yourselves: One of my colleagues and friends in Australia, David Wyatt, agreed to share some of his observations of low-light action photography with us. He's a scholar, a gentleman, a legend, and a bloody great photographer... Take it away, David!

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Implied nudity in portraiture

It doesn't take much of a brain to fathom what a 'nude' photo is. If bits that are normally covered up on the beach are on display, then it's a nude. Similarly, a 'non-nude' photo is pretty straightforward: There are no hoo-hoos, wee-wees or breasticles on display. So, what is all this 'implied nudity' stuff all about? Well, it turns out that there's an 'in-between' stage of nude photography: Implied nudity. Used creatively, it can add an interesting dimension to your portraiture. Here's how and why.

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Attracting better feedback

As photographers in this Internet age we read about photography, and share our work, in hopes of honing our craft. You could be pursuing a career as a wedding photographer or a sports shooter and either way you're searching for articles, subscribing to photography blogs, and participating in photo forums in hopes that there are gems of knowledge that will take your photographic prowess to the next level. What most photographers, especially those that didn't do any formal art training, are missing from their arsenal of learning tools, is the art of critique.

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BeetleCam: Safari via remote control

I've done a fair bit of work with Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas in the past - they're both ludicrously talented photographers and great guys. They also have a knack for DIY - and I have to say that their newest project is one of the ones that has interested me most recently - What do you get when you strap a camera to the top of a remote controlled car? You get their incredible BeetleCam. The modern world of wildlife photography is saturated with thousands of talented photographers producing a huge number of fantastic photographs. As a result it is difficult to produce original shots without really pushing the boundaries and striving for new perspectives. Often, this means putting yourself (or the camera) into places that many would consider impossible.

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Paid-for photo competitions

The blog you're currently reading is relatively high profile. I have written about photography competitions in the past (including the inspiredly-named 'How to win photography competitions', which, if you haven't read it, is worth a peek, if I may say so myself, and I may, because, well, this is my website, and I happen to quite like promoting my own articles in ridiculously long run-on sentences in parantheses when I really ought to be writing about completely different things, like the actual topic of this article, and I hope that you might in time forgive me for wasting your time with this aside). Anyway, as a result, I frequently get approached to help people judge their photography competitions. Recently, however, I've received a series of e-mails (about ten in the past few months!) asking if I would pretty please judge their paid-for-contests. The idea is that aspiring photographers pay an entry fee (anything from $10 per photo via a $500 site membership to a $100 per photo fee structure). They then get entered into a photography contest, and the best photo wins.

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