Tag: business

10 Habits of a Successful Photographer

Written by Nancy Young

Woman on Bridge Image

Image: Stefano Tinti | Dreamstime.com

1. Be Ready to Learn

The road to your success as a photographer begins from your mindset. From there you can do a lot of different things to improve your skills and grow as a professional. Developing certain habits is one of the ways your dreams and aspirations can take physical form through your actions.

In this post you can find the list of 10 habits to help you reach your goals and make dreams a reality.

In the world of affordable DSLRs and smartphones with advanced photography features, photography is more often seen as a no-brainer. However, even the most expensive camera won’t entirely hide poor photographic skill. But if you know something about composition and lighting, you’ll be able to create a great photo even with a entry-level pocket camera.

The best photographers keep learning even after they reached success. The more you know, the more you don’t know. This ancient observation can totally apply to a modern photographer’s experience.

Plaid Shirt and Camera

Image: Natallia Khlapushyna | Dreamstime.com

Fortunately, there are a lot of different ways to learn photography and polish up your skills today. For instance, you can take online courses, attend a formal class, read books and ebooks, follow the tutorials on photo editing, or just keep practicing and learning from your own experience.

2. Know Your Equipment

Are you able to operate your camera blindfolded? It’s not that necessary skill to practice as a photographer, however, you do have to know your equipment and its possibilities to discover new boundaries. You have to know how to operate those ISO and shutter speed settings along with how each of your manipulations will impact the final image. Knowing how to do it fast will help you not to lose a great shot in any situation.

Man Aiming Camera

Image: Andrianocz | Dreamstime.com

Take your time to read your camera manual or online reviews, even if it is painful experience, as all professional photographers do that.

3. Be patient and dedicated

Patience, persistence and dedication are your best companions on the way to success in the photography. Walking this path is gonna be difficult and sometimes you’ll feel like turning around, but being a great photographer requires effort, right?

By practicing regularly and remembering what makes you so passionate about photography, you can eventually reach the level of mastery you’re striving for.

4. Use Productivity Tools

A true professional values their own time and time of their clients and partners equally. These days there are a lot of great productivity tools to help you streamline your routine work. Why not take advantage of the technology progress and save precious time for the creative process?

For instance, Defrozo is one of the latest tools enabling photographers to manage all the ins and outs of their marketing in one place, for free.

Such automation tools like IFTTT and Buffer can also come in handy for organizing your workflow without soul killing manual work.

5. Think of yourself as a business

Investing your effort into the business side of your photography career is critical to your success. A habit of looking at things from an entrepreneur’s perspective is a surefire way to establish a prosperous photography business.

Laptop on Desk with Coffee

Image: Kittiphan Teerawattanakul | Dreamstime.com

Having a beautiful, mobile-friendly website, a set of business cards, and social media accounts for networking and brand promotion is a must for any aspiring photographer these days. Do your market research and create a consistent, attractive business kit to cast your marketing lines into many ponds.

6. Learn to Adapt

Learning to stand against stress and adapt to the situation is an extremely useful habit to gain. When something goes out of your control or some unexpected things show up try not to get frustrated. Instead, take a deep breath, keep your zen and try to get the maximum results from the situation you have. Sometimes bad things can turn good in the end, just don’t let panic and fear of failure to ruin everything before you get there.

7. Look for inspiration

Savvy photographers know that if inspiration doesn’t come to you, you can come to inspiration! Train your creative eye by simply looking at things around you and trying to see a “story” this particular object can tell in a picture. A project 365 or even a regular Instagram posting can help you with this task.

Icelandic Horses

Image: Santiago Rodríguez Fontoba | Dreamstime.com

Following the work of other photographers can be a great way to come with the ideas for your own work and stretch your boundaries. 500px and Behance are good places to discover amazing talents and notice some neat ideas you can develop and implement.

8. Know yourself

In any creative field, whenever it’s art, music, or photography, there are would be some days when you just don’t feel it. It’s necessary for your productivity to figure out when during the day you’re the most and least productive. When your stamina can’t keep up with your creative plans, dedicate your time to some routine work that doesn’t require as much of brain activity. When you have maximum productivity, for instance, in the morning, do some opposite things. This way you’ll be able to check off tasks from your to-do list faster and with better results.

9. Accept Any Feedback

One of the best way to improve your work is to seek for feedback and constructive criticism. You may get this feedback from your clients, friends, photographer you know, or online resources where you showcase your photography. It’s important to consider the feedback you get and make proper conclusions to improve your skills.

Desert Highway

Image: Paul Lemke | Dreamstime.com

Negative feedback should not disappoint you or make you upset, it needs to be your inspiration to become better photographer and finally make these people change their minds.

10. Be an eager collaborator

Never miss a chance to learn from other people and collaborate with like-minded creatives as it’s a truly inspirational and refreshing experience.

One of the key pillars of effective networking is being helpful and providing value to people. A blog post in which you share your takeaways from the latest sessions or a workshop giving your target audience an edge can help you build an authority and make people want to work with you. Another simple yet proven tactic to grow your network is using your lunch time to meet with other people rather than quickly swallow your food while processing photos in Lightroom.

About the author…

Nancy is a passionate freelance writer and blogger. She writes tons of inspirational articles on photography and web design, despite the fact that she is an economist by education. She enjoys reading, learning SEO and also losing her mind to French movies. You can check out her photography blog Photodoto and follow her on Twitter.

A Beginner’s Guide to Buying Microstock

Written by Kevin Thomas

An experienced designer will know how to manipulate images and find them for his current project, but what about people who are new to locating and editing images?

If you’ve been given a task to find and locate an image for a particular project, or you’re working on a task for yourself, it can be daunting just to find an image to begin with. Copying and pasting images for jokes to email to your friends is one thing, but the first thing you need to be aware of is copyright laws. You are looking for legal trouble if you think you can lift an image off the internet and use it for a formal publication or internet site. In fact, you can’t use it for most informal situations also!

Purchasing the rights to use an image is your best course of action. It is important to understand this. Yes, there are images which you can use for free. Most of the microstock sites will have a free section and there are also archival web sites that provide free use of images. There still will be legal limitations and terms of use for free images. It is up to you to research these restrictions.

When it comes to finding an image to use, you can start by searching the internet for STOCK IMAGES or MICROSTOCK. There are many internet sites that offer images for sale and weeding through them could become a job in itself.

After selecting a microstock site, the next step is to find the image you’re looking for. With tens of millions of images available for sale, the task of finding the right one could prove to be challenging. There will be a search feature where you enter specific keywords and that can be a science unto itself.

Photographers and illustrators who submit images to microstock sites are responsible for entering keywords. If they upload a picture of a cat but keyword the picture with the word FELINE, you will never find the image by searching on CAT. The reverse is also true, if you search on FELINE, you will not find CAT images.

dtSearch2
Searching for the perfect image on Dreamstime.com

There isn’t much you can do if images are poorly keyworded, but you can try different words or combinations of words to see what results you may get. There can also be options for how the images are sorted. Some microstock sites allow you to search by relevancy, upload date, best selling, and more. By trying various keywords and sort options, you will greatly increase your chances of finding the perfect image.

After selecting the image you need, probably the greatest concern is the size of the image. Many times an image needs to fit into a space with specific dimensions. Resizing and/or cropping the image may cause the image to be unusable. Most microstock sites will allow you to download a complimentary copy of the image so you can verify the picture will work within your project. The image will have watermarks to prevent the unauthorized use but it will allow you to verify that it will work before purchasing.

The problem is if you are inexperienced with manipulating images. If you don’t have software for editing images, how are you going to verify if a particular image is going to work for you? Fortunately, you do have some options.
If you have Microsoft Word, you can import the image into a Word document. You can then crop and resize the image as needed. This will be a process of trial and error but it’s an alternative from purchasing a software package that can edit images.

Computers that have a Microsoft operating system, most will come with an application called “Paint.” It’s a simple but free image editing software package. You can resize and crop images and it doesn’t require much skill to use the software. After manipulating the image as needed, you can then make your purchase with confidence.

msPaint
Cropping an image by Kevin Thomas with MS Paint

A couple of other free or low cost options for image editing are:

GIMP (Free)

Adobe Lightroom

Purchasing images is essentially a three step process. The first step is to find a microstock site on the internet that you’re comfortable with using. Second, you may need to employ various search strategies in order to find the perfect picture. Keywording is not always exact so you may want to try your searches with more than one approach in mind. Lastly, you will want to ensure the image will work if it needs to be resized or cropped. Chances are you you will have options for fundamental image editing without having to purchase additional software.

The Difference Between Commercial and Editorial Images in Microstock

Images & article by Kevin Thomas

dreamstime_s_48570600
Editorial Photo: Disney World Indiana Jones

Many people entering the world of microstock photography have a difficult time understanding the different between images that can be used for commercial purposes versus editorial. The answer is actually so easy and obvious that it becomes difficult to explain. It’s almost like someone asking you how to breathe. You just “breathe,” right?

OK… Let’s say you photograph a man standing in the middle of a street. If you want to use that image for commercial endeavors, then you will need the man to sign a Model Release form. By signing the form, the man is giving his consent for the image to be used for commercial purposes. If he does not sign the form, then it can only be used for editorial.

Most photographers are aware of model release forms but they still do not understand how this particular image floats in the realm of commercial or editorial. Look at it this way: If the image is editorial, then you can only state what is factual about the image. “Here is a man standing in the middle of a street. The man is walking in a neighborhood with houses. The man is wearing blue jeans and has a mustache.”

dreamstime_s_40419059
Editorial Photo: Workers, Laborers Haul Goods to Market in India

That is essentially what makes an editorial image, you are providing an image of a factual situation. People at a sporting event, a city scene, a famous person at an event, you see these types of images all the time. Editorial images provide a visual context for the viewer in relation to a particular event, setting, thought, situation, etc.

Let’s clarify this a bit more and go back to our picture of the man in the street. Is the man scary looking? Is he ugly? If you’re an insurance company and you want an image for a brochure promoting homeowner insurance, you might want a picture of a scary, ugly man prowling the neighborhood. If you use this image and caption it “Is Your Home Safe,” you are now implying the man is dangerous. The man could be a criminal or some kind of nut.

Since the man did not sign a model release form, he has not consented for having his face being used to sell insurance. The brochure implies you need to protect yourself from crooks such as this man. If you are representing the man to be a bad person, you have crossed the line from editorial to commercial. If you want to capture a scene of a scary, dangerous crook, then you will need to hire a model or buy some beers for your brother-in-law, anyone who is willing to create this concept for you and sign a model release. The model has to consent to representing whatever your idea is to portray.

dreamstime_s_26938771
Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, Turkey, Travel Destination

In this case we are suggesting the model to be a bad person. However, the character of the man is not the only thing to consider when understanding the differences between commercial and editorial images. If we print the picture of the man in the street and say “This man enjoys drinking Coca Cola,” again we are going beyond the basic facts on the image. If the man is actually drinking a Coke, we still can’t use the image for promoting a soft drink if he has not signed a model release form.

If you want to use an image for commercial purposes, then you have to think in terms of what the character of the subject may be and what the person may be promoting. We all know the people in TV commercials are paid actors who may have never used a particular product. Yet these actors are promoting and endorsing the product anyway. In these cases the company is using actors to represent customers who use and enjoy their product. You might see a TV commercial of a dishonest auto mechanic with the suggestion you go to a particular garage where you will get a fair deal. Is the auto mechanic in the commercial really shady and dishonest? You already know the answer to that question, he’s a paid actor who signed a release form.

Has this helped for understanding the difference between an image that can be used for commercial versus editorial? An editorial image can only be used for portraying a set of facts. If you photograph your neighbor cutting the grass, it’s a neighbor cutting the grass. Mundane scenes have virtually no use for editorial which is why you never see them. The more common editorial images you usually see have already been mentioned above. If the person(s) in your image sign a model release form, then they are agreeing their image can be used to promote a product, idea, or concept. Which is why people work as models, in return for their likeness to be used, they generally expect some sort of compensation. Hiring models and paying them, that would be the subject of another blog.

dreamstime_s_21427606
Editorial Photo: Chinese People Exercise, Xingqing Park Xian China

The subject of editorial versus commercial use of images can actually become more complicated depending on certain situations. Laws can vary from one country or another. There have also been instances where a model signed a release form and still took the phootgrapher to court because of how an image was used. These are advanced topics but suffice to say, if you now understand the fundamnetal difference between editorial and commercial images, you’ll be off to a good start.