The sub-title of this book contains the words “for fun or profit”. I will admit that I’m not going to be able to teach you much about the fun side because that’s up to you to enjoy photography as a hobby or pass time.
What I am going to show you in this chapter are some ways to make some money; either part-time or full-time. As with every business endeavour, you have to be prepared to commit the necessary time, money and sacrifice to make it a financial success.
I’ve been into quite a few different studios over the years; all the way from a tiny booth for taking passport photos to ones with a large stage which can accommodate an entire wedding party.
The key to studio photography is that you can control the photographic environment. You are not exposed to rain and snow, winds that make peoples’ hair stand on end, clouds that suddenly darken everything and all the inevitable distractions like a dog running off leash and enthusiastically jumping up and placing his muddy paws all over the bride’s sparkling white wedding dress!
In a studio, you can control the dog by not admitting him unless he’s part of the family!
To be serious, you can control the background. Most photographers with studios prefer a white backdrop because light can be reflected off it but you could also choose from a large selection of commercially available backdrops featuring everything from candy sticks to an old brick wall cloth background. Muslins and canvas are also used as backdrops.
Don’t forget the floor! You can also purchase material for use on your studio floor and most of these have to be fairly durable to take the “stomp” of a stiletto heel!
Chroma keying is an interesting technique, frequently used when filming video but not exclusive to it. It is a technique used to place one image on top of another by making the background behind the first image become transparent. So, you can take a still picture of a person or take a video, against a uniform background colour (usually green or blue) and this can then be made “transparent” in your “digital darkroom” or during post production for a video. You can then take the still picture of your subject or the video footage of that person and place it against a different background. You’ve probably seen this technique used many times on TV weather forecasts where the weather-person is filmed against a chroma key background which is then replaced with a satellite weather map.
In a studio, you can control the “furnishings” of your photographic environment. You are not at risk of your bride subject (in her sparkling white wedding gown) sitting down on a dirty park bench or even worse one that has just been painted and the “wet paint” sign has blown away in the wind!.
Studio props can range all the way from a simple stool to entire systems which feature “brick” archways and walls. Of course, all of these have to be made of materials which are fairly lightweight and easy to move. If you are going to use very elaborate props, you’ll also need the space to store them.
Lighting is probably the most important aspect of working in a studio.
Try to avoid using a flashlight attached directly to your camera-if anything move it off to one side. Instead, try indirect lighting and don’t forget to light the background to make your subject stand out.
The studio has the advantage that you can add moveable rail track lights attached to the ceiling. If you use floor lighting, you’ll need to purchase tripods and of course you will have the challenge of electrical cords lying around all over the place which people can trip over; bring your tripods crashing down or worse, they could injure themselves and sue you for millions and millions of dollars!
Not all lights are the same. For example, “hot lights” use halogen or tungsten “bulbs”. Be warned that they throw off a lot of heat and if you use a lot of them in your studio, you may end up with enough heat to fry an egg!
“Cold lights” burn at a lower temperature and are “arc” lights made from mercury iodide. “Cold” may be an exaggeration, but since they throw off much less heat, you could use coloured filters in front of them to achieve different effects.
“Warm lights” in the form of fluorescent tubes, can provide you with a good light source but be warned that the light spectrum can be quite narrow and often the bulbs flicker which could be caught by the camera shutter. If you are using a high end camera, you’ll need to adjust your camera settings, otherwise you may get some strange effects.
You can use what are called “softboxes” to reduce the amount of light. Some come with louvers and almost all have their own tripod mounting stand. You can also soften your lighting by using umbrellas and various types of reflectors.
You’ll find lots of studio lighting equipment at a professional photography store. You will likely find second-hand equipment if budgeting is a problem.
Costumes can add a whole new dimension to your studio work. A graduation gown and cap could be useful if you intend to cater to a school, college or university crowd. Fairy costumes for young kids or angel wings for babies can disguise even the most wicked little urchins! You could also offer “vintage” clothing or the entire gamut you’ll see at Halloween.
My advice is that if you have a costume rental company in your neighbourhood, is that you work closely with them. If you give them business, there’s a chance that they might send some business your way in return.
OK; so you’ve spent all this money on creating your studio but will customers come pounding on your door? The sad truth is probably not! You’re going to have to market and advertise your services. A good place to get the lowdown on these topics would be to read a book published by Productive Publications: Advertising for Beginners: Successful Web and Offline Advertising in the Digital Age by www.Learn2succeed.com.
If you are going to advertise, you’ll need to first define your target market. Will it be simple passport photos? Will it be taking family portraits? Will it involve model photography? Will it be graduation photos? Will it be photographing babies and young children? Will it be part of the wedding photo scenario which is almost an entre industry in itself and I will elaborate a little more in the next section.
I’m sure you have attended weddings where a photographer has been running around shooting the bridal party and guests ad nauseam! They usually consist of a mixture of still photos and video so you will either need to use a still camera as well as a camcorder. Of course, if you can afford it, you can splash out on a high end DSLR which will do practically everything for you.
The big advantage of weddings is that most take place on a weekend and, as such, offer a great opportunity for part-time earnings for someone who is working weekdays 9-5 in a regular job.
Before you sign up a contract with the couple who are getting married or (more often) one of their parents, you should go through their expectations and the kinds of shots they would like to preserve of their important day. Prepare a shot list and include it as an appendix to your contract. You don’t want someone coming back to you after you have presented your collection and saying: “Where’s the photo of my dear Uncle Fred?” If they want pics of Uncle Fred, get it on the shot list. When you are at the wedding, if you don’t know what Uncle Fred looks like....ask!
You will also need to find out what sort of final products are they looking for. Do they want framed pictures, a wedding photo album and if so, how many photos? Do they want en edited video? What should be in the video: the head table, clips from wedding speeches, the first dance, etc. Get it all down in writing beforehand.
At the church, make sure that the priest, minister, preacher or rabbi will permit you to take photos. For some, it is a place of worship; not an extension of your photo studio, and they may object to photos being taken during the service. Alternatively, they may object to you prancing around the pulpit. So, I would suggest that whoever is officiating be asked beforehand. There’s nothing worse than a couple saying they want all kinds of photos taken of the religious ceremony and when you arrive there with cameras, flash and lighting equipment, you’re told “no way!”
Lighting can be a major challenge especially in a place of worship, so you will have to find out beforehand if you are allowed to use a flash. If not, you will have to adjust your camera aperture or shutter speed to take this into account.
Frequently, there will be a few hours pause between the religious ceremony and the reception. This is often used to get the bridal party together for some photos while they are still sober!
If you are taking group photos immediately prior to the reception, make sure you are photographing the right people by having a designated person from each side of the family herd the right people to the designated spot. In this regard, I have a funny story to recount. Several years ago, we were at a wedding reception hall where three different receptions were taking place simultaneously. We didn’t know most of the family members of the wedding we were attending and ended up in the photos of the wrong party. They must have been saying afterwards when they got their pictures back: “Who are these people? We didn’t invite them!”
Often, the photos at the reception are taken during the congratulatory line-up or maybe a more formal portrait-type shot of the bridal party. Again, do they want photos of all the guests congratulating the couple or would they rather you go round the reception room at a later stage and photograph the guests at each table?
Don’t forget to take photos of the little things such as a flower arrangement, the wedding cake and especially any young children-especially during their first attempts at dancing. Use the continuous shooting mode otherwise the “perfect’ shot may elude you. Even though you have to capture all the “big events at a wedding” a little artistic flare can also help to lighten up an otherwise standard wedding album or wedding video.
Take the trouble to create a checklist of the equipment you will need beforehand. Finally, always, always, always include a back-up camera in case you have a malfunction. There is nothing which will ruin your reputation as a wedding photographer more quickly than a camera that decided to quit on you!
In addition, you could use the second camera with a different lens, for example a zoom, so you could quickly get shots of something happening across the room without having to elbow your way through an army of guests.
A huge number of products for sale on eBay include photos. These do not necessarily have to be high definition, high quality photos but they do need to be properly taken or they will detract from the apparent value of the products on sale and consequently may result in lower bid prices.
Many frequent sellers on eBay have already set up their small studios for taking photos of small objects. On the other hand there are many others who don’t know the first thing about product photography. So, while this may not be a highly lucrative area for earning money, it could supplement your income as a part-time job.
A more lucrative area for product photography is the market for photos for use in manufacturers’ catalogues and on their Web sites. Many firms do not have staff who are well trained in taking photos and sometimes have to rely on expensive professional photographers from outside. So, this may be an area for you to explore (through advertisements) but you will have to be free to do the work during normal 9-5 business hours, unless you are dealing with small home-based entrepreneurs.
Finally, my advice is to initially take lots of pictures of the products. Experiment with different lighting, backgrounds, try photographing from different angles and using different props. Then sit down and select the best ones.
Many people have old or damaged photos which they cherish and would love to have them “repaired”. For this, you’ll need a good quality flatbed scanner and then use some of the software programs which I covered in the last couple of chapters. Top of the list of software would be Adobe’s Photoshop.
Many old photos suffer from fading over the years so they need to be darkened and sharpened up to make them look as though they were taken recently. You’ll also have to touch up any scratches or spots due to dust.
If an old photo has areas which are badly damaged, you may need to ask if you can digitally crop the size of the photo image if this action will eliminate the damaged areas but don’t mess with the original.
In the past I’ve spent a lot of time touching up images and I should forewarn you that the hours go by very quickly. So, my advice is to base your fee on the number of hours you have to spend and possibly set some maximum. Also, don’t forget to add in the costs of printing the “repaired” image. If you don’t have your own equipment, you can burn your file onto a CD-ROM or DVD and there are many “photocopy” or graphic art stores who may have the right equipment and can save you a great deal of money if you are only doing this kind of work occasionally.
If you’ve got some good connections in the police or fire department, you may be able to get tips on where the latest serious crime or fire has taken place. In the old days, before 9/11, some people found ways to tune in to emergency crew radio communications but that has become more difficult with fears of terrorism and the use of more sophisticated equipment.
If you are going to do this kind of work, you’ll need to be quick off the mark and get to the scene as quickly as possible otherwise it’s no longer “news”.
You will also have to establish contacts with the newsrooms of your local newspapers or TV broadcasters.
There is a huge market for good photos which can be used in advertising, for magazine and book covers, etc. They can save businesses large amounts of money because they avoid them having to hire a professional photographer.
Quite a number of agencies specialize in amassing collections of photos for resale or for licence and they publish them in catalogues or as thumbnail images online. I’ve used them in the past for book covers and I’ve always preferred royalty free images because I don’t want to get tied down in continually paying out sums of money based on the number of times the image is reproduced.
Pricing is often based on the size of the image. Thus, a small image may be relatively inexpensive compared to a poster-sized image. However, if you try and get around it and enlarge the small image, the quality will deteriorate. So, as a consumer of stock photography, I had to decide in advance of purchase, what size I would require for final reproduction.
So, flip the coin. If you, as a photographer, have a number of photos of objects, people or scenes that are top notch, with right balance and lighting, you may want to approach one of the agencies that specialize in this area. They may not actually purchase the photos from you but make them available in their catalogue. You could then earn a commission of anywhere from 20% to 60% of the selling price, each time your photo is licenced out.
Just remember one thing! If you are submitting photos of people or players in a sporting event, you will need to have a written release from the person or people featured in your photographs. This could also apply to certain commercially owned landmarks, such as the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada. Be careful to get permissions in writing because if you don’t you may end up with an army of angry lawyers banging on your door!
What I said in the last section about getting releases, certainly applies to selling photos of players in sports events. As you know, the TV broadcast rights of major events can sell for millions of dollars and organizers are not going to take kindly to somebody trying to sell photos or videos of their events.
These same rules may not apply to junior leagues or especially to kids teams. Parents love to have pictures of their little Johnny on the ice scoring a goal during an ice hockey match or little Jane scoring at a grass hockey game.
The key is to get permission from the organizers and the parents in advance. Even, if you don’t take pictures during the match, a full-team photo could prove popular with parents, and if the price is right you may be able to sell quite a number of them.
If you can take the photos at the beginning before the game starts, and if you have a printer that will work off your car battery or a local plug-in source, you may be able to offer the photos for sale at the end of the match, which will probably produce better results than having to take addresses and relying on the mail service to deliver the photos undamaged and unbent!
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, you have to be prepared to commit the necessary time, money and sacrifice to make it a financial success. If you’re serious about it, you may be interested in another book published by Productive Publications: Business Start-Up for Beginners: How to Become Your Own Boss by www.Learn2succeed.com.