Thanks for the comments guys, glad you liked the shots.
Israphel: It sounds like your making good money off of your work and rightfully, from the look of things. You have outstanding landscape photos. I am curious as to how you make money off of landscape photos. I ask not because of pure curiosity but because your business model has to be very different from mine in order to become profitable.
Where do you get/find your clients?
What do they normally ask of you?
What do they use the photos for?
All expenses payed?
What is the most profitable way of distributing your work?
If your not comfortable answering here you can PM me
Hey Mike
To be honest, making money out of landscape photography is bloody hard and kind of requires that you put yourself forward quite a bit for very little return. It is far easier to get well paid work as a wedding photographer (at least it is in Portugal, where I live).
In my experience, the most profitable way is to get your work out locally, and sell prints. I've got my work in various local galleries and cafes, and I'll sell a number of prints each month through these. You need to get used to taking knock backs, because most places (certainly galleries) will say "no thanks", but a couple will say yes, and that's how it starts. I have a portfolio of around 15 of my best shots printed out at 50-60cm and mounted, and these are what I take around to places. I leave business cards in every cafe and restaurant I visit, and occasionally get calls from places looking to put stuff on the walls. With galleries, they'll often add you to a waiting list (which can be years long)
Generally, the things which sell best are local shots. People seem to like to buy stuff of places they know.
Also, one thing that's really effective is calendars. I do one every year
http://www.andymumford.com/calendar.html and give the proceeds to charity. I sell them around local companies (and give some to older clients) and these in turn can generate print sales in the future.
I've done a couple of local exhibitions as well. These can be profitable, but really require a large investment in time as well as a considerable outlay of cash in the first place, because you need to have 20-30 (depending on the size of the venue) images printed up quite large and really beautifully mounted. Of course if you don't sell them, then you'll lose money, so it helps to have a general idea of which of your shots people are likely to buy.
I've also noticed that people often like to buy things from exhibitions even if they don't want a print for their wall, so postcards and small books (the kind that Apple/Lulu/Blurb make) tend to sell quite well.
For me though, it's impossible to make a living doing this.
Other things i've done with landscape photography. Well, online prints sales are a waste of time. Just to put it into perspective, my front page at Deviant Art has had almost 200 000 hits, and my images somewhere between half and three quarters of a million hits....and yet the profit I've made on image sales there would just about cover the cost of a good tripod and ball head. It does get your name out I guess, and from DA I've been contacted a couple of times for CD covers and stock sales...but again, this still comes out less than the profit from shooting a couple of weddings.
Magazines. Most either no longer pay to use images, or pay very little because they know that don't need to. There are literally thousands of very talented people with dSLRs who are willng to let magazines use their images on the cover for free, simply because it feels great to have your image up there. Of course the big names like National Geographic and Outdoor Photographer still pay, but they tend to use the elite guys. I'm talking about the raft of DSLR User, Practical Photographer etc magazines that have sprung up over the last few years. The last magazine I was published in did a nine page spread and interview...and of course they didn't pay because (as you get bored of hearing) "it's good coverage for you" ie, they're doing you a favour.
I understand this, understand why it's like this, but ultimately, sending images off to magazines is time consuming and you receive very little benefit (apart from the buzz of seeing your images in print) from the time you spend...so I don't bother sending them off anymore.
Magazines still will pay for articles with images, and I've sold a few "how to" articles to Portuguese magazines (usually based on stuff that I've already written for
ND Magazine but they don't pay very much.
Stock sales? Well, because of places like istock, Shutterstock etc, the price of stock images is pretty low now. Again, it's a large investment in time (in terms of keywording and submitting large quantities of images) for quite a small return. I occasionally get emails from people asking to use my images as stock via either my website or Deviant Art, and I prefer to do it myself rather than use an agency. CD or book covers pay quite well (the companies producing them usually have relatively generous budgets), whereas clients who want shots for spots on websites or web ads generally don't want to pay much (but often ask for 10 or more images).
So, basically making money from landscape photography really requires a lot of work for a pretty limited return. The most profitable way of spending time I've found, as I've said, is getting your prints out locally to as many places as possible. Even places like the dentist and doctors are places worth speaking to the office manager and leaving a card.
At the end of the day though, weddings are far more profitable. I'm lucky here in that Portugal is a lot less sophisticated than the US for wedding photography. For years here (and it's still the most common type of wedding shoot even now) people would pay for some guy in a cheap suit to turn up and shoot poses of every combination of the bride and grooms family possible, then make money by selling the prints.
Documentary style wedding photography is still rare here, and there is a niché for people who actually don't like posing (I can understand this, both me and my wife hate posing and at our wedding I gave my camera to a friend who's a part time photographer and asked him to shoot whatever he liked). For good wedding photography here, you pay and arm and a leg, so I've kind of aimed at a niche of affordable documentary style photography. I'm not comfortable directing people in poses, and I marvel at your ability to work with models, but i've never come at photography from that angle, so it feels strange for me.
When it comes to getting clients, well I advertise on a Portuguese wedding site, and I also work with a wedding planning agency (they have 3 photographers on their books, and clients choose which they prefer).
Most of my work comes via a good friend of mine who is a violinist, and organizes string quartets for weddings. She's one of the few people in Portugal who does this, and she throws a lot of work my way (and in return she gets all her publicity photography done free)
That's about it really, I hope I've answered some of your questions.
At the moment my wife and I are involved in a sustainable tourism project in southern Portugal, and when that's up and running I'm thinking of looking into doing photography weekends with courses for beginners and stuff...but that's a long way in the future.
All the best with everything.
Andy
