Photography is one of the most common hobbies nowadays. Everyone has a camera phone, or even a semi-professional camera. If you really enjoy taking photos, you could consider turning your passion into a successful home-based business. It is easy to find affordable online photography classes and Photoshop tutorials. This will help you improve your skills, take amazing photos and edit them carefully.
Making money from photography is relatively easy, because there are many niches you can specialize in: event photography, portraits, street photography, news photography, etc. However, you should not stick to one single niche, because there are no great differences in skills, technique and equipment from one to another.
In fact, you are probably not aware of many creative ways of making money from your photography skills, so today we will run through five of them, which are tested and proven sources of income for many photographers. Let’s get started!
1. Sell Stock Photography
Stock photography websites have huge libraries of images containing everything from “pretty girl working on laptop” to “heavy traffic in the city”. These photos were taken by various photographers either during photo sessions or simply while walking down the street, and then sold to the stock photography websites.
Here is a quick idea: find a popular website and find a category of images where they do not have a lot of photos. Take high quality photos fitting that category and then approach the website owner with the offer to sell them your photos.
2. Create Photo Albums
Wedding and baby photographers are in large numbers. Most of them are talented, skilled, and honor their business engagements in a professional manner. So, why are some more successful than others?
It all depends on how you sell your skills. The clients should feel that they get extra value from you, so do not limit yourself to taking, editing and printing photos. You have the Photoshop skills, so it should be easy to create a beautifully designed photo album which the newlyweds or new parents will cherish forever.
3. Offer to Improve Local Businesses Websites
Look around at various local businesses and search for their websites. Not all of them are professionally made, especially when it comes to photos. Offer to photo menu items for restaurants and cafés so they can use these photos on their website and menus. Offer your own stock photos (which you did not sell to anyone else) to spice up the look of their home page.
4. Sell Your Photos through Your Website
Every professional photographer should have an impeccable looking website. Do not spare efforts in creating a stylish, fast loading and visually pleasing website and promote it on every type of social platform, including artists and designers’ forums, such as Behance.
Offer your clients the possibility of purchasing digital images, or printed ones and to book their own photo sessions with you.
5. Freelance for Local Newspapers and Magazines
Small newspapers cannot afford to hire a photographer on a permanent basis, so they prefer working with freelancers. You would be attending various public events (sports matches, concerts, important city hall meetings or events) and taking relevant photos for news articles. It is an exciting activity with lots of variety, and it also pays well.
As you can see, there are lots of ways in which your photography skills can be put to good use and bring you an income. All you need to do now is select the option that works best for you.