These guys offer unsecured small business loans of $10K-$100K  to US clients with an established business, $100K+ turnover who are not operating in certain industries. Their slogan is that they lend based on business performance and credit scores, and the promos all suggest they offer a much needed alternate financing option for small business owners rejected by more traditional lenders.

I’ve had a good look around and haven’t found much at all about them, good or bad, so I’m going to give it a run and see how it performs. They offer affiliates a handy 1.5% commission on any referred business, so the commission on an approved loan would be between $150 and $1500.

Depending on your clientele and website audience, this could be a very good option for some photographers…

If you’re dealing with a lot of small business owners, as a lot of commercial photographers are, it’s probably worth registering with GoCreditWise here, grabbing your affiliate link, and keep it to hand out next time you hear a small business owner complaining the bank has turned them down.

If you have the kind of website that’s frequented by small business owners… think other photographers, graphic designers,  printers, small advertising agencies, web designers etc… you might find it worthwhile adding a page for this.

And if you have any sort of skill at  (or desire to learn how to) generate targeted web traffic, it could be well worth adding a page to your website for this.

I’ve added a quick resource page for anyone interested below. There’s a more detailed explanation of the small business loan  program and a heap of ideas for how you might add some promotions to your current website or marketing activities.

Promoting CreditWise Small Business Loans

Make sure you read it all the way through because there’s one key aspect I haven’t covered here that’s a real game changer!

And in my day-to-day with GlobalEye I hear from a lot of photographers who, for one reason or another, are about ready to give up.

And none of these reasons have anything to do with character flaws…

Or how hard you work… or how many hours you put into your business.

So if you’re currently frustrated with your lack of success, or feel like your spinning your wheels, and never getting the success you deserve…

I urge you to watch this FREE video below…

It’s from Rich Schefren and it follows on from the Free Report I sent out last week.

http://ozurl.com/l/phvideo

After years of working with hundreds of business people both offline and online, Rich has seen firsthand why entrepreneurs struggle.

He’s identified 3 online business traps that ensnare 95% of them… and in this video…

http://ozurl.com/l/phvideo

Rich will reveal…

* How to tell where which trap is stopping your success right now with your business.

* The “virus” in the online market space that infects entrepreneurs and makes them struggle more than anything else.

* The 3 Root Causes that actually force hard-working entrepreneurs to get stuck in the first place.

This is one of the most insightful videos I’ve seen all year. Rich’s focus is ‘online marketing’ in general but the information is quite universal and applies to a lot of photographers as well. In fact, Trap #1 is one that we spend a lot of time helping our contributing photographers deal with.

I urge you to check it out right now.

http://ozurl.com/l/phvideo

If you missed the free report last week, we had a lot of good feedback on it, and good news, you can still download it from the video page!

This is building up to a special ‘live event’ next week. I’ve had a sneak preview of some of the content and it is excellent … content I’m sure anyone trying to sell photography online will be able to use …  make sure you grab the report and watch the video so you’re be ready for the grand finale!

Profit Prophesy Report

I’ve been a big fan of Rich Schefren for quite a while and I’ve shared a number of his ground-breaking reports with our photographers over the years. More importantly, we’ve applied a lot of his ideas and strategies to our business here, and incorporated a lot of what he teaches in the business system we offer our photographers.

In short, this guy knows his stuff. His insights have been featured in media outlets around the globe including The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, FOX, and MSNBC…to name a few… and now’s your chance to be the first to read and act on Rich’s latest strategies in his new report.

Profit Prophesy Report

It’s totally free and there’s no opt-in or anything. Just good information you can apply to your photography business today.

Be warned, Rich is writing to a broad audience of people doing business online, but if you take your time you’ll see countless ways you can apply this information to your photography business. Many of the problems and the solutions are universal and photography is certainly an online business these days.

When you consider Rich’s last 7 free reports were packed  with marketing predictions that came true… and have been downloaded millions of times already… I’d drop what you’re doing and read it now. Because this NEW report reveals the biggest threat  to your business in 6 years. Don’t wait. Download this report right now.

Rich Shefren’s Profit Prophesy Report

Inside this report, Rich also reveals…

• What he calls the “mind virus” that has swept the Internet space, and why it’s killing what could be successful businesses.
• Why the majority of hard-working entrepreneurs still constantly struggle. (Hint: It’s not because of any character flaw.)
• The two critical advantages you MUST have if you want to maintain a successful business in 2012.

So wherever you’re at with your photography business: if you’re wanting more out of it, struggling to know what to do next, or wondering it it’s ever going to take you where you want to go… I recommend you have a good read of this report!

In the video above, I show you how I created a video for a lightbox page, all in about 5 minutes, and then completed a few simple promotion steps, to get it listed and indexed in 40+ video sharing websites. It really is super easy when you’ve got the right tools, so check it out, then have a look over the resources listed further down the page.

As a guide to how quickly this works, I created the lightbox page about 8pm on October 1st and I ran the standard GlobalEye ‘broadcast’ submissions shortly after that. The video was created and submitted about 12 hours after that. I’ll add a follow up video later on to see how the various pages are ranking.

Resources & Links From The Video

Animoto

Animoto is the powerhouse of this approach. You can test this system out with a free account, and if you decide to use it regularly, I’d highly recommend you consider the ‘Plus’ upgrade for just $39 a year. You’ll get some additional video templates, royalty free music tracks and you’ll be able to make longer videos.

Sign Up For Animoto Here

LinksAlpha

LinksAlpha is a powerful automation tools that will check a RSS feed regularly and report any new content it finds to various Social Media accounts. The free account lets you make 50 posts a month or for $5 you can post up to 1000 times a month. As a guide, each post we make at GlobalEye goes to 91 different accounts … so that equates to 91 posts. Please note: GlobalEye photographers don’t need to do this… if you just post to your GlobalEye blog, we do this and more for you!

Sign Up For LinksAlpha Here

Mass Ping

This is a free service that lets you ping multiple URLs to 80+ search engines at once. We recommend you use this to ping your photo/lightbox pages, your video on YouTube, your video on Animoto, plus you should write a short blog post announcing the new content and ping that as well. If you use Fiverr to get your video submitted to 40+ video sharing sites, the Seller should give you a list of URLs when they’re done… you can ping that entire list as well to really get  things moving!

Free Mass Ping Service

Fiverr Video Submit

Fiverr is a great resource for finding people to do various SEO tasks for you. For Video Submissions make sure you give the Seller a good title, your target page link, and a keyword rich description. One word of warning with Fiverr promos… don’t be tempted by people offering mass submissions and thousands of backlinks. That sort of thing stopped working a long time back and these days Google will actually penalise your website if you over do it!

Fiverr Video Submit Services

The business of photography is something that you really need to approach based on a honest assessment of your abilities, strengths and interests. From there you can then see if there’s any kind of market for your planned products or services, and do some proof of concept research to ensure those markets will indeed pay you for your offerings.

Then you’ll be ready to start planning your business!

Unfortunately most photographers come at it from the opposite direction. They have a desire to make money selling their photos but no real understanding or interest in the business processes involved in converting photography to income. They mistakenly believe great photography is all it takes to build a successful business.

So with all this in mind, this is the gist of my response to the would-be pro photographer.

1. Start with an honest assessment of your current situation.

Photography is extremely competitive simply because it seems like such a dream-job to so many people. Modern digital technology means anyone with basic camera skills can create a good image, so everything thinks they’re a great photographer with real prospects, you need to work out what makes you different?

• What specialised skills do you have that will set you apart from the crowd?
• What interests and knowledge do you have that you can use to in your work?
• What subjects & fields do you do your best work with?
• Do you have a distinct personal style of work that sets you apart?
• Is you equipment suitable for creating high-res, high quality images?
• Do you have the skills and software to take an image from your camera and create a commercial quality print-ready file?
• What business experience do you have?
• What sales & marketing experience do you have?

The idea here is to first of all identify the kinds of products and services you’re able to offer, and then assess whether those photographic services are of commercial quality?

2. Is there a market for those products and/or services?

It’s one thing to know you can produce some amazing work, but it’s another to know there are people out there who want to use it. So you really need to put in some time to determine whether or not there is a market for what you do?

It doesn’t matter how good your work is if you can’t find anyone to buy it, and yet many photographers go into business with little more ‘market research’ than the encouragement of friends and family. “Wow, those photos are good, you should sell them!”

So somehow you have to answer the following questions…

• Are there people who need the kinds of images you like to shoot?
• Are there people who buy photos of the subjects you shoot?
• Are there people who will pay you to create specific images for them?
• Are there people who will pay for your expertise or knowledge?

The best approach here is to find other people offering similar products and services, and then see how your offerings stack up? (Google is great for this!)

• Are your subjects similar?
• Is your technique as strong?
• Do you present as professionally?
• If the buyer was to view your portfolio and that of your ‘competitor’, who would they choose to do the job?
• Why?

If you’re serious about making a business of your photography, you need to be totally honest with yourself when you answer these questions. The truth is, you don’t necessarily have to be a great photographer to build a success photography business, but your work does need to be as good as the competition.

You also need to be clear on what you’re offering, who your offering it to, and why they are going to buy.

Unfortunately, many photographers – and many other would-be business owners – start with little more than a product idea, and rarely take the time to objectively test their idea to see if there’s likely to be genuine demand. They build a business based on little more than wishful thinking and wonder why it fails?

Fortunately these days it’s quite simple to test any idea and assess the likely demand using the search engines and keyword research tools.

3. Proof of concept testing

This is where you prove to yourself that there is a real demand for your offerings. In days gone by this would have involved surveys and focus groups, and taken considerable time and money, but these days is super quick and easy.

The best place to start is to simply search in Google for other people offering something similar? The volume of search results will give you an indication of the competition, which is a good start. Too many competing results and possibly your idea needs to be more unique. None at all and there mightn’t be enough demand for it to be viable.

The real test of course is whether people are making money offering those services, and that’s easy enough to gauge .

For that you look at the Adwords ads, to the right of the search results. In simple terms, lots of ads mean that those photographers are making money offering those services. No ads means there’s no money to be made in that market.

That probably seems a bit over simplified, but it really is quite simple…

People only spend money on ads that make them money, so if no one is paying to advertise a specific service, chances are good it has been tried but didn’t work.

To be sure though, you should also test your idea in a proper keyword research tool.

Google offers a very useful free keyword research tool… you may need to login to a Google Account to access it but it’s well worth setting up!

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The process is quite simple. Once logged in, type a keyword phrase into the tool that represents the product or service you’re considering building your business around. It might be the style of photography, the field of work or the subjects you want to focus on.

Regardless, once you submit you’ll get real-time data back showing you the number of people searching for that phrase – and similar related phrases – every month. So the first thing you’re looking for is search traffic… proof that people are in fact looking for the services you plan to offer.

The next thing to look for is the CPC value. This is the average/approximate price paid by Adwords advertisers to have their ad shown besides the search results. This is a cost-per-click, meaning the advertiser pays this amount for every single visitor they get.

So while most general photography terms might be in the $1-2 range, when you start seeing prices higher than that … sometime $5 or more per visitor … you know you’re looking at a highly commercial term. And if that is closely related to your business idea, then you also know your concept has merit!

Of course this kind of research is all relative and quite subjective, so spend plenty of time on it, test some broad phrases to give yourself a benchmark, and the zoom in on phrases related to your planned business, and see how it stacks up.

If you find genuine search volume you know there’s interest and if you also people paying to advertise with those phrases, you’ll know there’s a viable market … and that’s a good starting point for building your photography business!

4. Developing Your Business Plan.

It’s only after you’ve done all this that you’ll be ready to start planning your business, and that’s where the real work begins.

You need to spend even more time now planning how you’re going to market your offerings, transact your sales and deliver your products or services. As a photographer your options are virtually unlimited so it’s important that you take your time to get clear on your business model so you can focus on the best options for that and avoid the distraction of trying to do too many things at once.

The good news is, by now you know you have the skills, the product or service, you know there’s a market for it and you’re confident that people will pay you for it, so it should be easier to focus on the specific processes – sales & marketing, fulfilment and operations – that will turn your idea into a sustainable business.

One final point to keep in mind is, you don’t have to be a great photographer to build a successful photography business.

In fact, there are many mediocre photographers who do extremely well on the strength of their business skills. There’s obviously minimal standards required to ensure customer satisfaction, but you should never assume great photography skills will guarantee you a successful photography business.

The truth is, you’ll be hard pressed to find a successful photography business run by a great photographer with poor business skills.

So when you consider how many talented photographers share the dream of making a business out of their photography, it should be clear that the best way to succeed is to focus on your business skills as much as you do your photography.

This is an area where a lot of photographers let themselves down … they might shoot professional images but then they try to market them with amateur graphics! If you’re determined to take that job on yourself, at least give yourself the right tools to do it right!

View Samples & Templates Here

<p> Check out more stock photography by Howard Birnstihl here.</p>

We’ve got a heap of photography ebooks from several authors, all available for free download, but it gets even better. You can ‘rebrand’ them with your affiliate IDs and make money giving them away!

It’s all super easy and explained on the website, so please check it out…

http://www.photowebprofits.com

If you have a photography book you’d like to contribute, you’l llget a heap of exposure and a load of extra visitor traffic … look for the ‘submit your book’ link on the site above.

• Ebook sales grew 177% last year.
• 53% of people who buy eBook readers state that they now read more books than they did before.
• 51% of eReader owners increased their purchases of eBooks in the past year.
• 176% Increase in US electronic-book sales in 2009.
• 86% of eReader owners read on their device more than once a week.
• 51% of eReader owners read on their device on a daily basis. (Wow!)
• eReaders are now owned by 1 in 10 Americans. 12% of Americans plan to buy one within 6 months.
• The average Amazon customer buys 3.3x as many books after buying a Kindle than before they had one.
• One out of five people who buy digital books from the Kindle store don’t own a Kindle device. (i.e., 20% of sales are on iPads, etc.)
• iPad controls 16% of the eReader market and rising.
• iPad sales are expected to be 15.6 million this year and 46 million next year.

The short version is, Amazon, Apple Store and others are selling thousands and thousands of digital books every single day of the week, but so far they are almost all text-based books, with very few pictorial options.

And all these distributors will tell you, ANY type of book that sells well in print is going to sell well as a digital download.

So the big question for me is, why aren’t more photographers cashing in on this?

Well image security is a concern for some, but realistically, is it any different to a print reproduction?

I know I’ve seen instances where someone has clearly scanned a print repo to use in their own layout, but there wouldn’t be many photographers who’d turn down an offer to have their coffee table book published for them?

So while there’s always a chance that an unscrupulous reader might do screen capture from an ebook and re-use that without permission, is it really a reason not to publish in the first place?

When you consider how big this market is, and how much bigger it’s set to get, I certainly don’t think so.

Textbooks are already a huge market … sooner or later they’ve got to go digital. Even more so when you look at the university/college market where students are already racking up massive loans and many of the required texts are priced in the small-car range.

Obviously a lot of the appeal of a Coffee Table book is it’s physical presence on the coffee table, but surely a lot of people do by them to read and look at the pictures? Yet looking through Amazon or the Apple store, you see very little cross over to digital publishing for this genre.

The DIY market has always been a hot niche for hard copy publishing, but again, most of the digital editions you find are very text-heavy with few images. Again, that’s got to be another area where there’s big potential for self-publishing photographers.

And finally, my hot-tip would have to be travel guides. It’s a major print market and ideally suited to digital, and as far as image rich-content goes, largely untouched in the digital market place. For photographers it’s also a passive revenue stream waiting to happen …

How long would it take you to write a short illustrated travel guide for your region? I’d wager most photographers have the local images already, so it’s just a matter of doing a little research of the major attractions and writing a page or so on each, then getting it onto the right format. Do that through a site like Smashwords and they only need a fairly simple Word Doc format and they’ll reformat it for you, for every other ebook format you can imagine!

I did this earlier this year with an aviation novel my father had written and it’s now been ‘published’ and distriubted to multiple other platforms including some major online book retailers. Pretty impressive really and I’m currently working on repeating the process with a few of my own titles and a couple of more pictorial items.

Print On Demand Technology

Another option I set up for my fathers book, Change In Direction, was using Print On Demand technology provided by a  company called Createspace [ You can check it out here ... a great aviation themed thriller if that's your thing! ]

Once the book was formatted to their specs it got added to the catalog and people could order it online as they would at any other bookstore. The fulfillment process is a little different though… within minutes of your order it hits the presses: pages first, then the full colour cover, then it’s bound, glued and trimmed, dropped out the end in to a post pack, an address label printed and into the mail.

All within 10 minutes of the customer placing an order.

The best part?… with POD books, the writer can actually make more per copy than they would through a traditional print publishing contract. The costs are no doubt going to be higher for photo-heavy content, but prices are traditional higher for this kind of material as well, so I’m sure there are plenty of options out there waiting that could work extremely well.

Near as I can tell though, very few photographers are doing anything in this area?

So what’s your big book idea? I’m yet to meet a serious photographer who hasn’t got at least one, and turning the idea into a reality has never been so achievable …. so maybe it’s time to act on it!

The first step is to decide on your format … Print or digital, or Both, and then find a publishing platform.

For my money I’d have to suggest digital for starters … and you can’t go past Smashwords.

You can checkout Smashwords here. The link goes to my Dad’s book … consider grabbing a copy if you found this article useful, you’ll make an old pilot’s day! (And it’s a pretty good yarn as long as you’re not afraid of flying!)

Then once your done. have a look at the Print On Demand options on CreateSpace. [Yep, that's a link to my Dad's book again!]

That’s not going to be a such a good return for photo-heavy books, but it could be a great way to test the market, and if you find you’re selling a good number of POD copies, it might be time to look at more traditional publishing options. (And a heap of POD sales is a pretty good foot-in-the-door at your local publisher! )

So if you’re one of those photographers with a hundred book ideas, stop day-dreaming and start doing something about it. It’s never been easier and the demand has never been higher!

… and don’t forget to grab a copy of Change of Direction!

PS. If you do decide to self-publish, keep in mind the publishing is the easy part … you also have to be prepared to do some shameless self-promotion!

Mostly the feedback has been very encouraging… people who’d been thinking much the same thing and looking for solutions in similar areas… but there’s been a few comments back that weren’t so cool. I suspect they were mostly from people who didn’t read the report all the way through and only got the negative stuff at the start, so just to be totally clear…

I think it’s a FANTASTIC time to be a professional photographer!

Sure it’s all super competitive, prices are down and there’s no question… a lot of photographers are finding it extremely tough to make a living… but despite all that, the outlook for a talented photographer with some basic business savvy has never been brighter!

The Internet has given us access to a global market the size of which we couldn’t begin to imagine 10-15 years ago. It’s open 24/7 and knows no international boundaries. At GlobalEye our Client list now spans some 154 countries! I didn’t even realise there were that many countries in the world, but now I can sell my photos to people in any one of them!

It gets better though… in-house desktop publishing means that virtually every organisation on the planet is now a potential photo-buyer. That’s business, government departments, not-for-profits, major corporations, mom-and-pop outfits … the yall need photos and they’ll all doing more and more of the buying and publishing themselves.  

It’s no surprise that the corporate/government buyers often account for more sales across our network than the editorial and advertising buyers combined!

The demand for quality photography has simply never been higher.

And this demand is set to go even higher again as whole new markets are now emerging in the areas of mobile devices and applications. We are regularly getting inquiries for uses we’ve never even heard of before. This are generally small screen repros, so the prices are generally quite low, but the volume of them is set to go through the roof.

The photographers who work out profitable a way to supply this market are going to clean up! So far, the low-res requirements mean most buyers are probably going to the RF & Microstock libraries and their photographers, but as this market evolves there’s sure to be a sector that emerges that needs to know publishing history of the images it uses, and some buyers who’ll be looking for exclusive use. The RM libraries and photographers will need to be ready when they come knocking.

Without going into a long monologue on the technological improvements in digital photography in recent years,I do need to mention the less obvious benefits of the near instant results, no film processing and no hard copy originals … it all adds up to less time, less costs and less stress for the photographers.

I suspect a lot of the younger photographers out there don’t realise how much time and effort and stress digital photography saves us these days. We can show our portfolios to multiple buyers at once, anywhere on the planet, and we don’t need to send our precious originals off for weeks or even months at a time in the hope of a sale.

That mightn’t sound ground-breaking to the younger photographers, but anyone who’s ever packed up a submission of film originals and posted them off to some distant buyer, knows how it feels to drop it in the mail and ‘hope’ they make it back undamaged and complete, some time in the next few months!

You could spend a small fortune getting dupes made but most buyers would still want to see your originals before they bought, so you’d often have your best images ‘out’ for months at a time. And all you could do was wait for their return before you could even think about offering them to someone else.

It doesn’t stop at Stock Photography either…

Any photographer with a bit of talent can post images to the fulfillment websites and have their images printed on framed prints, posters, calendars, clothing items, you-name-it… and shipped directly to consumers around the world totally hands-free.

Seriously … how amazing is that!

Upload some photos, add a few descriptions, set some options and suddenly you have a whole line of your own custom photo products, ready for sale!

We set this up as an option for our photographers last year and some have gone to town with it. One Member is doing a whole range of traditional paper products, another a line of mugs,a couple of others are doing their own clothing lines. For all of them it’s set-and-forget passive revenue!

>Another photographer having good success having her photos printed on framed canvas that she’s then marketing to local businesses. Ten years ago, it would have cost thousands of dollars to set something like this up, but she arranged her fulfillment for free through an online provider and printed her own sales materials … and set it all up in a weekend!

So I’ll leave it there, I just wanted to make sure no one thought I was actually ‘giving up’ on our industry or jumping on the doom-and-gloom bandwagon as a few suggested. I’m actually incredibly optimistic about where ‘photography’ is right now and what we might achieve in the next few years.

Sure there are some challenges we’ve got to face… both within the photography industry and in the wider world economy… but seriously… if you had to tackle those issues as a photographer, at any time in history, wouldn’t you rather be doing it now with all the fantastic tools we have at our disposal?

I know I certainly would!

Here’s a more detail article showing you installation and settings, but it’s really very straight forward…

http://www.wpsquare.com/auto-post-google-plus-wordpress-blog/

I’ve been using LinksAlpha to streamline a lot of our publishing and social media for GlobalEye, and this was the last gap in the coverage.

With LinksAlpha, we now republish each of our newsfeeds automatically to multiple blogs and about social media accounts, which generates additional backlinks to our photographers content pages, plus a lot of direct traffic. It’s all managed sfrom one easy interface, compelte with stats and tracking so I now know exactly what’s going where.

If you’re publishing to your blog regularly, LinksAlpha is definitely worth looking at to leverage those efforts into extra backlinks and traffic!

http://ozurl.com/l/linksalpha

It’s also worth noting, ‘megapixels’ is a marketing term and means very little to photo buyers. They don’t give a hoot about your camera specifications. They only want to know about the image you can supply and whether it’s suitable for the job at hand. So that’s what we need to focus on.

At GlobalEye, we generally recommend to photographers that, as a minimum, they should be able to provide a file that can be printed at 300dpi, to a full page size, ie 10″ x 8″.

So in pixel dimensions, that simply means you need a file that is 3000px (10 inches x 300dpi) x 2400px (8 inches x 300dpi).

In practice, we find that is ample for the majority of sales going through our library. In fact, the majority of images we sell are reproduced at a half page or less!

But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can make a living with a low end point-and-shoot.

Because we’re licensing images under a RM (rights managed) model, the value of the sale is based on the usage … and generally speaking, larger repros are going to demand a higher payment.

So the problem you face is, if you’re only shooting the small images you’re not even in contention when the larger sales come around.

Here’s a quick example … let’s assume we;ve got 3 photographers shooting similar images with pro gear, high-end consumer gear and compact digital gear. They each get 10 leads where they have the content the buyer desperately wants …

Photographer A is shooting large files on professional gear and makes a sales for all ten leads as show below …

6 x 1/2 Page Images         @  $200 = $1200
2 x Full Page Images        @  $400 =   $800
2 x Large Format Repros @  $600 = $1200

… 10 sales for a total of $3200 in revenue. Not a bad month.

Now Photographer B has the high end consumer gear and can supply all but the 2 largest images. He only misses out on 2 sales, (20%) but loses $1200 (37% of the income).

And it should be pretty obvious, that Photographer C trying to make a go of it with low end gear might be able to supply the half page images, but has effectively shut themselves out of 40% of the sales and 42% of the income.

Can Med-Low Res Images Sell?

OK, but what about all those images from your early digital cameras that are smaller than this … should you throw them out or can they actually sell as stock?

A lot of people have some serious collections of images taken on older digital cameras or compact digital cameras, and they’ll often ask whether it’s worth submitting those to our stock library. As a guide I usually suggest only the very best, and only if they are honestly exceptional or somehow unique.

By all means sort them, edit them and catalogue them, but don’t waste time submitting them all.

Pick out the best 1-2 shots of each subject that have real commercial potential. Submit those with a caption-note that more are available and store the rest. Then use the time saved to get out and shoot new images with broader potential.

If a Client sees you have 1-2 images of a subject they want, they’ll automatically assume you have more and ask to see them. Alternatively, if there’s no interest in the subject you haven’t wasted too much time on it.

Stock photography is a volume business, but it’s because of that you can’t afford to waste time and effort on images which aren’t likely to generate a reasonable return. Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of submitting anything and everything you’ve got, just to build up numbers. Your time is far too precious.

Capturing The Largest Possible Image

The message here should be clear enough … you should ALWAYS capture the largest possible image to ensure it has the best possible sales potential.

Storage is cheap, so capture large every time.

For most people that will mean shooting RAW files.

If your camera captures RAW, learn how to use it and incorporate it as a simple step in your workflow. RAW is far from standardized, so it’s extremely unlikely that a buyer will ever ask you for a RAW file, but you will get a larger, better quality image file if you use it.

The theory goes something like this …

All digital cameras capture image info in RAW format and will either save as RAW (if your camera has that option) or convert in-camera to TIF or JPG.

If you do the conversion in-camera, quite often the processor in your camera has to throw away a certain amount of image data to get the job done. As a general guideline, he cheaper the camera, the less grunt it’s got for this processing work, so the more data will be lost.

On the other hand, your desktop computer and raw conversion software have much more grunt than your digital camera, so no data is discarded if you capture and export RAW files from your camera.

There are some exceptions when you start looking at the high-end professional gear but as a rule of thumb, you will get a better end product if you leave the conversion and processing until the file is on your computer.

If your camera doesn’t offer the RAW format, the next best option is TIFs. These are uncompressed image files — so the conversion is done in camera but there’s no further data loss that might occur with a compressed JPG file.

There is some debate about uncompressed JPGs, and some people/manufacturers will tell you there’s no loss of data with high-quality/uncompressed JPGs, but if a buyer asks me for an uncompressed file I am always going send a TIF, so it makes sense to capture and store your master copies in that format in the first place.

The exception might be if I’m in a situation where I’ve got limited access to download images to a computer and I’m running short on storage, but it would have to be extremely remote and I’d still be kicking myself for not being more organised.

Like I said earlier, storage is cheap these days so as long as you’ve got battery power to shoot images, you should make sure you have the cards to store them or the means to transfer the contents to other storage devices.

Software For Upsizing

There are a few options available for upsizing your images to something more useful, and this is great for one-off jobs, but it’s not something I’d recommend for a large collection of low res images though.

At Global Eye we actually recommend to new our new Members that they download a demo of our preferred program — http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/suite/perfect-resize/?ind  (Previously Genuine Fractals) — and get familiar with it, so they know just how big they can go if a Client comes knocking.

We’ve seen some great results with this, including a 35mm scanned image that was upsized to over 750mb for use on the side of a fleet of semi-trailers!

We’ve also seen a number of full- and double-page sales of images that have been upsized from files output by compact digital cameras. It’s definitely not something you’d want to do for all your small files, but it is good to know what’s possible … before someone comes asking.

OK, this has turned out a bit longer than I planned so I’ll leave it there. To wrap up, don’t ever go throwing away all your smaller digital files, but do be very selective about which ones you invest time on trying to market. In most cases you’ll find it more productive — and a lot more fun — spending that time shooting new images!

Feel free to post your comments below.

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