I drove around the city and finally found a parking space close to the city center where the cathedral dominates the landscape. I walked around the building just amazed at the sheer size of the building. The architecture is awe inspiring, especially considering the fact that construction started in the year 1248.

Inside, the sun was streaming through the hundreds of stained glass windows, featuring different scenes from the Savior’s life, the Virgin Mary, or images of the various Catholic Saints.  The floor was inlaid with coats of arms and other images.

Inside the altar of the cathedral is very simple, but ornate with the backdrop of impressive stained glass windows within the nave of the cathedral.

I can’t get enough of this cathedral.  Every time I come to Cologne, I have to spend time at this awe inspiring building.  Sunday, I had a chance to listen to the organ playing and echoing through the building.  The acoustics are fantastic!

The first time I visited, I shot several images both inside and outside of the building.  I went across the bridge over the Rhein River and froze for 3 hours while I shot this scene.  I uploaded it to an online portfolio and it was featured as a showcase image.  About 6 months later, I got contacted from a poster dealer in Germany that wanted to publish this image as a poster and pay me royalties.  Up until this time, I had only made money portrait sessions or family pictures.

This one image changed my whole outlook for the business of photography.

The big question that has to be answered by every photographer is how much should I charge for my services as a photographer?

The answer to that question actually depends on several factors.

1. How good are you?
2. What does the competition charge?
3. What do your competitors charge that are as good as you.

If you are the best, you can charge whatever you want, however, all things being equal, here is a method to determine how much you should charge as a photographer:

There is a great link from the National Press Photographers Association that provides a web form to help you determine how much you should charge as a photographer.

The calculation takes into account all of a Photographers expected expenses including:

• Office or Studio
• Photo Equipment
• Photography Supplies
• Repairs
• Phone (Cell, Office & Fax)
• Subscriptions & dues
• Computers (Hardware & Software)
• Internet (Broadband, Web site & email)
• Advertising & Promotion
• Vehicle Expenses (Lease, Insurance & Maintenance)
• Legal & Accounting Services
• Office Assistance (Payroll)
• Office Supplies
• Postage & Shipping
• Professional Development
• Travel
• Entertainment (meals with clients)
• Utilities
• Business Insurance
• Health Insurance
• Taxes & Licenses (Business, Property & Self-employment)

It even accounts for those things that an aspiring photographer sometimes sacrifices

• Retirement Fund
• Desired annual salary
• Total days per year you expect to bill for shooting

All in all, it is a great resource.

This of course does not take into account your competitions prices, so you might have to make some adjustments somewhere in order to remain competitive in the marketplace.

Check it out – How much you should charge as a photographer

The badge idea kind of faded over time and you didn’t see as many around, but now they are coming back into style again just like those pants you wore in Junior High and some of those horrible hairdoos.

Badges are a print idea that you can offer on the photography pricelist. They are not for every occasion (I don’t see badges being a logical add-on to a glamour shot – although that could be some good humor), but for a birthday party for a young child, family reunions, Grandma and Grandpa pictures, etc. you can add this long forgotten item to your pricelist capture some incremental sales.

Besides, once you own the machine, you can use it for lots of other things, not just photography…Just think of your kids run for Student Body Vice President in 7th Grade.  You could have “Vote for Bob” pinned to every kid at the school.  Some of the ideas that you might use badges for:

• Fundraising
• Family reunions
• Business meetings – “Hello, my name is Bob”
• Church events
• School activities

Check out http://www.badgeaminit.com for the equipment needed to do the job.

They call it Freeze Frame Cakes.  They take a customer’s picture and scan it into a computer and print it on edible paper. I asked the manager about it. She said that the paper is made from sugar and the ink lays on top of that without problems and then they frost it onto the top of the cake. I didn’t ask whether or not the ink was edible as well.

What an incredible idea. That opens up a whole new avenue of publication and partnerships. You can partner with the local bakery to include your images on top of a cake used for celebrations and parties – not just sitting next to it. Think about the possibilities:

* Birthdays
* Anniversaries
* Weddings
* Graduations
* etc.

Some bakeries already offer this service. Hmm…I could partner with a local bakery and add yummy, edible portraits to my pricelist.

The first game was tough.  There were a couple of really athletic girls on the other team and a really tall girl – almost 6′.  Very tall for a 14 year old!  It was a hard fought game.  Lots of traveling, double dribble and fouling going on.  The ref’s did a pretty good job, but it is hard when the parents are calling every foul, three second lane violation, and traveling call from the stands.

Whew – it was a tiring morning that started way too early (for her and me ).

After the second game, it was Picture day.  All the girls were looking great (sweaty, red faced, and tired), but looked cute for the picture.

As it is customary, the picture format featured an individual shot of each girl and a team picture.  The end result will be a printed 8×10 with the picture of my daughter in one of the upper corners with the league logo, year, team name, etc. in the opposite upper corner and a team picture below.

The studio that took these pictures does all the youth sports pictures for the city.  They shoot basketball, football, soccer, baseball, softball, etc. and have for years.  The photographer that owns the studio has young teenagers doing the actual photography. I haven’t seen him at Picture day for a couple of years. The process is well tested, all the equipment is digital, and I know he makes a bundle every season.

They pass out forms a couple of weeks before the picture with a schedule of when the team and individual pictures will be shot. At the prescribed time, the team assembles and the teenager presses the button for a team shot (they take two shots just in case) and then they shoot the individual player shots.

The order form is an envelope that contains an order form printed on the front for the players and parents to choose what package (~$7-$25 depending on the number of images, sizes, and # playing cards). The envelope is for the payment which is due when the pictures are taken. The whole process is barcoded and automated. It is a pretty slick process.

I peeked at the laptop that all the images are automatically downloaded to after every image.  They are using a combination of Nikon Capture and some custom software that the photographer’s son wrote.

I have seen catalogs that contain the equipment needed to do this type of photography. It comes complete with cameras, computers, bar coding equipment, printers, and the software needed to make it all happen. If I remember right the equipment packages start at about $6000 on up.

I will try to find links and contact info. Anyone have details?

The world is changing (depending on what generation you are – the world has changed) to an electronic world (See my post entitled The Photography World is changing). I don’t read the newspaper anymore. All of the news that I read is online. A lot of the audio that I listen to is blog content on my iPod.

To celebrate a Paperless world, what if you added the option for the results of a family portrait setting to be distributed on a digital photo frame in addition to the normal 5×7, 8×10, wallets and large framed picture. You could provide up to 50 images of the shoot preloaded on the frame. What a great upsell item!  It is also the perfect item to add 2-3 (for the happy couple and both sets of parents) to the normal Wedding package.

Digital photo frames run from about $69+ (retail) depending on what size, what resolution, the brightness of the images, and other features. Some have wireless upload capabilities. Some have remotes. Some have ability to play movies and have built in speakers. If you decide to do this on a regular basis, you might consider becoming a dealer for a specific brand of digital photo frames.

Most of the digital picture frames available today are fairly low resolution – 800×600 or less. This means that your customers will not have a high quality image that they can just take and print (especially enlargements) without the quality being compromised.

I will write more about the benefits and features of digital photo frames later, but wanted to get the idea out there that a digital photo frame is a great upsell item to a normal picture package – or someday it might just BE the picture package.

All the best and keep shooting!

The video production company was at our wedding and wedding luncheon and shot a whole bunch more footage. They spent the afternoon furiously combining the footage with some of our favorite music in order to have a 30 minute video available at our reception that evening. I thought it was great back then, but I watched it the other day and it was so sappy.

But, the wedding video combined with our wedding album is what we have to remember our wedding by.

Fast forward almost 20 years and you have additional options. Of course there is the wedding album…that is a foundation of the wedding memories. Combined with that is the wedding video. Digital recorders and the drop in price in video production tools has made that very easy to learn and include as part of a wedding package.

But let’s look at some other options that you could use as a photographer to differentiate yourself from your competition.

What about taking the video that you make as part of the package and provide his/hers video iPods or even iPhones or Blackberrys with the video and slideshows of the wedding pre-loaded. You could even “wrap” the ipod with an image of the couple together. This is a great idea to pursue with the parents of the bride and groom as a surprise for the wedding couple. With all the different iPods out there that handle video, this could be an inexpensive add-on to a wedding gig.

Just a couple of ideas to round out your ala cart menu for a Wedding Package.

Best of luck and keep shooting

I ask that question to people and get so many different answers, i.e. hiking, fishing, hunting, stock car racing, slot car racing, basketball, painting, sewing, cooking, swimming, sleeping, watching my kids play sports, reading, etc.

Wouldn’t it be great to take your favorite hobby and make money from it?

Lets pick a real world example – Fly fishing. What if you were to go to your local fly fishing store (I actually have one about 2 miles from my house – honest!) and introduce yourself to the manager as a fly fisherman photographer. It helps to have purchased equipment from the store to break the ice.

Offer to trade fly fishing photographs for their advertising and catalogs in return for trade or cash. You could trade photographs for the hottest new fly fishing rod and reel, or that collection of this years hottest flies, or new waders, or even that tackle box that you have had your eyes on for a coons age. Trading photography for products is as good as cash because you would have purchased that equipment anyway.

In the fly fishing example, you could offer so many different types of photographs. For example:

• Early in the morning with the fog just lifting off of the river with the early morning sunlight glistening off of the fishing line as it trails behind the fisherman
• What about capturing a rugged looking man’s man sporting the latest clothing that they sell in the store that they can use for advertising
• What about doing some macro photography focusing on some of the mini fishing flys that they sell within the store. Have the store blow those images up and display them to encourage customers to purchase the hottest new fly – a must have for the upcoming season
• What about offering to go on a guided expedition with customers to photograph or video the event and have that as one of the benefits of the trip. Free fishing – what could be better than that?

The list of options is as long as your imagination and creativity. You would definitely want to shoot some images of Fly Fisherman and Fly Fishing so you could show them as samples of your work to jump start the discussion.

The early settlers in the United States functioned almost exclusively on a system of barter and trade to survive. Adopt the same approach and have fun linking your hobby to extra income (or that new reel that you have been trying to convince your wife that you absolutely have to have).

You could take those same images and upload them to your stock portfolio (check out istockphoto’s fly fishing photographs), make a screensaver of them and offer it online, contact other fly fishing stores on the internet and ask if they need any great pictures for advertising purposes of fly fishing, enter the image in your local state fair photography contest, enter in other online photography contests, etc.

The world is there for your taking if you have good enough images…

Have a blast, but bring your camera!

One of the methods that works for me is submitting images to an online micro stock agency, iStockPhoto.com.

My portfolio is featured at http://istockphoto.com/legacyimagesphotography.

The Internet has changed the world of stock photography. Twenty years ago, the typical way you became a stock photographer was to have a portfolio of thousands of slides (with releases) which enabled you to be signed at an agency like Getty Images or Corbus. Today, you could have a handful of images available and be a profitable stock photographer at a micro stock agency.

I joined iStock to get some of the images I had taken for fun – and that I thought were pretty good – off my hard drive and out of my slide collection and make them available to be purchased. The beautiful thing is there is a market (however small) for almost every type of image. It could be nature, food, landscape, flowers, even brick walls or wood floors. Obviously, some markets are much more lucrative than others and some markets are more popular than others.

Most magazines you look at will contain images that were probably purchased from a stock agency. This is also true for book covers, corporate brochures and reports, websites, even billboards.

Stock photography has changed the way I approach photography. The images I am shooting today are different than the images I used to shoot. I am constantly trying to maximize the potential revenue that I can make from each shoot. I think to myself, is there a market for this (besides adding to my portfolio or the model’s portfolio)? What are the most profitable types of images and markets for stock photography?

I am more conscious of image quality (lighting, focus, eliminating distracting elements, using depth of field and other techniques to center focus on the subject, eliminating artifacting in my post processing, etc.) I am also much more aware of copyright issues and obtaining model releases and property releases (i.e. you can shoot a model sitting on a statue in a park and publish it for sale if you get a release from the model and a property release from the statue artist).

Micro stock photography is not for everyone. You maintain ownership of your copyright to each picture, but you don’t make a lot for each image that is licensed (the revenue you make is definitely volume-based). You also don’t have control over where or how your images are used – only that the images cannot be used in a way that is pornographic or defamatory.

But, for me, stock photography is providing an additional revenue source from my photography. I have had pictures used on Forbes.com and the PBS “Antiques Roadshow” homepage among many other places. I have been submitting for about a year and a half, and it is addicting. Every day, I come home from work and check out my portfolio to see how many images were downloaded that day and how much money I made. I maintain a notebook of ideas and thoughts of potential stock shoots that I think will be lucrative and fun. I even downloaded an application for my iPhone that I can check my balance during the day.

This last year, I traveled to Californa to shoot for a Chef just graduating from cooking school. That assignment motivated me to start shooting food so I feel comfortable doing it. There are so many tricks that can be leveraged in shooting food and I want to learn them all. The best thing is that I will maintain the rights to submit those images to iStock in addition to my fees that I will make on the shoot.

Stock photography definitely has helped me to make more revenue and has helped me to become a better photographer.

Much more on stock photography, how I got involved with stock photography, stock agencies, how to choose what to shoot, how to maximize accepted images, etc. in the near future!

Let me know what you think of stock photography as a source of income for your photography!