Do you "Only Show Your Best"?
Earlier this year I was contacted by a publisher that is working on a book for the State of Utah to use for recruiting companies to relocate to Utah. The publisher was in need of photographs to place alongside the written copy about the state's economic advantages. This served as another example of the power of the Internet for today's photographer. The publisher's photo editor found my work on Flickr and contacted me directly about the freelance job. While not a huge windfall, the job does pay fairly well (about 100x better than microstock).
This is a reason that I am a proponent of the "Only Show Your Best school of thought, especially if you ever desire to sell your work. I didn't adhere to this at first (as evident from some of my early images on Flickr), but over the past year I have worked on keeping this in mind when uploading. On a public forum, you never know who might be browsing the images and what impact they can have on future earnings.
Today's image is a collage of some of the photos they have selected for use in the book. I like the diversity of the images, I think they have chosen well.
8 Comments:
I really should follow that train of thought, but so many of my uploads are photos to share with friends and family. Even then, I should limit it.
Perhaps once my wife ssets up her studio, we'll make more of a "professional" display of the better work on a separate Flickr account.
Congratulations! You have some very beautiful photographs and am so happy your work has been chosen! :)
I should follow this tip with my writing blog>. But it's all words.
To keep my blog from distracting me from my other writing, that is, the stuff I hope to sell and publish, I only blog after I've done some work. Sadly, at that point, all the good words are wasted. My brain is shot, so there's always more typos in my blog too.
So if I were smart, I'd quit blogging. But I haven't got there yet.
I love the one of the cathedral. What colors!
Congratulations, the promise of the Internet is truly starting to happen.
I've struggled with this concept myself as Jonesblog was designed to keep up with family and friends as well as a creative outlet for my reintroduction to photography after a long absence. Because of this I tend to censor less and post photographs around a particular experience or subject for an entry with the best photo of the "group" as an introductory photo while the others serve to document the rest of the experience behind the entry.
This has not proven too detrimental as I've received numerous requests for the use of my images in everything from museums to ad campaigns as well as an assignment to photograph for a defense industry publication. This was without any hunting for the opportunities as they simply came to the blog looking for images and found things they liked.
This post really peaked my interest. You have great photos and I have found that as I started being more conservative in the photos I posted on my flickr site, the more interest I received. I found the need to create a 2nd site just to share photos w/friends family to make up for that lack of photos I now post on Flickr.
One struggle I have being an amateur and not needing to make money from my photos (but certainly not against making some money), is how to negotiate price. Can you give some insight on how you do that if someone comes along and wants to use a photo for a book cover or a magazine article?
Thanks,
Andy
I fully agree with you on that thought. Ever since I started posting on Flickr, I became even more aware of the quality of my images and after a while went back and deleted good majority of my P&S shots taken pre-DSLR days, just because they were below of what I perceived as quality images. I have to go back and do more of it again, but yes, you're right.
Great images, by the way, and a good representation of Utah.
Congratulations on the sale, Rich. I've enjoyed watching your photography on the internet receive well-deserved recognition.
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