What are you going to do with that photo?

Many people go out carrying a camera in the hope that they will get a good photo, it may be the family on holiday or just a walk in the park or around the city centre, they take hundreds of photos in the hope of getting a few good ones. But good for what? Many people take some very good photos, some have a “good eye” for detail, colour, composition or images in general. Some people know their camera inside out, they know all the technical stuff about exposure and all the rules about composition and colour balance. We can all improve our photos if we know what we want to do with them before we press the button, better still before we take our camera out of the house. Now if your photos are going to sit on your hard drive only then read no further.



You may not want to sell your photos yet and they are just to show the family but how are you going to show them? On the computer, TV via DVD, printed out in an album or framed on the wall. Each of the above methods will require you learning more skills to get the best results. When printing your photos will they look better with a matt, silk or gloss finish, only you can say but the more you practice the better you will get and the more likely you will be proud to show off your photos to family and friends.



Have you thought about selling your photos or are you already selling your photos? If you want to sell or increase your sales then you need to think about where you are going to sell your photos and if possible what the end product will be before you take the photo. So you have had a day out and you have some very good photos and you think that such and such a magazine or website might use them, well yes they might especially if you let them use the photos for free. There are so many photographers out there that happy to see their photos published that they do not mind not being paid and the big companies know this, so if you want to get paid you have to have exactly the photo a magazine needs.



There are many ways to sell your work and each method has its advantages and disadvantages. They can all be broken down as follows; time, effort and expense to you against the number of people that will see your work that may buy it giving you a profit. As I have said above some photographers give their work away for free, this is not a bad thing even if you are trying to make money from your photography, think of it as advertising. When you give your work away for free you get no money but you do get exposure but it is a balance of what you get and what they get, so next time you send in a photo to your local news paper ask them to put the web address of your gallery as well as your name in the credits. You do not know where the balance is till they say no.