My efforts to get some money (from selling my photos)

It is 2007. There is the internet. Everyone seems able to get rich. Except me.

I have been wondering how to get some money from selling my photos. My photos aren’t that bad, although they probably aren’t that good either – still improving I hope. But on the other hand, who would not want to buy a print of this incredible photo.

Mycena arcangeliana	buy a print

The problem is twofold: how to make photos that people will buy and how to advertise those photos (how to find the people that will buy). I have been focusing on making photos that I like. I am not sure that I want to focus on making photos that others like or on marketing my stuff. Making “friends” all over internet to in the hopes that they will become my “friend” but in the meantime just hoping that they will buy my stuff somehow is not what I like to do. Yet I have made some marketing steps, and to be honest I have actually sold one single print so far, which gave me the mere sum of $1,29. If you are interested, check out my Nature photography on Imagekind. I have tried to increase traffic to that page, in different ways, but not with great success and also with increasing inner resistance. There are so many blogs, so many people on flickr, so many photosites. Some people seem to be able to make their weblogs into a success. Not me.

Maybe I should try to join an agency that will take care of selling my photos. But then again I am not sure if my photos are good enough. Gotta try that some day though. And then there is stock photography, but do I really think that my photos are worth $0,20 each?

So tell me please what I should do.

Bird photography

As a boy I always wanted to be a bird photographer. I borrowed an old camera from my father and walked around or found a hiding place with a view on birds possibly passing by. Still I have a couple of these photos in a box, and when I joined flickr I scanned in one of those old photos and posted it.
It became an instant hit on flickr and still today it is my most viewed photo there. It helped probably that I explained my childhood passion, and yes, I made the circle to indicate where the bird is at that time. I do not remember exactly when the photo was taken, but it must have been in the early seventies.

About two years ago I started with a digital compact camera, then after a years a DSLR – because I loved it so much. I bought a macro lens, mainly for dragonfly photography, but never forgot about the birds.

Last winter I spend lots of hours on my toilet, peeping through the small toilet window into my garden. Because that – I had decided – was the best place to make photos of birds. I had placed some food in my garden to attract birds and kept track of the species I saw. As I live in a city and my garden is tiny, there are not really exciting species to be expected. The macro lens has 100mm focal length, which is nice for dragonflies. But birds are different, they won’t let me get so close. All shots I took had to be cropped. Still it would turn out to be a large improvement over my earlier work, although it was never more remarkable then the shot of the encircled bird.

Blue tit and Greenfinch, last winter, in my garden

So now I bought a new lens. A 70-200mm zoom. Also in the hopes that I can get the birds in my garden a bit closer this winter. I know, 200mm is not the best focal length for bird photography, I’ll need more, 400mm at least I think. Someday, when I’ll be rich….

What was it that I wanted to tell? Something about this lens. Yes, that it is so different from the 100mm macro. And about the birds that really don’t like to be photographed. As I did with dragonfly photography I took my bike and went out of the city. I did not make it hard for myself, just shooting a common duck would be fine. But these birds always see me before I see them, and after I have parked my bike and readied my camera there are no more birds in range. Dragonflies are so much easier.

The “Extraordinary Capture Macro Award (invite only) Post 1 Award 3!” group

Flickr is fun. Just take a look if you don’t know it, I am not going to explain it all here.

One the things that anyone can do on flickr is start a new group. Mostly it has some theme – which is reflected in the name of the group. Some people think that a group should have a group logo. And that this group logo should be posted in comments at other people’s photos with an invitation to post that photo to that group. There are tens of thousands of groups on flickr each competing for attention of the flickr participants. Of course there are even more photos on flickr, each competing for attention too. Lots of groups use a ‘clever’ concept of making their group logo also a photo-award. The shinier and the more animated the group logo/award is, the more value it has to get it on your photo. At least some seem to think so.

The thing is that I don’t like to get those group logo’s and awards as comments on my photos. It is stated in my profile. But occasionally I still get this distracting and ugly group-spam. The record-comment so far invited me to three groups and left two group logos in a single comment. Sometimes I leave such comments, sometimes I delete them silently and sometimes I notice the group and/or the person that I rather not receive such stuff. The latter is what I did when I received an invitation for the “Extraordinary Capture Macro Award (invite only) Post 1 Award 3!” group.

Seriously, that is the name of that group. And they take themselves very seriously too. Because when I complained about the big and ugly animated gif the response was hard and merciless. Not only was my complaint deleted immediately, I was also permanently banned from this group.

Man, that hurts.