Freelance Photography?

What does it mean to you?  Well initially, to me it meant making a full-time living from photography.  And that my friend, ruled it out as a possible source of income.

How wrong could I have been. Yep,  most freelance photographers make ther living from photography and are totally dependent on their skills as photographers to generate an income.  But there is another way that you can start that does not involve giving up the day job and allows you to work in your spare time, at your pace and when it suits you.

Have you heard the term "stock photography"?  Well, this refers to a collection of photographs that can be sold for specific uses.  Let me explain. Suppose you had a collection of photos (your stock) and you wished to make them available for sale. Now as the owner of the photos you hold copyright and can allow them to be used any way you wished (anyone wanting to use your photos would require a licence from you - for a price of course). The customer would then purchase the right to use your pictures for ther own specific needs.

There are various ways of promoting your stock of pictures.  Probably the easiest and least expensive way is on line through specialist stock agencies and microstock websites. There is an excellent on line training course at  Camera Careers which will give you all the information you require to get started, such as which stock sites to start with, how to find out which types of photos are 'hot' and a host of other information that will make your start-up relatively simple.               

However you may eventually want to set up your own website.  It is easy enough, I set this one up myself. First of all you will need a domain name. For instance the domain name of this site is Wittens.co.uk  Once you have decided on a domain name  you will have to check that the name is available.  Try a web hosting company such as  1and1.co.uk   Type in you chosen name, let's say you've chosen Joe SoapsPictures.co.uk ( the .co.uk suffix is , athe cheapest but you can select whatever you like)  Therefore your website address would be  www.joesoapspictures.co.uk

If your domain name is available and you choose to register it, it is cheaper and easier to do it through a web hosting company like 1and1  and if you take a hosting package( somewhere to park your website so it can be viewed on the web) they will carry out the registration for you and will offer you free web building tools and a variety of templates so you can create a profesional looking website.  This website was created using a template and web building tools supplied free.  The website builder is WYSIWYG ( What You See Is What You Get) and is dead easy to use, no need for programming such as html although if your that way inclined you can add program text if you wish.

You will also get a number of email addresses as part of you package. Talking of professional looking websites, you also really need a professional looking email address.  You'll agree that   Joe.Soap@ JoeSoapsPictures.co.uk  looks a lot more professional than Joe.Soap @ Hotmail.com. This suggests a private address whereas the one linked to your website gives it a more professional look.

Have a wee look at the picture above. Do you know what it is? Well it's a ham and cheese sandwich. Someone went to the bother of taking a photo of a sandwich, then uploaded it to a stock photo website and it was put up for sale.  Now there was nothing hard about what that person done, probably the hardest part was using their imagination (or not eating the sandwich).  What I am getting at is, that once this very simple - nice, but simple picture was uploaded it was for sale 24/7, the person had no more work to do, the website took care of all that. So you don't have to be a professional or even an experienced photographer for your photos to work for you.

I have absolutely no idea as to your photographic skills or knowledge, so I have included some  digital photography terms. I am also making the assumption that you are the owner of a compact camera, you may have heard it referred to as a point and shoot camera.  Anyway here's a few basic tips that will hopefully improve your photography skills.

FOCUS

Quite simply this refers to the adjustment of the camera lense to bring into the sharpest focus your subject. For instance if you were taking a portrait picture  you would focus on your subject by adjusting the lense and leave the background out of focus.

SHUTTER SPEED

Refers to the adjustment of the shutter speed,and is frequently given as a fraction of a second , eg  1/20 would tell you the shutter is open and allowing light to reach the camera sensor for one twentieth of a second.   The faster the shutter speed the less time the sensor is exposed to light, hence a shutter  speed of 1/500 (one five hundreth of a second is faster than 1/20).  So higher shutter speeds woyld be of use when you were taking pictures of say a sporting event.  obviously a slow shutter speed in this instance would give image blurring from the motion of your subject.

APERTURE

This the adjustment of the size of the lens opening to control the amount of light passing through the lens to the light sensor.  Simply put, the diameter of the lens is called the aperture and the larger the diameter the more light admitted to the camera.

The size of the lens diameter is measures using a   'f '  number the larger the  f number the smaller the diameterof the aperture.

Now I will be adding more content to the site very shortly, and hope to cover subjects such as aperture more deeply, white balance and red eye , so please visit again.