Getting bored of photography

Tom Reichner wrote in post #18231068
...Admittedly, this modus operandi isn't a very lucrative form of photography.......but somehow I manage to sell enough to pay the bills and keep the household going, which is all that matters to me...

Your work definitely speaks for itself. I can see why people would want to license them. Can I ask, how do you market yourself? Is it strictly through your site or do you also license through stock sites? Just curious. Thanks in advance.

-Duck- wrote in post #18231096
Your work definitely speaks for itself. I can see why people would want to license them. Can I ask, how do you market yourself? Is it strictly through your site or do you also license through stock sites? Just curious. Thanks in advance.

I sell primarily thru stock sites.....simply because I don't like selling photos.

Don't get me wrong - I love it when an image sells! .But the actual act of selling --- of promoting myself, introducing myself to potential buyers, trying to get people to use my work --- is something that I really hate doing. .And I pretty much try to avoid doing anything that I don't like. .I guess that's laziness, but I've pretty much manipulated my life so that I only do things that I like to do, and I only do those things when I feel like doing them.

I do have a few clients that I work with personally - a few publishers who I've worked with for several years now, and from time to time they email me and inquire about using a given image for a given project. That's fine, because they are coming to me and I don't have to promote myself. Those sales are easy. Some other sales come in because someone sees a photo that I have put on my website, or on Flickr, or here on POTN or on some other internet forum. So they email me or call me and ask about licensing the image.

I also do some local/regional sales, mainly through a regional art gallery and a local interior design company. The gallery likes to sell prints and merchandise like greeting cards and calendars. The interior design company will once in a blue moon spec out one of my images to be printed on metal at a fairly big size. The area I live in is very sparsely populated, and very impoverished, but there are a few folks about that have money to spend on art, hence these sales.

The sales that I do independently and locally don't result in much volume, but they do augment my stock sales, and over the course of a year it adds up to a helpful sum.

Several friends of mine are also in the business of photographing wildlife full time, and they are MUCH more successful than I am, if you measure success by gross sales and net income. But they spend a lot of their time emailing magazine editors and negotiating with image buyers and continually cold-calling publishers and ad agencies in attempts to get their work sold. That is what you need to do if you want to make decent money at this. And that is what I do not like doing.......I would rather surf the internet, watch football games and Netflix, hang with friends, play strategy games, talk about art, look at my photos for hours and hours on a nice big 5K monitor, volunteer at church and at local conservation-oriented organizations, and most of all - go out on road trips and photo expeditions to search for animals and do the actual photography.

I work really, really hard at the photography itself. But I don't put much effort at all into selling / making money with my photography.

So I end up doing what I feel like doing almost all of the time, and am kinda poor, and my friends spend a good deal of their time doing things that they don't really like to do very much, and as a result they are successful financially.

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Tom Reichner wrote in post #18231150
I sell primarily thru stock sites.....simply because I don't like selling photos.

Don't get me wrong - I love it when an image sells! .But the actual act of selling --- of promoting myself, introducing myself to potential buyers, trying to get people to use my work --- is something that I really hate doing. .And I pretty much try to avoid doing anything that I don't like. .I guess that's laziness, but I've pretty much manipulated my life so that I only do things that I like to do, and I only do those things when I feel like doing them....

That’s not laziness, that instead seems to be the secret to happiness or at least a well balanced life.

urbanfreestyle wrote in post #18230390
My god, what have I started!?

Since you're still here (and I've just discovered the thread lol) I'll bring it back to your original post and the word that caught my attention was "motorsport". That was your mistake - thinking that you could turn motorsport photography into a business. Is it possible? YES. Is it likely? Oh, hell, no.
In a world where well-known names are struggling to make ends meet and hang onto clients you chose a particularly difficult area to specialize in. Almost impossible to make money in. You need a few major things to line up just right and you will still have to worry that it can be taken away from you tomorrow by someone willing to do it just a little bit cheaper. Happy to go into this more if anyone is interested but I can assure you that motorsports alone is not where you are going to make enough money to turn your photography into something you can make a living at.

thanks for the replies,

Wel lwith it being the new year etc i have come up with a plan and am taking a step back from "businessy stuff"
I have 2 weddings booked off the back of my previous work in general and two weddings i have done before so i am happy with that.
I have also bought myself a REALLY nice Olympus Trip 35 camera and a shed load of film and going to be doing more shooting for me.
Really looking forward to getting back into my film photography and seeing what i can create. Already spoken with a few small companies about displaying my work in their establishments (coffee shops and hotels)

Feeling positive this morning!

urbanfreestyle wrote in post #18231484
thanks for the replies,

Wel lwith it being the new year etc i have come up with a plan and am taking a step back from "businessy stuff"
I have 2 weddings booked off the back of my previous work in general and two weddings i have done before so i am happy with that.
I have also bought myself a REALLY nice Olympus Trip 35 camera and a shed load of film and going to be doing more shooting for me.
Really looking forward to getting back into my film photography and seeing what i can create. Already spoken with a few small companies about displaying my work in their establishments (coffee shops and hotels)

Feeling positive this morning!

Good for you. Sometimes this thread took a turn for the negative but I'm glad there was some incentive/positivity in here for you.
Good luck

On another note I bought a new car today (new to me) so gonna go take some pics of it

Tom Reichner wrote in post #18231150
I sell primarily thru stock sites.....simply because I don't like selling photos...

Thanks for the great response. It helps me see possible avenues for me to pursue. Like you, I hate sales. Hopefully in the near future I'll be able to hire a sales manager. Or perhaps that's just wishful thinking on my part.

which stock sites Tom?

chauncey wrote in post #18232671
which stock sites Tom?

A couple of sites I am on as "Tom Reichner", but for the others I use pseudonyms. Why? Because I don't want other commercially-minded photographers knowing what agencies I work with. If others knew, then they might want to submit to these agencies themselves.......which would increase the amount of competition I have on these sites. I want the agencies' customers buying MY shots, not those of other photographers. In short, I don't want anyone else to make any money that could have been mine. Therefore I choose to be an anonymous contributor with several sites. But it is no secret that I sell through Shutterstock - just google my name and that's what pops up, I'm told. I used to sell through Alamy and Fotolia, but sales there dropped so far that it isn't worth it anymore, and I have removed almost all of my images from those sites.

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Thanks Tom, I've heard of Shutterstock but not the others.

My question is, about these sites, how do you separate yourself from the plethora of other photographers that use those sites?

Holy hijack batman!

chauncey wrote in post #18234471
Thanks Tom, I've heard of Shutterstock but not the others.

My question is, about these sites, how do you separate yourself from the plethora of other photographers that use those sites?

Primarily it is the subject matter, as it relates to supply and demand.

There is an enormous demand for images of people, manmade things such as products and buildings, and domestic animals such as cats and horses. There is also an enormous supply of such imagery. Practically anyone can shoot images of these subjects, and there are literally millions of people who want to sell images thru stock sites. The result is that even though the demand is great, the supply is greater still, and it is very difficult to make much of anything selling such images.

There is also an enormous supply of images that are not realistic photographic representations of things, but rather 'artsy' renderings. This type of imagery includes both vectors and heavily photoshopped photos; things that are at least 50% 'digital art', as much of the content is created on the computer and/or with the use of photo editing software. The supply is huge - lots and lots of people create this stuff and create huge volumes of it. Yet the demand for this stuff is only moderate. So again, it is very difficult for anyone to make any worthwhile money selling such images as stock.

There is only a small demand for true wildlife photos. Yet, even though the demand is small, the supply is even smaller........at least the current supply that is available on a royalty-free basis through stock agencies. The same thing can be said for the work I have done recently with photographing wild fires - small demand, but an even smaller supply.

If one can capture full-frame portraits of wild animals, with nice blurred out backgrounds that isolate the subject, one has a reasonable chance to make a few dollars from the sale of such imagery. The same can be said for images of wildfires as they flare up and consume forests, brush, and grasslands with raging flames - that stuff sells because there isn't much of it out there.

So I have kind of lucked out in that the subject matter I like to shoot is one of the few things that seem to have a favorable balance between supply and demand.

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Tom Reichner wrote in post #18234786
There is only a small demand for true wildlife photos. Yet, even though the demand is small, the supply is even smaller . . .

If one can capture full-frame portraits of wild animals, with nice blurred out backgrounds that isolate the subject, one has a reasonable chance to make a few dollars from the sale of such imagery.

This may be doubly true of very small animals, if one identifies the species and can tag an image accordingly. Note: "may be." I haven't looked into any paying markets. But after I started submitting insect photos to BugGuide, I got requests from writers of entomological articles and reference books to use some of my images. I'm far from an expert photographer; I don't have pro-level equipment. A shot from a compact camera can be in demand because most shooters don't bother with the lesser-known tiny creatures.

When people a bored, then tend to fill time with small talk and chatter. When that doesn't work... they find something interesting they want to talk about. Boredom can not - and should not - sustain itself. Something like:

Yerp. I'm bored.