Selling Bird/Nature Photography?

Anyone here have experience with selling prints, rights, or anything at all?

I feel like I'm churning out good results on artistic, funny, cute, or documentary-style captures fairly consistently. I'm using professional lenses and have a lot of shots that don't require too much cropping or too much imagination.

I have realized that the market for wildlife photography is extremely narrow, and that even the rare few seen as "experts" barely make enough off of sales to pay for their equipment. So far all I've really done is setup a smugmug pro account and flickr using my real name but I don't know what else would be effective. Local art shows? Stock photography? Divine Intervention? Teaching seminars? Nothing?

Looking for comments from others with any first or second hand experience. Conversely, if your bird photos are highly cropped, blurry, or with poor exposures this may not be the thread for you.

Thanks,
Dave

Hi, Dave!

You're right in surmising that it is extremely difficult to earn money with wildlife photos. However, if you're willing to work harder at selling the images than you did to take them, you should be able to find some success, mainly by selling framed and matted prints. It is far easier to sell a ready-to-hang image to someone to display in their home or office than it is to find a publisher to purchase the rights to use an image. Local sales attempts are the most likely to be successful, as people are more likely to buy a framed print that they are actually viewing in person than they would be to buy the same thing over the internet. Despite the relative success that one can have with selling framed prints locally, there is still very little, if any, money in it. The costs of matting and framing can be substantial, and for every four prints that you mat and frame, you will most likely sell one of them. It has been my experience that most people aren't interested in selecting a print and then having it framed. They are most likely to buy something that they see already framed and nicely displayed. It's an impulse purchase, and they want to take it home and hang it right away.
Overall, it's a hard gig. But some sales can be made. Whether they're profitable or not is another story.

Thanks for that response Tom. Artwork as impulse buys does indeed make a lot of sense, so does putting in more time to sell than taking the shots. I'm still holding out for divine intervention!

The problem is, everybody, their uncle Charlie and their dog has a digital camera, more credit than they can pay off and a desire to make some money with them rather than work a regular job. I mean, who doesn't want to be a NG Photographer? With 7 billion of us on the planet, great photographers are like ants at a picnic, they're everywhere. The market is flooded with bird and wild life pictures, the big name stock photography places usually have a blaring notice on their home page that they aren't interested in wildlife pictures at this time.

That's my pessimistic view of it.

Enter contests first on the local level. As you progress with both your abilities and recognition then proceed to state wide ones. After that try well known international ones. By getting published either in print or posted on their respective sites people will start knocking on your door to either purchase your winners for additional publications or inquire what else you have to offer. It's much easier to sell a image to a well known magazine for $1,000 then to try and peddle that same shot 25 times at $40 printed and mailed.

Thanks guys.

Can't argue with you Mitch. Nice pointers Mike.

Since wildlife photography is a somewhat saturated market, I think the other thing to consider is pricing the photos reasonably. Would you rather sell 10 items @ 10.00, or 0 at 100.00?

A lot of the pro photographers I've talked to (largely in the art space) have to take a shotgun approach to selling their images, including:

Selling on their photoblog or website (requires a lot of work marketing on social media tools like Twitter, not to mention working on things like SEO).

Microstock sites

Selling at art fairs (I've personally purchased a number of items on impulse because of a street fair).

If you are trying to sell on Flickr, which is probably rare for most people, it would be a good idea to include a price in the description of the individual photo(s) your selling.

Hi Damon -

Using flickr for commercial purposes is against their terms & conditions and offenders are subject to account termination. Do I see people dropping subtle clues about selling prints on Flickr? Sure. I wouldn't press my luck though.