You want to make money at photography? read this!

Great message, I could learn a lot from you.

Good post Globalbooks.

Jon.

First of all, to the OP, I don't question your use of anonymity or judge the quality of your message based on that. If you feel you need to communicate in that way, thats your call. Free speech doesn't mean you have to identify your self. Look at Batman and all the protesters on TV of good causes who hide their faces. !!!

About the message - I agree with a lot of what you say about Internet forums - and its not just this one. Like others here, I stay away from the gallery and CC of others pictures. My example of the difficulty of C&C is a picture that was posted here some years back of a creek in a National Park with a Coke can in it. One poster said to PS out the can cause it ruined the picture. Another said the can in the creek was actually the real message of the picture. If your the poster of that picture what do you gain from that? Just that everyones got an opinion. Part of the problem is that we push technical C&C together with compositional C&C and creativity C&C and it all gets jumbled under one roof.

I keep coming back here because I've learned to stay away from the galleries and the posts that irritate me and I just try to learn from the great people that inhabite the place by taking all posts for what they are. Someone's opinion.

What constitutes good photography is simply who finds it appealing.

If you take a photo and like that photo, then it's a good photo. That's a fact. However, if you present it to a friend and he doesn't like it, then for him it's a bad photo.

Think about Garth Brooks' music. Most people don't like his music, certainly not enough to buy it. They're not interested in hearing it because it's bad music. It's downright horrible.

....Or is it?

If there are 300 million people in this country, and 97% of them say, "man, that Garth Brooks' music stinks," but just 3% like it enough to buy it, well then do the math: Three percent of 300 million is NINE MILLION customers, which is about what some of his albums sold.

My point?

Your photos stink, are okay, are good, and are amazing.....depending on who views them.

Now, if you're planning to make money with your photos, then you have to appeal to a certain percentage of the population, and if they like it enough to buy it, then good.

If I show an Ansel Adams photograph of Yosemite to a hundred people, I can promise you there will be a range of responses from "amazing" to "that's nice" to "why isn't it in color?"

IF YOU COULD MAKE JUST ONE PENNY from each American you would have 3 MILLION DOLLARS.

Let that soak in.

Great thread! Thanks for saying this Global. Of course I don't need to worry about it due to the simple fact that I know everything about photography! LOL

Thanks for the post, globalbooks. I have found this to be the case in forums relating to other industries as well. I've found myself taking people's comments as law (ie. IT industry is bad with no jobs, photography is crowded so don't even bother trying) and I have come close to believing this.