Selling Wildlife Photo's.

[matt_xyz]

Originally Posted by djeyewater

Cool, I'm a member of Leics and Rutland Wildlife Trust, are your pics in/going to be in the magazine?

Dave

Hi Dave,

Yes, the front cover of the current Autumn issue was actually one of mine. The photo is of a Common Hawker dragonfly resting on blackberries. I believe they're also planning to use some other shots on publicity material.

Matt

[JennyS]

Of those who have sold images through their websites (e.g. Zan and JennyS) can I ask what the subject matter was, just out of interest?

I'm living in Ireland and all my photos are of wildflowers...........
My website gets found easily on a 'Google' for wildflowers, specially for anyone searching for Irish material. Realistically I'm not likely to get a lot of sales, but they help fund the site and one day maybe finance a 'proper' camera!

I would suggest that you look for gaps in the market. If you submit robin photos for example, you will have thousands of photos in competition with you. If you submit something like green woodpecker photos there is much less competition. So, choose more unusual subjects.

Totally agree with jennyb on the above!

[djeyewater]

Originally Posted by matt_xyz

Hi Dave,

Yes, the front cover of the current Autumn issue was actually one of mine. The photo is of a Common Hawker dragonfly resting on blackberries. I believe they're also planning to use some other shots on publicity material.

Matt

Congratulations, the first Common Hawker to be photographed in the counties as well!

Dave

[zan]

Hi Matt,

Sorry for the slow reply, I've not checked this thread in a bit. I should mention I've not had many sales, but just enough to pay for the website, which is ok at the moment

The sales I've been approached for were: "rainbow at sea" for a therapy website (exactly what it says on the tin), and a sale through a canvas printers who sell my stuff; a macro shot of a peacock fan worm (underwater) for the biomimicry website in the US and a 3ft x 3ft display, a couple of work-related ones for posters in my work, and a couple of prints from people coming to my site from the New Scientist calendar competition website. There might have been a couple of others but I don't remember at the moment. Once I've got a bigger portfolio to my name I'll start pushing it more aggressively - my current contract runs for another 2 years but then I'll be looking for work again, and the aim is to use the photography to help tide me over

The ideas on here are really good though for getting sales - one of the biggest things I think helps is to pick a niche for your photography that you are keen on, and become known for that (easily said!). Good luck though, and fingers crossed you start seeing a few sales

Zan

[matt_xyz]

Thanks Zan. I thought yours might be marine themed images, that should be a nice niche for you to exploit as not everybody can take images of that kind.

Matt

[jennyb]

Matt,

As examples of niche images, I was asked by a UK magazine if they could buy one of my images of a field maple tree. Unfortunately, it was taken with my old camera and the resolution was not quite high enough for a magazine.

A US newspaper wanted to buy a photo of white stonecrop, but the image I had was so bad that I gave it to them for free!

A TV company bought a roe deer image for a BBC 2 documentary. The quality was not good but when I offered them better images, that was the one they wanted and they paid for it!

ITV bought a photo of red campion (not a niche image, I think) for use on a quiz show. They don't seem to need high res for TV.

And just to prove my niche theory completely wrong, someone bought a photo of a daisy for use on packaging.

I think the bottom line is that my site is fairly highly ranked in the search engines (I can help with this if anyone needs advice) and possibly my images are easier to find than on many web sites. The other point is that I don't have a "Gallery" as such. I have an informational web site, and an, "oh by the way, if you want any images you can buy them" attitude. As I mentioned earlier, this was added as an afterthought and as such my site will not be seen as a hard sell.

Jenny

PS: I should add that I don't sell many images, so I would not give up the day job!