Blog on Photoblogs

You often hear in the media about “getting your money to work for you”.  It occurred to me the other day, that we should be saying the same thing as photobloggers about our photography.  Most, if not all, of us take a ton of images in a yearly basis; our latest Featured photographer is currently on a 1200 day streak (over 3 years!).

Many of the images we create never see the light of day, so let’s start “putting our photographs to work”.  Here’s my idea, first, don’t change a thing, continue to shoot what you like, and process the images as you do right now, but classify each and every image (I know what you’re thinking) in one of the following categories,

Portfolio Images
These are your prized possessions, the images that you think about daily, and are really proud of.  Add these to your portfolio bucket and get them up on your portfolio site today!

Photoblog images
These are images that 1) just missed the portfolio grade, or 2) were taken in an effort to learn a new technique,etc.  Get them processed and queued up to be published on your photoblog.  Make sure you add a sufficient amount of text for each image.  Although “images speak 1,000 words”, Google is easily distracted and likes nice easy to digest text.

Microstock
These are still good images, but maybe you just don’t want to post them on your photoblog for whatever reason.  These are the ones that are destined to live out the rest of their digital lives somewhere deep within your hard-drives.  Let’s put them to work, why not setup an account on your favourite microstock site,

iStockPhoto
Shutterstock

I know what you’re thinking why would I sell my images for $1 and get a 20% cut they are worth more than that!  Well you’re probably right and those images aren’t the ones you’re posting to the microstock site(s), those images are in your portfolio or on your photoblog (for sale as limited edition prints).  You might as well get these photographs working for you now.  We’re all gear fanatics, so maybe you can soften the costs associated with that new VR lenses you have your eyes on.  You don’t have anything to lose right?

“What was I thinking” Images
Like it or not, we all have a few of these images in our library, the ones that for one reason or another just didn’t turn out like you had expected.  Whatever you do, don’t delete them!  You just never know when or where these images could come in handy!  Storage is getting cheaper by the minute, go buy another external drive and go crazy!

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