I am an amateur photographer and while I may never reach a full professional level, I would still like to position myself well (plus understand the business/marketing side better).
I have been working with computers for 10+ years, so the tech side of this is real easy for me to get going, as I already have my website up and running, etc.
I currently have done mostly outdoors/nature type stuff, but also some high school football (as my niece is part of team management), so it has been a good way for me to cut my teeth, so to speak. I for the most part, post everything on FB, with my copyright and watermarked on the sides. I've been debating on revamping my strategy for that and instead going to something along the lines of a 5-6 picture collage. I guess a sampling of the better photos of the batch I took and then pointing people to my site, etc.
I'm becoming more critical about my photos and beginning to develop a quality over quantity mentality (which is necessary to some extent). I love that my friends and family can see what I've taken and potentially others who I don't know may see it and be interested, etc... but I don't want to just be a "FB Photographer".
I' guess I'm just trying to figure out the best way to revamp it, so that I'm still able to share my experience for a particular set of photos, but also drive some traffic to my site.
Thanks
I agree with Jim. I think a better strategy would be to use social media (tumblr, FB, –I stay away from flickr) to point people towards something that is branded specifically for you.
If you want to be able to sell prints of football games (NOT sure of the legal issues surrounding this) you can use a photoshelter account.
I also separate my images somewhat. My tumblr photoblog has some iphonography mixed in with shoot outtakes and "remixes" of images while I keep my "real" photography site clean and carefully edited. This allows me to have a foot in both worlds.
Good luck.
matt r.
Thanks! I'm not overly concerned with selling of football prints, tbh. It is kind of exciting for me to be trying to improve on my skills and to get some good shots and who knows, if one of the players ends up in the NFL, then it might be worth something.. but that is years down the road and not the focus.
I'm just searching for my identity and my branding I guess. I'm really just debating cutting back on what I put on FB and just instead offer a small sample, either in collage form or some other form, and point people to my real site with the rest of the set.
Thanks
Jeremiah
http://www.onebytemedia.net
First off, good choice going for quality over quantity. When showing your work, always remembered that you (and I) are judged by our weakest image. Just about anybody can create one memorable photo but to stand out, all of your images should be a homerun.
In my humble opinion, all social media should be used to point people towards your well crafted web page where I feel it is a better platform to showcase your work. It is just too easy to slap together something on Facebook or Flikr and call yourself a photographer. In addition to that, I am not happy with the current trend of copyrights grab these huge sites are trying to enforce. Read the fine print carefully before posting any images on line. Good luck.
If you have a SmugMug account you can publish from SmugMug to FB and includes any watermark plus a link back to your SmugMug page, from which you can set up for sales. Additional benefit is that your photos on SmugMug will be in full original resolution with slide show and other display options (looks much better than on FB but you get the benefit of FB exposure).
I was just looking into this about 30minutes before I came to this site. First, I heard that fb owned the copyright, but from what I read today on Facebook, you basically grant them a non-exclusive license to:sell(without receiving compensation for use), sublicense and use the image as long as you or one of your friends have it on fb.
I am pretty sure this gets tricky when it comes down to people that post copyrighted images. It seems like a big mess to me. However, I have seen photogs sucessfully use teaser images on their account to engage people to further investigate their work.
I would not post all images.
I would either post links to your site or a few images with links to your site.
IMHO
commented:
October 7, 2011
Robin LaPoint
Non-Photographer
I am actually moving towards a "teaser" image setup, where I have my album which will just contain a collage of sorts with some of the pictures from a set (in smaller resolution) and information on how to get to my site
commented:
October 7, 2011
J. Fulbright
Amateur