10 Ways for Making Money from Photography

Love photography? Want to take it to the next level?

Read on to learn how to make money as a photographer…

Commissions – someone hires you / pays you to take photographs. These fall into a number of categories

1)  Weddings

Some photographers go down the wedding photography route. This niche has the potential to make you a lot of money as a photographer. And for a good reason. The stress, planning, and amount of work you need to do are immense. You are responsible for capturing one of the most important moments of the happy couple.

You don’t have to start a wedding photography business to make money from shooting weddings. You can start by contacting clients or offering your services to friends and relatives. Or  you can start working as a second shooter.

I’ve done a couple of weddings for friends, but for me, it’s too stressful to undertake full time. 

2)  Engagements / Christenings etc

Similar to weddings but because the events tend to be more informal, they are less stressful and are a good way to get started in this type of event photography

3)  Portraits

General portrait photography tends to pay well. There’s the choice of formal or informal / candid styles. For families, my personal preference is for the informal style, getting the family rolling around on the floor, tickling each other etc. 

This category also include new-born, nurseries & boudoir photography

You don’t need a studio, in fact I don’t have a studio. But you do need studio type equipment

I did a post on family portraits in more detail a couple of months ago.

4)  Corporate Headshots

This can be quite lucrative on a time cost basis if you have a whole management team to photograph

It can be a fairly simple lighting set up with just one strobe with shoot through umbrella and a white or grey backdrop. 

In this case I actually used three lights, a main light to my right, a hair light back left & a spot on the backdrop behind the head

5)  Property / Architecture

There are many opportunities in this category. Airbnb host want high quality images of their property.

Pubs, shops & restaurants that have been refurbished need fresh images for their brochures & website

Offices can require internal & external images.

This type of photography generally requires a really wide angle lens, typically 16-35mm full frame or equivalent.

In all of the above examples, someone commissions you in advance to take the photos that they require, and usually, a fee is agreed up front before the photography work is undertaken.

6)  Stock Photography

You can sit around and wait for clients to find your photographs. Or, you can sell photos online by submitting them to a variety of stock photography sites. There are loads of different stock image sites, from ShutterStock to iStock, that you can submit your images to. Be sure to add lots of keywords so that people are able to find them, and bear in mind that making money from stock photographs tends to be a numbers game.

Companies and businesses are always looking for stock photos. If your images fit what they are looking for, they will buy them. Actually they buy a license to use them. You can continue to sell licences for the same photos time and time again. 

But be aware that you need a large portfolio online. Typically 10,000 photos can make you £1000 pa so you can do the maths

7)  Flickr & Getty Images

Very similar to stock photography mentioned above. If you have a Flickr account you license your images through Getty Images.

If anybody wants to use them for whatever reason, they can do so by paying you a small fee. It  is super to set up – you just turn on the ‘Request to Access’ link on your page – and Getty will review your work.

If they like what they see they’ll help you set up all the legal stuff like permissions and pricing. Best of all, it’s a passive income stream, putting money in your pocket as you go about your daily business.

8) Sell Your Photos in Galleries

Selling framed copies of your photos in local galleries is another way to make some money. But, it is important to figure out what sells. Photos that remind people of the local areas, such as nice views or local landmarks will sell. If you can find galleries in tourist area, for example the Lake District, then local scenes will sell well to holiday makers. 

As a general rule, if you have people in your photos, they won’t sell. Photographs of cliched subjects work well, for example, a photo of the Nelson’s Column, or a boat in a sea town, or a mountain in the Lake District. Although these are overdone for locals, they appeal to tourists.

9) Photography Competitions

Photography competitions is one way to make money that most people seem to forget about. I went round a friend’s house and up on the wall was a pretty terrible picture of her when she was younger. It looked like someone had taken it on an early camera phone in the back garden. It turns out that some photographer won first prize in a competition with it. My jaw dropped. I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing, it was just so… average.

It doesn’t take long to enter competitions. Even if you do not end up winning, it’s a good way to improving the quality of your work. If you’re lucky, your work might even get critiqued.

10)  Teaching Photography

Not everyone can learn from the internet. In fact, as I said in a recent post, trying to learn from YouTube or books or webinars can be quite confusing & frustration.

You can’t ask Youtube or a book a question. It’s like trying to Google where to buy a thingamajig to fix your whatjamacallit, when you don’t know the proper names for things.  You can’t ask how do I whatever? Or why isn’t so and so working? They don’t know what you’re struggling with.

If you have the ability to teach, reach out to those people, and show them how it’s done, one on one. A good teacher can make a good living, whether it’s from group classes or one on one sessions.

How Easy Is It?

Lets be under no illusions. Starting any sort of business is hard these days. And with photography these days, everyone with a phone thinks they are a photographer. And just because an image gets likes on social media, it doesn’t mean that it’s a great image or that it will sell. That’s not to say you can’t take amazing pictures with a phone – you can… if you understand about composition and your subject and lighting and timing and post processing and…

So it depends what your objective is. If you are look to make a few extra pounds to fund a new lens or the latest camera body (which by the way won’t automatically make your picture better), then that’s one thing

If you’re looking to give up your day job so that you can do something you love, that’s a completely different proposition and you need to go into it with your eyes open, and I would suggest that you seek professional help, guidance and coaching.