Shawn,
It is difficult to sell one's photos however good they may be. I think it
is the subject matter that sells. Particularly in the case of the photo of
Princess Diana.
Do you have any photographs of the subject nobody else is doing? Nowadays,
it is so easy to take pictures with P&S, and reprints are cheap, people
don't want to spend their $$ on your pictures.
Although I wasn't persistent, I have tried the calendar/note card market
myself without any success. What I have sold are fine-art photographs of
mine nobody else or few people would do that customers appreciate,
photographic mementoes of the choir trips we have taken to choir members,
and lately prints of my church photographs to our church. For the past few
years, I have been showing my fine-art photographs at corporate sites in
Virginia, but I have not been able to sell a single print yet through that
venue. People like to look at my photos, but not enough to part with their
hard-earned $$s.
If you want to make some money with your equipment you have, perhaps you
might want to consider photo-digitizing services with an Olympus ES-10, for
example. You can use it yourself and print your own snapshots on a
cost-effective printer to reduce the cost of printing and driving to the
labs. Another idea might be copying old photographs. I've done two jobs of
this kind using my OM-4T, but without any copying stands or a macro setup.
The thing to do now is to do the copying digitally.
I have tried wedding photography a few times myself. The first one was O.K.
I sold enough reprints and I got a T-32 at that time. The second one, for
which I charged more, did not result in any reprint sales. I have finally
come to the conclusion that it was because of a second marriage involved in
the second wedding I did. Friends of mine showed me their wedding photos.
I don't know if it was a second marriage for the wife, but it was definitely
so for the husband. They told me that they never ordered any reprints.
They just kept an album of proofs just like my second pair of customers! I
felt sorry for the photographer.
BTW, I have two books I would like to sell since I am no longer interested
in making money in the area. The two books are: Professional Techniques for
the Wedding Photographer -A complete guide to lighting, posing, and taking
photographs that sell by George Schaub and Retouching Your Photographs by
Jan Way Miller. Both are in like-new condition and were published by AM
Photo at $18.95. I can sell them $10 each with postage included to anyone
in the U.S., Canada or Mexico. If anybody elsewhere is interested, we'll
figure out the reasonable cost for shipping.
Please e-mail privately. I might add that I can accept cash payments. With
a few transactions across the Atlantic recently, I became comfortable with
an idea.
Tomoko Yamamoto
Photographer, Composer, Soprano
mailto:tomokoy@xxxxxxxxx
Home Page: http://www.charm.net/~tomokoy/
Olympus Classifieds: http://ep.com/ep/csp.html?csp=1130
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