Single-Serving Photo

One of the most popular questions asked throughout the photography blogs that I read and on other discussion sites is “How can I go pro?” or “Can I make a living with my photography?” Everyone seems to have a different answer and the responses vary a lot depending on whether the individual answering is a working pro, and if they are, what industry they work in.

Despite plentiful arguments to the contrary, I do believe that photography can be a viable full-time job. Making it work for you requires flexibility and understanding of the marketplace. (more…)

Thanks to a surge in “community” features being implemented on practically every website, it’s now easier to solicit feedback about your photographs than it is to fall out of a boat and hit water. In other words, pretty damn easy!

Fantastic, you might think, the more feedback the better! Well, true, except that a lot of people calling themselves “serious hobbyists” or “beginning professionals” simply seek out the most positive feedback they can get and live in a world totally isolated from how completely awful their work really is. Paul Indigo asks a question on his blog, Beyond the Obvious: do photo enthusiasts really want to learn? In his article, Paul wonders about the true intentions of people who demonstrate fundamental misunderstanding of the art concepts of photography and blame it on insufficient equipment or software. If these people want to learn, shouldn’t they be more open to feedback? (more…)

If you have, let’s just say, a trunk-full of strange and wondrous objects fresh off the barge and out of the splintered shipping crate from lands afar, chances are good you’re either the kingpin of an international smuggling ring or you’re going into business for yourself. If you’re my friend Eli, you’re the owner and operator of Old Man Hodapp’s Worldly Treasures, peddling only the finest of… Completely weird stuff from all over the globe.

After you’ve come to terms with the concept of selling parts of animals you can’t readily identify, you will surely need to take some pretty pictures to entice the prospective customers who crawl through your website, and that means you’re going to want to build a low-cost lightbox (or cloudbox or cloud dome or… diffuse light chamber) to get that snappy catalog look.

I got together with Eli and got him to explain how he constructed a very serviceable lightbox for less than $20. We also talked a bit about post-processing and how to streamline the task of readying hundreds of product shots for the web without going insane. (more…)