Despite the almost constant urge to do so, I have never posted one of those “link wrap-ups” wherein I present you all with a bunch of links I ran across over the course of the week (or month, or year) and expect you to thank me for it.

I suppose it’s because I feel cheap passing someone else’s content along without at least some sort of substantive editorial. Nevertheless, I do read a lot of blogs, not all of them photography-related, and I often run across things that I think you guys and gals would be interested in. It would be a shame for that to go to waste.

So today I bring you my very first ever I Hate Link Wrap-Ups post.

Back in June I wrote an article about the Creative Commons project, Creative Commons: Good Idea?, in which I advocated the use of their licenses for promotional purposes and how that approach ties in with socially-driven sites like Wikipedia and Flickr.

This month the debate over Creative Commons licenses in photography flared up once more, with Jim Goldstein declaring that he would never use CC licenses, and Brian Auer retorting that he had before and would most certainly continue to in the future. Underscoring the points made by both of these fine fellows was an interview I read with author Cory Doctorow about giving away free electronic versions of books that brought many relevant points into play.

I’m revisiting the topic here today, not simply to agree or disagree with anything Goldstein, Auer, or Doctorow said, but rather to paint a picture of why I think the Creative Commons plays a very valuable role in photography in today’s copy-and-paste culture and why you should be thinking very seriously about how it can help you.

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.

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”:/tag/desgn and blame it on insufficient equipment or software. If these people want to learn, shouldn’t they be more open to feedback?

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.