Professional Applications Within Photography

For my latest assignment at university I've been set a project called Professional Applications. The brief entails becoming a professional practitioner within the photography industry in some form or shape. The requirements for the brief are:

• A portfolio on line or printed containing at least TWO examples of submission to a live brief and/ or competition.
• A research journal/ folder containing evidence of research in to possible appropriate live briefs
• A ten minute illustrated presentation outlining your engagement and feedback with live briefs and/ or competitions during the year.

Stock Imaging

To start I'm looking at the live briefs, as open as this is I'm going to start off by doing research into stock imaging. So, where do I begin? Who's the best? What will be the best route to go?

So after doing my research by reading blogs and looking at online sales figures I've found six sites which I'm willing to submit my work to. As far as I can trust doing business with people online these are the most recommended sites.

Alamy.com

istockphoto.com

 shutterstock.com

 jupiterimages.co.uk

 fotolia.com

 123rf.com

I'm not submitting work to these sites just for the project but I also want to do it to see if I have what it takes as a stock photographer. It's always been something I've wanted to try out, I'd love to be able to quit my bar job and live off my photographs but let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet. 

So what kind of images do stock libraries want? 

After searching the internet endlessly, reading blogs and articles I've found that the biggest selling images are a mixture between photographs of people, specifically those in a business environment or still life photography specifically images of food. So to start off my career as a stock photographer I'm going to start out by uploading images of fruit. 

The images of fruit are nothing special, however they meet the submission criteria of all the image libraries. The images are exposed according to a professional light meter so the lighting and exposure is as close to perfect as possible. The images are all in focus this is a strong requirement from all the websites because you can't expect to sell a blurry image or one with camera shake. So I'm going to upload these images to all six websites and then report back to them later on in this blog post after the images have had time to fail or succeed. I will also keep trying to upload more photographs to the stock websites to try and generate some form of income or publicity for my university assignment. 

Competitions

The next action I'm going to take is to look for a photography competition to enter. Yet again...back to the internet.
Conveniently as soon as I started looking I received an email from one of the stock imaging websites (Alamy) promoting a competition that the company is supporting and associated with.

The theme of this competition is the concept of circles. This is a very open subject and could mean absolutely anything. Circles appear everywhere when you start looking, however, for this competition I thought that I would upload an image I took a few years ago due to the vibrancy of it, it's a little bit more eye catching then most of my normal images.

I think this image could stand a good chance in this competition as it's good to look at and there's no real concept to it. The lack of concept I feel will work better in this competition as it's open to everyone, so the majority of entries will come from amateur photographers and those who don't really have much of a background within reading images (without being offensive).

I also entered into another photography contest on this website (photocrowd.com)

I entered the same photograph from the Alamy circles competition into this competition. I know that these competitions are nothing special, however, if I manage to do well in them then maybe that will lead on to bigger and better things. 

Nothing really happened with the Alamy competition.

However I checked on the light painting contest every other day and this is what happened. I noticed that I had actually placed within the top 50 only after a couple of days, I think I was 47th, that's when I thought I might I actually stand a chance in this competition. So after a lot of social networking these are the results.

So there's one day left of this competition and I'm currently sat in first place, admittedly not by much and it could still change but I'm going to hold out hope that I can win this! 

There's 7 hours left of the competition and it's starting to become more and more nerve wrecking every minute.

So I won the competition. I don't really feel like it was worth the hours of Facebook messaging and text messages trying to get people to vote for me. However, a win is a win.

I'm rather annoyed with how the competition was advertised as there was no mention of a judges vote. It appears that I didn't win the full competition as I only won the Crowd Vote and not the Experts Decision. All I ended up winning was a DVD with photoshop lessons on it and I'm really grateful to everyone who managed to find time to vote for me but it just wasn't worth the stress. In the prize description they also mentioned huge publicity for your work but still no one has contacted me to ask for any additional images or interviews for the magazine. The fact that I had to email several different people in order to just get the photoshop DVD was quite disappointing as well.

So it's nearly been two weeks and I got an email today from the magazine.

It turns out that my image will be used in the magazine and I was just being impatient. However, I'm really excited to see what comes of this. Hopefully future work from a business or company.

Self Promotion

Logo

To start to promote myself I thought for a start I need a logo if I'm going to try and make a name for myself in the photographic industry. Luckily I have a friend who is a professional graphic design artist who didn't mind helping me out. My friend Claire is doing very well for herself within the graphic design industry, she's made logos, websites and branding.

www.cestech-creative.com

Here's what she managed to design for me and only in a couple of days as well.

I wanted something that would be personal to me, something that described myself a little bit and something that was a bit more creative than the usual boring logos that pop up everywhere. This logo is now going to be the face and front of any work I do.


Networking

As much as I dislike the idea of Facebook and Twitter, I thought that it would be within my best interests to create a business page on each site to generate some form of online presence. Both websites were very easy to create profiles on.

Within a day I had gained over 100 followers as well as a message off someone who was enquiring about work. I think this means that creating a Facebook account was a good decision.

The next step I took was creating a business email address jjacksonphotography@outlook.com just to try and tick as many boxes in the online presence grading criteria so I'm publishing this whole assignment as a blog post as JJacksonPhotography on blogger.com. 

I've found that blogger is a great way of generating not so much a fan base but people who are more arts based and are willing to give good feedback with my own personal and live work.

Website Design, Development and Publishing

I thought the last key to the puzzle would be to create a business website where I could promote myself and services and also showcase my current work which I think would be acceptable to lure people in to wanting me to shoot for them as a 'Professional' Photographer. 

Seen as I know absolutely nothing about HTML coding I decided to use a website called wix.com where they have pre-made website templates meaning that all you have to do is choose which style of web design best suits your idea of how you want your website to look and then just edit it yourself. It's very easy to use as well as simple and efficient with no cost.

Deciding on which template you use was pretty straight forward. I went for a simple layout which is really user friendly. 

Editing the site to how I wanted it to look was really easy and straight forward. The things that were the most time consuming were deciding which images to use on the website and of corse the dreaded 'About' section (no one likes writing about themselves). 

So I started out with the home page. I've left it simple, less is more.

 I then moved on to my about section. It still needs a lot adding to it but for now it will do.

 The first gallery I have started with was the Portraits. Really easy to set up and seen as I have enough good portraits it was easy to decide which ones to use.

 Still Life was the second gallery I have decided to add. My still life photography is really strong at the moment so I thought that this would be good to include in my website.

 Music for gallery number 3. I really enjoy music photography as it's more of a relaxed atmosphere and you're just left to do what you feel is best, pursuing it as a career is something which I would like to do.

 My fourth gallery is dedicated to Skateboarding photography. Skateboard is my favourite hobby and I try to incorporate as much of a skateboarding vibe and feel into all my work no matter how professional the work is. I feel you should always stay true to your passions.

 The last sub-page I added to the gallery list was a Projects page, just so who ever is looking at my website can see what I'm currently working on. I want to be able to change this page frequently to try and showcase my productivity to potential clients.

 The last page to choose from is my contact page. It's really straight forward and includes all my contact details such as: email, facebook, twitter, phone number and instagram.

I really like my website and I hope it works out for the best, but trying to maintain it and get it up and running is challenging and expensive, but as they say. 'You have to spend money, to make money.'

I will be running the site through the domain name joejacksonphotography.co.uk and shall hopefully have it up and running as soon as funding lets me. 

I intend on getting business cards for myself, because you'll never know where or when you'll need them. I feel like this would be a good step for business.

Rationale 

I have enjoyed this assignment. I feel I have learnt a lot about the photographic industry and self promotion. Parts of the networking have been very mundane and boring like trying to get people to vote for you in competitions but it has all been worth while. I'm still waiting on the stock imaging websites for someone to buy my work but I'm sure if my work stays there someone will purchase it eventually. As for my own business and work I will always be looking to expand and search to work for and with people to create excellent quality work. I hope you've enjoyed my post.

Joe.