Photo sales

I've been doing a lot of research and thinking (and a little action) into the best way to try and sell some if my photos.  While I've done some event photography and shot some weddings, my real passion creating amazing landscape, nature and still life prints... so I figure I should follow it.  This article is basically some rambling and thinking out loud, hopefully it will give you some ideas about directions to go in photography or maybe you can leave some comments giving me some direction.  Anyway here it goes...

Right now I have many of my 'art' photos for sale on Redbubble, I also have them displayed on my web site with links to my bubblesite where appropriate.  I also use my web site to sell photos from events I've shot, so I could use this option to sell my art photos as well.  I really like Redbubble because I don't have to do anything when someone orders a photo.  I don't like Redbubble because the base price is high, the don't offer 'normal' prints and they only have a few products I really like.

There's also a printer in Brisbane called Brilliant prints who do excellent affordable canvas prints and have recently started doing block mounted photos prints which look great and are even more affordable (I have to two photos below block mounted on my wall).  But the don't do framing, cards, calendars or 'normal' prints.  I've often wondered about giving up on redbubble and just using these guys and maybe supplement it with another standard photo printer but it would be a lot of work to set-up (print sizes and cost on web site) and I'd have to do 'stuff' whenever an order came through.  I'm still pondering this option if I could find a (singular) good printer and framer to work with.

Another option is that I've just joined Imagekind who do 'normal' prints, framing and canvas printing in a Redbubble type set-up with lots of size, paper type, mat and frame options.  But they are US based and I don't want to have to point to both redbubble and these guys from my web site. Just to make things interesting I've got a Zazzle account that is somewhere inbetween Imagekind and CafePress (I also have an account with these guys but the 'free' account isn't much use to me) which I'm using to create posters, postcards and different calendar formats.

The other thing I've found is that people are more likely to buy a print or calendar if it is physically there in front of them, particularly for less-computer-savvy generations.  This is hard, because it means you need to have up front $$ to buy the products and you need somewhere to display them.  It is even more important if you are going to sell postcards, these are normally bough from a store, somewhere near when the photo would have been taken.  So this involves doing more research into printers that have products you want at good prices which also involves buying in bulk to save $$ but first requiring you to spend more $$.

This means I now have images strewn all over the internet, three sales sites (four if you include my attempts with cafepress), one flickr site, facebook site, my web site, I have a blog (two actually), a twitter account, myspace account, a printer in Brisbane and are pondering getting calendars, prints, cards and/or postcards physically into various stores/galleries/cafe's.  Which all adds up to one big mess.

So I hope you weren't expecting me to come to a conclusion about the best way to do photo sales coz I'm going to leave it there for now and keep thinking and working to, well, see what works.  Let me know if you have any comments, thoughts or ideas.  If you are in the same place as me, GOODLUCK!

Will's new gallery

What's that I hear you say, bout bloody time?? Yeah I agree, my web site has been neglected for a long time, largely because it was very labour intensive to update the image gallery and I figured there was no point putting more effort into a lost cause. I've know for a long time that I've needed some sort of an automated site builder/image gallery/content management system but didn't really know how you went about setting it up and the one attempt I had was a bit of a mess.

So what changed?

Well I had the opportunity to shoot an event (the event album) that I thought I'd be able to sell prints from and needed somewhere to sell them. So research ensued, I checked out all the Australian "smug mug" type web sites and found none of the suited, either out of date, too expensive, couldn't get info on them (even after email requests) so I decided to set-up my own shop front.

Will's attempt at creating an online store for photos using free PHP software = Fail.

What happened, well I managed to install two different pieces of free shop front software and found both of them lacking mainly because selling photos is a little unique, you have a very large number of "products" that will all have the same set of multiple prices depending print size. Now it may have been possible to fix this and or install a "photo sales" module but I couldn't see and easy way of adding the products and I'd yet to learn about modules. Besides it was after 2am, I needed sleep.

So I had in my head that I needed a bulk upload facility that I figured an image gallery would have, so the next day research started again and I came up with a list of free image gallery software (and a suggestion of using drupral). In the end I went with "Gallery" image gallery software coz it looked good, seemed pretty easy to use, had many modules to customise the look and function including a couple for shopping carts that use Paypal! YAY! So I eventually figured out how to install it and a few module and upload a couple of photos, double YAY! After 2am again, bed.

The following day I was researching way to further customise it, details of the checkout, changing themes and layouts, privileges and all the rest and it was starting to come together and actually looking functional. I decided to use the "checkout" module, it seemed streamline and it actually worked when I tried it (usually a good thing). So i continued improving things, getting down to the smaller and small details, the only problem is that the more I played, the more I wanted to play and improve and change and tweak and . . . and . . . and crap, 2am, need sleep again.

Anyway after that there haven't been a lot of changes, I do try new themes occasional and I have a few things on the "improvements" list but I need to learn more about tweaking the actual code and style sheets (I did try it once and broke it for a while, good think I always keep the backup). On of the things that I have done is start to migrate my old "art" image gallery across to the new location so that it hopefully shows off my work a little better and I can keep it up to date much more easily.

So where to now? Well it still needs to be properly integrated with my web site, not entirely how to do that right atm, if I move the site to gallery or gallery to the site or both to a new content management system the might include this blog a bit better too. We will see, only time will tell but for now I'm just happy to event photos up for sale (with ppl buying them!) and my 'art' photos are slowly coming up to date.

- View the Gallery -