52 Get an audience
Share the joy
Kevin Meredith
The Idea
Taking photos, and refining them on your computer, can be just the start of your photography. Once you have your images, you should get them out into the big wide world so that other people can see and enjoy your creations.
Taking a photo is just the beginning—after shooting, there is a whole world of creativity awaiting you.
The Ingredients
- ▶ Photos
- ▶ Computer
- ▶ Internet access
The Process
Online
It used to be that if you were a budding photographer you would just show your family and friends your photos, but now, with access to the web, it's as easy to publish content as it is to view it. I post my photos to flickr.com, one of the more popular photo-sharing sites. Photo-sharing sites give you great potential for a wide audience. If you get into a certain type of photography, there will always be a corresponding flickr group, making it easy for you to show your photos to people with a similar interest, and to get tips from your peers. If you want your work seen by a lot of people, you need to make it easy to find. Make sure you add meaningful titles, descriptions, and tags to your photos so that they turn up in searches. If you are a bit shy and don't want to publish your photos publicly, facebook is good for sharing your images with family and friends.
If you want a more professional online presence for your photography, but lack the skills and/or funds to get your own website built, there are sites that offer slick, customizable portfolio templates. One such place is www.ariosites.com. You can add galleries and style your site the way you want it, In some cases this is a far cheaper option than building a site yourself as web hosting alone can cost as much.
Prints
Having your photos seen online is great, but it's always good to get physical prints. I don't own a color printer. If I want something printed, I usually get my local lab to print it because, once you have paid for a printer and ink cartridges and factored in time for cropping your prints, you can spend just as much as you would getting them printed at a lab. Once you have your photos printed; you might have a problem getting them framed, Frames can vary in price, but if you want hassle-free printing and framing, look no further than imagekind.com, which offers an online printing and framing service at a very competitive price.
Cards
Photographs are good for hanging on wails and putting in albums, but they don't take handling very well as they pick up fingerprints and kink easily For prints that can take a little more handling I use moo.com. Moo will make you business cards, mini cards, postcards, and greetings cards from your photos. Moo's biggest strength is that it lets you have a different image on each of your cards so that, if you buy a pack of 100, you can have a different image on each.
Uploading images to websites can take a long time, but both Moo and Imagekind can grab your photos from flickr, facebook, and a number of other online services to save you time.
Books and magazines
The data you can add to your flickr image — including tags, people, location, and camera type—makes it much easier for you and other users to find a particular image
With the advent of print on demand, anyone can have their own book printed. With traditional printing methods you have to print a minimum number of copies, which can prove costly if they are left unsold. Print on demand allows you to print just one copy, if that is what you require. Blurb (blurb.com) allows anyone to make a book, in a range of sizes, and then publish it. Blurb has its own bookmaking software called BookSmart (Mac and PC compatible), which is super easy to use and free to download. If you prefer to design your book using other software, you can upload your design to Blurb as a PDF. Mag Cloud (magcloud.com) do the same thing for magazines; this is really good if you have a small project you want to publish that is not quite big enough to fill a book. MagCloud, Blurb, and Imagekind also allow you to put your creations up for sale on their sites. You can sell it at cost or add a markup. It is incredible to see how print on demand has leveled the playing field when it comes to enabling people with limited resources to make their work available. In a strange twist, big publishers are using it too. In 2009, Life magazine used MagCloud to reissue its 1969 Woodstock edition. Wouldn't it be cool if your magazine was on the same virtual self as Life magazine?
From the Blurb websrte you can browse through a list of self-published books and upload your own book with the user-friendly software BookSmart.
Moo make hall- and full-size business cards from your images in packs of 50, and you can have a different image on each one.
Anyone car distribute a magazine worldwide— all you need is a PDF of it
Merchandise
And it doesn't stop at that. If you want something more, check out Snapfish. Snapfish can print your photos on a huge range of products: mouse mats, T-shirts, mugs, coasters... they will even print photos onto a mini T-shirt for a teddy bear.