Woo, this thread is pre-Jurassic. We were still shooting film when the OP typed his first post, imagine!!
Pentaxuser raised an interesting point, and had an equally interesting and insightful response from jtk.
Now my 2021 question. Is anyone selling photo images in this Covid era? Fifteen years ago a fair few brave photographers were putting up images for sale on (shock horror) Ebay, more so in photo web sites. Both practices now seem to have declined to a great extent. The sales markets have probably all disappeared.
I personally doubt Ebay will ever be (if it ever was) a viable sales market for photo images, as it now seems to be going down the gurgler, as Aussies say. All the photo galleries in Australia were in lockdown last year, for six months in Melbourne, also the community/government venues for photo displays and exhibitions, such as public libraries, city/town halls, as well as theaters and the many coffee shops and cafes with wall space for local photographers to display their work. The photo sale market suddenly faded away. I wonder if it will ever return, and if so how it will restructure itself.
Australia is not Europe or North America, we here have to deal with much more limited markets and sales opportunities, even if some areas (like documentary photographs of our distinctly unique native wildlife) appear to draw a ready if Covid-reduced sale market.
Way back then I had a reasonably successful part-time business taking and selling travel images, mostly in Southeast Asia. My clients were publishers in Europe and the USA. I never did earn enough to fund dirty weekends at a Waldorf, but one year (I think it was 2006) I did make enough to cover my airfares to Sarawak and a few weeks of happy wandering in longhouse country.
Those halcyon days (and most of the longhouses, alas) are long gone. My last good year was 2017, when I sold enough to pay for my B&W darkroom supplies (I admit I didn't do much processing or printing that year) and a chunk of the Nikon D800 I bought then and still use.
These days I consider myself lucky to sell a dozen images every year. I think I did about 10 in 2020 - our tax year ends on June 30 so I've not yet done my tax preparation and I'm not sure about my photo sales) and probably two or three at most this year. Most publishers put new books on hold last year and none will be producing again until 2022, so the market has 95% collapsed. I have no control over this as it wasn't caused by my (good or bad) images, so I go with the flow. I plan to travel again next year if I can, to do more photography of the fast-disappearing colonial architecture in Asian countries. This keeps me active and involved, so it's as important for me as the small money I earn from my images.
Sadly, the handful of (all young) newcomers in professional photo work closed down and vanished from the scene during the first dismal Covid lockdown in Australia in 2020. All now tell me they won't return to photography as a professional, the markets and clients are no longer there. We have lost something valuable with their passing.
Beyond this lengthy introduction, my question is: who is selling photography in 2021, who are they selling to, and how do they promote it. No, I'm not asking for business secrets. Only your thoughts about where the photo sales markets are heading and how we plan to tap into it. Sharing the hopes for a new future.
