I’m bored now…
Drinking champagne with my camera at the Goodwood Festival of Speed
Matt Kloskowski once said there was no such thing as a professional wildlife photographer. That’s not quite true, but it is very hard to make a full-time living from it. So what are you supposed to do when you’re not on a shoot?
It’s the same if you’re an amateur photographer. You can probably only afford a few photographic trips a year, so what do you do for the rest of the time if you want to improve your skills?
Here are a few ideas for paid and unpaid tasks that might fill a few hours more productively than watching daytime TV…
Paid
There are lots of ways of making money out of photography when you’re not actually taking pictures. In fact, I’ve written an article all about it. Feel free to read that post for more detail, but here’s the basic list of options.
Microstock
The easiest way to dip your toe in the water and try to make a bit of money is by submitting your pictures to microstock agencies. This is how I started out after my trip to Kenya in 2013, and I now submit 100 images every week to 12 different agencies. I’ve found that the most productive agencies are Adobe Stock and Shutterstock, but there are plenty to choose from. One of the other benefits of working with Adobe is that you get a free subscription to Lightroom and Photoshop if you sell a certain number of images. That’s worth having…
The average, one-off, download fee for a Royalty Free file is only around 25-35 cents, and I only make around $450 (£350) a month, but every little helps…!
One thing to bear in mind is that microstock agencies require titles and keywords for any images you submit. They also have standards, so they won’t necessarily accept all your files. Some will be too small (although you can fix that in Gigapixel), some will have technical faults (such as over-exposure) and some will be too similar to your other shots.
That means the submission process is pretty time-consuming. It often takes me more than three hours to select the right images, ‘polish’ them so that they look their best, make sure the metadata is complete, upload them via Filezilla and various web pages and then submit the files online. Phew!
Finally, it’s a good idea to create a spreadsheet listing all your submitted files. Mine has nearly 25,000 rows now, so it would be impossible for me to keep track of them all otherwise…!
Stock Agencies
A few decades ago, ‘microstock’ agencies didn’t exist. There were simply ‘stock agencies’. These organisations did the same job, but photographers generally got a much better rate! Sadly, the proliferation of mobile phones, digital cameras and the arrival of the internet mean that the price per image has been driven lower and lower. Gone are the days when you could be paid hundreds of dollars for a single image.
Stock agencies do still exist, and they do offer a better rate per download than the microstock agencies. That’s mainly because they sell Rights Managed images. This means they earn a commission every time they’re used rather than just a one-off fee.
I applied to a few stock agencies years ago, but the only one that accepted my work was a Canadian firm called Design Pics. Unfortunately, I only earn a few dollars a month from them, and they’ve had a few financial difficulties, so they’re VERY bad at paying their bills on time…!
Competitions
Some competitions offer cash prizes, but most offer benefits in kind—or just a digital certificate! There is obviously some kudos in winning awards, but it’s very hard if you enter the best-known ones such as the Wildlife Photographer of the Year or Nature’s Best Photography in the States.
When I started out, I was ruthlessly cynical. I just wanted the ego boost of winning something—anything!—so I found a site called Pixoto and entered all the competitions that had the least entrants. Sure enough, I did win a few awards, but I soon wanted a bigger challenge.
I’ve won over 500 awards in the last 10 years (if you count absolutely every last one!), but I’ve only won a few quid in cold, hard cash. Otherwise, it’s been Wex Photographic vouchers (for winning the Sunday Times/Audley Travel weekly award in 2017) or a £600 pair of Opticron binoculars (for Animal Action category in the Wildlife Worldwide Photography Competition 2019) or various annual subscriptions to The Societies of Photographers.
Exhibitions
I started out thinking that putting on an exhibition was an impossible dream, but it’s actually not that difficult—or expensive. The first time I put my prints on sale was at a Christmas Fair at my local tennis club. I sold a couple to a local dentist, and another stallholder told me about a two-week exhibition she’d put on at the Norman Plastow Gallery in Wimbledon Village for just £70!
That was ‘throwaway money’, so I decided to do the same. I ended up selling around 10 prints and made over £1,000. That got me started, and I eventually moved on to the 508 Gallery on King’s Road and LumiArts in Pimlico. Unfortunately, I had to raise my prices A LOT to afford those spaces, and I only managed to sell one print in the course of three exhibitions. That and the stiff, 50% commission meant that it just wasn’t worth it any more.
Photo Shoots
One of the problems with being a wildlife photographer is that it’s almost impossible to win clients. If you’re a wedding or portrait photographer, there are always people wanting their photo taken, but animals are different. They don’t really have the budget!
However, if you can’t get paid to photograph wildlife, there’s nothing to stop you doing events on the side. I shot a friend’s wedding and another friend’s birthday party as a favour, and I was able to make a few hundred quid out of it each time—as well as getting in some useful practice with flash photography!
Lessons
If you’re confident enough in your photographic ability to give lessons, that’s another way to make an income. You could start small with friends and family and then work your way up to doing workshops for the general public.
I’ve only given a few private lessons to people, but things changed when I came across a company called Handmade Workshops. The two women who run it have kindly let me run a few sessions at the London Wetland Centre and Bushy Park, and they’ve been very enjoyable.
I get paid a fee for each student, and we’ve had from three to six people at each one. I’ve taught them for four hours on Saturday mornings, starting with a PowerPoint presentation and finishing with a review and an informal competition. If you want to come along, the next workshop is on Saturday 1 April 2023 from 0930-1330 and costs £70.
Talks
If you don’t mind public speaking and you think you have a few decent images to show people, then giving talks is another idea for making a bit of money. It’s not a money-spinner, and I’ve only felt able to charge £100 for a couple of hours. However, it’s been very enjoyable, and I’ve given talks from Pall Mall to the Southern Ocean via the Serengeti…!
Trips
One final way to raise money is to organise photography trips yourself. You can either partner with a tour operator or go it alone. I tried myself, but I couldn’t get enough bums on seats. Maybe one day…
The general rule seems to be that you need four to six people to make it worthwhile. Some companies will also give you a free place if you can bring 10 guests with you, and my dad did that to get a few free trips to the Holy Land.
I had a coffee with wildlife photographer Andy Skillen a few days ago, and he suggested buying a stall at a trade show like Destinations or The Photography Show. It would cost £3,000 or so, but he reckoned that was the best way to target people ready to book a 10-day, luxury safari costing £7,500 or more.
Unpaid
I’m supposed to be ‘retired’, but there’s always something I could be doing to improve my photography or ‘build my brand’.
Social Media
I wrote a book on Social Success Strategies for photographers, and social media is a good way to publicise your work and develop some name recognition. It’s also free—unless you choose to pay for ads. I have accounts with all the major platforms:
Unfortunately, it’s hard to monetise your content on most platforms, so you may have to content yourself with likes and followers rather than print sales or lesson bookings. It’s also hard to track where sales come from without sending some sort of intrusive email questionnaire.
I’ve found the best way to build your reach is by joining groups on Facebook (or LinkedIn) and publishing daily posts. I’m now a member of around a hundred different groups focusing on wildlife photography and particular species such as lions, leopards and elephants.
I post a technical tip every morning based on one of my favourite images, and those posts now reach over two million Facebook users a month! Everyone needs a confidence boost now and then, so it’s nice to get so many likes, followers and comments.
I also post a Shot of the Week every Sunday across all platforms and write a blog post every weekend—like this one!
Finally, I post a few videos on YouTube, and some of them have even gone viral. A guest I met in Tanzania gave me a few clips of four male lions taking down a Cape buffalo, and seven of them managed to get more than a million views! That was exceptional, though, and YouTube has given up on me now. My videos aren’t promoted any more, and the popular ones were too short to qualify for monetisation.
Practice
When was the last time you used your camera? I was at a talk given by tour guide and wildlife photographer Paul Goldstein last week, and he asked the same question. Unfortunately, the answer in my case would have been ‘last October in Botswana’!
I have to say, I’m utterly rubbish at taking pictures when I’m in this country. I accept that I’m a bit lazy in going to places like Richmond Park, but I just don’t get a rush out of photographing fallow deer rather than lions, leopards and cheetahs!
Having said that, you don’t get any better at photography by leaving all your kit in the cupboard! That’s especially true if you’ve recently bought a new camera. It takes a while to get to know all the main controls inside out, so it’s worth reading the manual and playing around with it at home or going out to shoot something locally.
If you’re lucky enough to live in an area with abundant wildlife, you can obviously benefit from that by making yourself a local expert. Marina Cano grew up right next door to the Cabárceno safari park near Santander in Spain, and that helped her become one of the best-known wildlife photographers in the world.
If not, you can still familiarise yourself with your camera and practise certain techniques. As a photographer, you need to be able to change all your main settings instinctively without taking your eye away from the viewfinder. You often have only a few seconds to grab a shot, so you just don’t have time to fiddle around trying to find the right exposure settings.
The best way to practise is probably to set yourself a few challenges against the clock—or ask a friend, partner or relative to do the same. How quickly can you select 1/1000 of a second at f/4? Can you dial in two stops of exposure compensation while looking through the viewfinder? How fast can you switch to manual focus and back again?
This is especially useful if you’ve recently bought a new camera. I’ve lost count of the number of times guests in Africa have had to treat their safari as a week-long course in ‘getting-to-know-your-camera’! They all have the best of intentions and try to do a course or read the manual beforehand, but they tend to be very busy people, so they never get round to it.
The other thing you can do is practise specific techniques. One of my favourites is the slow pan. You can read all about it in my blog post, but it’s essentially a way of generating a sense of energy from action shots. Paul Goldstein taught me the technique on a trip to Svalbard to see the polar bears. I spent a whole day taking nothing but slow pan shots of seabirds, and I only kept four out of 1,500!
This is the kind of thing you can easily do in your local area—even if you don’t have easy access to wildlife. Birds are better than buses, obviously, but you can still learn the ropes by photographing moving vehicles. I ended up taking hundreds of slow pan shots of vintage racing cars when I went to Goodwood Revival in September.
When it comes to wildlife photography, I’m with Gary Player: “The more I practise, the luckier I get!”
Customisation
I’ve recently switched from DSLRs to mirrorless cameras, and one of the big benefits is the amount of customisation that’s now possible. I have a pair of Sony a1 cameras, and almost every button and dial can be programmed to do almost anything!
Again, you can read all about it in another blog post, but the main point is that customisation is fantastically useful in speeding up your ‘workflow’. For example, I’ve set up one of the custom buttons to toggle between animal and bird eye detection, excluding the human option because that’s not what I shoot. Now, you might say that’ll only save a second or so, but that might be the difference between grabbing the shot of a leopard yawning or missing it completely.
Research
Even if you’re not actually on a trip, you probably have one planned. That means you need to do your research. Again, I’m not particularly good at this, but you should still do as I say, not as I do!
Andy Skillen got to know a lot about animal behaviour from watching natural history programmes, but you can often gather specific, helpful knowledge about the wildlife at your destination by searching on Google or YouTube.
The world is a much more accessible place than it was even 50 years ago, and there’s usually a YouTube video or article by somebody who can teach you a lot about what to look for, how to approach your trip, what equipment to bring and how the animals and birds are likely to behave.
Equipment
Your equipment is crucial in helping you take the best possible pictures, so you need to maintain it properly and occasionally upgrade it. If you’re at a loose end one Saturday, why not send your camera(s) off to CameraCal to have the sensors cleaned or the autofocus calibrated? You could also update the firmware to the latest version. That’s easy enough to do yourself, and it only takes a few minutes. If you have a Sony model, here’s an article that covers the whole process.
If you have a few quid spare, you could even plan your next purchase. Before I bought my new Sony kit, I did a LOT of research, reading countless articles and watching countless videos comparing autofocus systems and other features on the latest batch of high-end, mirrorless cameras. That took time, but it led me to the right decision in the end.
If you’re anything like me, you probably want new equipment more often than you need it! However, it’s true that certain locations or situations are better exploited with the right kit. It might be cameras and lenses, or it might be other accessories such as tripods and gimbal heads. It might even be clothing. I challenge anyone to go to Arviat or Churchill without decent cold-weather gear!
Verdict
Tin Man Lee often mentions how little time he had when he was starting out as a wildlife photographer. His point is that you have to do your research and go to the best places in the right season to make the most of the time available. However, it’s also possible to fill your hours in the evenings or at weekends by doing productive jobs that advance your knowledge—and might even make some money!
I hope this list has given you a few ideas…
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.