Creating a Fine Art/Travel Sales Site

I need a little guidance in what to do with the large number of

documentary/travel and fine art images I have collected through personal

adventures over the last few years. I have a growing portrait/wedding

business www.lucidmusings.com (went full time in November..yay!!), but also

attend several events and have a penchant for out of the norm travel. So my

question is, should I just treasure this collection of images I have for

personal enjoyment, or is there a logical way of making a side income from

them. I really don't feel I have the quantity (or the time to maintain the

quantity) to put them on a RM site like Digital Railroad, and the quality may

not reach the level of a Corbis, or a Getty agency, so this leaves me RF sites

and personal sales through vehicles like SmugMug. I have read a fair amount

about RF sites and it seems that it is a pretty amateurish and compromised way

to go about it. SmugMug looks good, but how do you get sales, unless my site

is top ranked Google. Also, how do you attract print/image buyers if it is

seemlessly hooked up to my wedding site...or is it a seperate entity. Any

feelings?? Any experience with a similiar situation?? Any help remotely

helpful would be most appreciated...negative and positive.

I've been struggling with the same questions myself. Fine Art is a tough nut to crack. I think most people do it for their own enjoyment. I have quite a variety of stuff on my site. I've been shooting weddings for about 7 years part time and shoot Fine Art and other things on the side. I still have a job and don't want to be a full time wedding photographer. I'm leaning more and more towards Fine Art and Stock. I've had some print sales. But, nothing that's going to set the world on fire. I've been trying to boost traffic into my site by blogging and setting up links to other sites. I'm also in a lot of directories. You need tremendous traffic to get good sales in Fine Art. I'm considering finding a rep and trying limited edition Fine Art. I haven't done that yet and I haven't been in any galleries yet. I've been considering the Microstock sites and will probably try some of them soon with certain images. I'm in the process of cleaning up my site as well. Which is a lot of work. When I was first getting my site set up, I uploaded a lot of stuff with a low quality scanner before I had a thorough understanding of photoshop. Now I have to go back and rescan a lot of images with a new scanner and clean up a lot of images in photoshop. I've had this site set up for about 2 years. www.RobValineimages.com If your serious about Fine Art, Maybe you should try to find a rep and a gallery to show your work.

Get iView MediaPro. Catalog and keyword your images, very easy. Create your own web template in iView then create your own web galleries. Buy a domain name that works for your travel images, load up yor gallerries, include Google searchable text and that's it. Very easy. Don't consider microstock or royalty free- they are the Devil.

 

Do it yourself and reap the rewards, don't give it away for pennies to some microstock or RF agency. They will suck your soul and leave an empty husk.

 

Think towards marketing your site to the art buying agencies, graphic design, ad agencies. Forget about marketing to individuals to sell one print at a time for peoples homes or whatever, You want to license the use of your images for reproduction. Hotel rooms, corporate offices, websites, brochures, calendars, whatever, ect ect. We live in a world of instant worldwide global communication. Someone out there is looking for a photo you have right now, in order to license images an important component is to have them seen.

 

Check out one site I made myself doing exactly what I described above:

 

http://www.dcstockimages.com

 

Good luck! Don't let anyone tell you you can't do it. What that typically means is that they can't do it.