Successful photography: Inventory of a photographer. Photo publishers buy no inventory, photographers create inventory. Make a plan what to create and time your photo work.

I see that some of you have a photo related site. When I started many years ago there was no one to learn from, no one to copy, no one to inspire me ... Hence I also had the freedom to do all my own mistakes, at my own expenses and in my own time.

You however have no such freedom to make mistakes. That would be simply stupid and no one wants to feel or be stupid. Once you have others to learn from - LEARN from others by listening, asking, looking at others' work! In any trade, in any business, in any profession, in all aspects of life!

The most important mistakes are:

Lack of photo quality - lack of critical selection

Now you have your top camera, the best your available cash could afford and you have an empty web site. Thus you go out and make quantities of photos and put them almost ALL on your web site. Even the less good ones ... just to fill empty space ?

Be critical from the very beginning. Be selective among your own photos. Think that OTHERS need to feel and say "WOW" when they see your pictures. Remember that millions of others may also have millions of other tastes. Cater to the needs of many to attract and satisfy the needs of many.

Hence make photos, lots, make from each scenery up to many photos. From different angles and with different camera settings. Remember there are sceneries that occur only ONCE in a lifetime. If you are too stingy with your shooting, later you may miss the ONE "WOW picture" from an entire photo session.

Make plenty of photos on each session - then delete one by one all, except the few perfect ones. Perfect in background, perfect in light, focus, depth of field, sunshine, sky, weather, etc. When skimming thru all your photos in fast mode to delete all bad ones. Keep in mind any possible secondary use a photo may have! A bad photo may contain a good area large enough to create a blog photo or documentary photo or card photo - such s this I love you rose. Hence cut that useful part and delete the full size photo to free storage space.

Have an "order list" in mind and know what usage you have for photos

If you go out on a photo session, know in advance the main topic of that session. Visualize what kind of pictures you want to have by the end. What is the exact purpose of the pictures?

Documentary photography

Documentary: If so then you get action or series of educational documentary photos independent of weather, sunlight or background. You have an event or situation or a topic and have to get your shots during the one session reserved for it. Make plenty of photos to have a large number to select good ones from. Make the best possible pictures using the best possible photo technique multiplied by your experience. All else then is within your editorial and image processing skills.

Printable photos, cards, etc

eCards, calendars, posters or any other printable photos. Here you need to look at quality, light, background. All at once. e-Cards of flowers with dirty, dry or artificial background such as houses, walls, cables, etc are ugly in most cases.

Posters or wallpapers

Wallpaper or other high resolution - or other large format applications like posters or large format printable calendar. Same as ecards - but much more critical. The proper day time for correct colors, sun shine, light, season of the year, weather condition, background, etc all are important. On wallpapers or large printable photo cards keep in mind the color capability of printers is different from computer screens. A computer monitor can easily show better quality colors for less $ than if you want to have a full color beautifully printed on paper. On a computer, wallpapers need to have an empty or dark or very bright area for all the icons. When I look - and you should too - at some of Google image results on topics I want to publish. The I see some beautiful or extremely beautiful photos - but quiet often I see extreme beautiful photos that are absolutely useless as wallpapers due to their rich image content across the entire picture area = NO easy space for icons left. People never change their icon settings or icon placement just to fit your wallpaper. You are the one to study people's icon habits and thus to fit your wallpapers to the existing icon habits of computer users!

The purpose of a computer is to work, to use icons, to arrange your work by means of icons on your desktop. Hence the photo used as wallpaper NEVER should interfere with clear overview and identification of all your icons. Icons are either dark - thus a wallpaper would need to have a bright area where normal average user have their icons. Or icons are bright and a dark area should be available around the wallpaper topic.

There are most beautiful photos out there - sometimes labeled as wallpaper - but they would much better be printed in LARGE poster format and framed on a wall! After each photo session:

Secure your photos before starting to work / modify your images

Copy / transfer ALL pics to your laptop ( I assume you have a laptop to be mobile for photography work ). Make a COPY of all photos before deleting, before editing or modifying your images. Rename all edited / modified photos OTHER than original file name.

Myself I use 2 external high speed USB drives - 250 GB each - to store all my photos. In addition I have other USB drives to store older photos already published. And a few thousand photos are on my laptop hard drive.

After transferring my photos from DSLR to USB drive, I immediately copy all to my backup USB drive. On Linux I use rsync - usually without the --delete option. That keeps all files deleted on source drive alive on backup drive. Why? Just in case you delete a wrong file or miss a file later on! After a few days of processing, when sure that you have nothing useful accidentally deleted, then you remove your --delete option in your rsync command to clean up your backup drive. Else your backup drive soon gets twice or more the size of your primary storage drive.

The fact that the primary storage of all photos is in external drives has the advantage to speed UP access of pictures and speed up work on my laptop. My system works from my internal drive, all my photos are external. Hence my laptop can work at full speed without being slowed by photo file access or image file writing.

This external photo storage becomes specially important if you have large quantities and if your image file size grows. My Sony DSLR Alpha 900 produces 24,6 Mpixel - that produces thus file size in the range of 24 MB or little smaller. That needs lots of access and writing time!! If done on main internal drive, all working speed would be snail-speed like on my first home computer 1985.

Have a long term goal and image inventory order list

There are special topics that may require dozens or hundreds of photos. May be a full season with all stages of nature across an entire year. From snow to fall and winter. Or dry season / rainy season. good weather plus bad weather. Or gardening at all stages of the year. Or farming during the course of a few years showing progress in growth. Or any other similar situation.

For such photo series you may need to have an todo-inventory list in your head when ever you go out with your camera and see if there is a shot you may do at any given moment to add to the inventory list. Some of such "orders" may last up to years until completed and ready to publish! Hence to be successful over many years and improve your success over the course of years, you need to make up your mind, make a mental list of ALL topics and areas of interest you are qualified to write / document image content.

To actually use such individual shots for a long term photo collection, you need to make a complete and very detailed folder structure with subtopics of ALL your interest areas to store one by one all your shots until complete or until needed for an article to come up. The best way is to have all folders on top level of the drive for fast and easy access and clear overview.

Know the topic of your photography object

The Internet is no means to earn money but above all a means to share, to help, to provide learning material free for all. The earning is a side effect if first mentioned part is successfully accomplished to a sufficient high degree of perfection and expertise!

Hence when shooting flower photos, know names, even scientific names, foreign language names, some details, etc. May be even how to grow particular flowers, where to grow, care, etc

When making wild life photography, know names and habits and other details of animals.

When shooting technical pictures, know the particular topic of technology shown on your photos. Photos need to be informative to be of help to others.

When making travel photos or photos to promote your own living area, add details for visitors. Include information typically useful for foreigners considering a visit of that place. Add photos showing ALL aspects of a region rather than just the beautiful parts. Show all seasons rather than just sunny season. Collect data over extended period of time to edit and publish a real package suitable to complement the many other sources available in Internet. Nothing needs to be complete by all aspects and means. There are many others also contributing for same or similar topics or areas of interests or travel destinations. But make at least a honorable and valuable contribution that helps to round up the image of a topic. You have an editors responsibility AND liability to provide facts and information as true and as correct as possible to contribute to clarification, to contribute to education and learning experience of others. Your photo documentation accompanied by your texts should be a complimentary source of of education and information useful to as many others as possible within a particular topic.

Add details, add facts, turn your photo pages into a source of valuable information, into a learning resource. Make titles of pages and image labels accordingly.

The titles and labels of photos should match the page title of an article. Else you may find a page to be top 10 but no images in the image search results from that page.

Be multilingual in your Internet publishing work. Help to unite cultures and to cross barriers with your web content and photographers work.

Summary for successful photo publisher work requirements

• Have a plan and know and follow your plan.
• Take time to invest years of your life and all necessary funds to succeed.
• Split your photo work into many separate steps that can be published one by one. Some sooner or immediately.
• Some steps may require years of preparation until publishing - store all accumulated photos safely and know your existing inventory as well as your missing shots.
• Know your photo inventory by heart and know all missing photos by heart as well.
• Be ready to walk rather than to drive if you want to have the best shots possible.
• To be successful you may need thousands of good pictures. To filter and select thousands of good images you may need many ten thousands of actual shots. To get such quantity and selection of photos, you may need to walk hundreds of kilometers per year, shoot photos for years and invest thousands of kilometers of travel, thousands of dollars in travel expense, and even much greater amounts into high end photo technology. Photos are the product of a photographer and of course widely depend in quality of the expertise and experience of the photographer behind camera. However without high quality optics or technology even the most experienced photographer may produce only average quality.
• If you want to justify your top 10 Google SERPS, you should also provide top 10 quality on a global level. It makes no sense at all to fill the search engine indices with crap just for the sake of getting traffic. The ultimate criteria is true customer satisfaction. Even if the customer gets all your pictures for free!!!
• While beautiful pictures certainly are nice to have - educational content always must go along all web publishing. Above all a web site always should be educational, useful and helpful to others. Photos are complimentary or just as decoration or documentation where words fail to provide the full picture or full information of a topic.
• Produce photo exactly matching the purpose intended for each photo. I.e. printing, cards, background, wallpaper, poster, promotion, etc. Publish photos in matching size with best possible resolution and exact matching proportions for each purpose intended. Know printing formats and paper size proportions, screen resolutions - also for mobiles if such intention, know screen ratio ( 16:10, 16:9, 4:3, or other formats like mobile.
• Publish photos in formats and quality also matching future technologies. Hence learn the industry trends and offer products for future use as well as for current use.

If you do photography only to make money and charge for all your work, then you may face a hard time all life long. If however you focus on providing greatest happiness, greatest joy, greatest value to your viewers, you may succeed.

I have never charged for a single photo during the past many years while web publishing. I have charged moderate amounts decades earlier for my professional UW photography work. However today I also would change that. I always find a solution and reason to give photos away for free use, even if used in commercial or semi-commercial printed applications. Just last night I had one such request - granted. Nature photography never is made by humans. Nature scenery, flowers, beaches, etc are all made by God. How could I sell something God has given for free to me! As a gift of love to share with all. Never sell for money what is given to you for free!

The only strict rule is to publish in Internet every single photo or text content ONE single times. Hence any reproduction of a published photo strictly is against common purpose and rules of the Internet. All content, written and graphic always should be unique!

Avoid copying others whatever you do. Get inspired by others, but create your own content different from others by all means!

One negative example of duplicate image publishing currently is a Google image search for

red canna

At the time of this writing and many days preceding, far more than half out of the first 36 image results ( first 2 image result pages ) shown are identical pictures. Even if you continue to image result page 6 that one red canna image still spams the search result in Google.

Successful photography web publishing requires far more than just making excellent pictures!

The photography part is the fun part. Walking thru nature is no real work, it's plain fun! Making photos, even by the thousands is no real work. Work of a photo publisher starts after his photography sessions and goes far beyond photography. One single half day of photography may result in a full months of editing and publishing work. Every single page published also needs to be promoted as part of proper SEO techniques. That all requires additional and plenty of time, skills and knowledge.

Know what you do and do only what you know - Learn before doing!

1. You will have hackers and copyright infringements.
2. You will have hotlinkers by the thousands or ten thousands or more each day. Mainly from the blog sites such as blogspot and online communities.
3. You may loose substantial percentage of your possible publishing revenue thanks to lazy people scraping sites and republishing your images or content for their own advertising revenue without investing in creating the actual content.
4. Operators of such sites hosting communities or blog farms earn hundreds of millions each year in advertising revenue. Hence they above all care nothing at all about your copyright or intellectual property rights. The formal procedures to stop copyright infringers are so time-consuming, that most people refrain from claiming their rights and stopping abuse. Until a solid class action lawsuit has been filed, that abuse may go on and on. The only language understood by such hosting sites is dollar language. The damage of such massive hotlinking however may easily be into Billions of dollars each year. A damage you have to learn to carry as part of your web publishing job. You also have to learn and know how to prevent most common hotlinking to avoid excess server usage or overload.

Hence there is much more to learn about publishing, server management, server security and other internet publishing related stuff besides mere photography. You have to learn to solve most or all of above problems without lawyer, without court, without money, without any waste of time or resources. Else you run out of luck and money before you even started to be successful. Learn rules and common laws, learn procedures to solve problems or much better to avoid problems before they occur.

Start small and grow with your traffic and success!

It is absolutely wrong to start any kind of business with financing or expand any kind of business with financing! Do only what you can pay in full and in cash. Never owe money to others, never borrow money from anyone including banks. Never purchase on credit cards. If you need cards, use debit cards and stay within available funds.

If successful, then expand in small but steady steps. Focus on quality. Invest at any given time only a fraction of your revenue. If your work progresses slowly, then you may have wrong work or apply wrong procedure or you may try to copy what others did years or decades before you. If you do the right work, then you progress. If progress is missing, then you made mistakes. Analyze and correct. Never finance your web publishing over years from your primary job income. Each new activity if useful must pay all expenses plus cost of work within less than a year. Else your procedures wrong!

Expand your business only if a fraction of your gross revenue from THAT particular activity is sufficient to pay for expansion, for new equipment, accessories or working expenses.

Any work - what so ever - only makes sense if at the end of each day, week, month and year you have a substantial amount for charity, to support others, to support God's creation! Every work you choose must be beneficial for entire creation. While on earth for our entire planet. Your work and the results of your work must be a benefit for others. In addition you may need cash overflow to help those others who have no direct need for your product or services and thus may need some of your cash overflow. You need to be able to flush your surrounding with your love and blessing on a daily basis!

Start small, be moderate in all your expenses and focus on quality. Avoid any expenses when ever possible. The total expenses of an entire business never should exceed more than 25% or so of your gross income out of that activity. Anything else is wrong business model requiring too much administration or too much promotion. Keep your web publishing under your full and sole control. Learn to do all needed skills on your own. Do all work, including boring work or demanding work on your own. Learn whatever you are missing until you know what you need for your work. Avoid cheap outsourcing. Do cheap work yourself! Stay within the size of a family business.

Until today I have never spent a single cent for advertising for my web publishing. Good products and good services are in demand and thus need no promotion or advertising. Your SEO skills will help searching people to find you. To learn SEO is free, it simply requires a few thousand hours of your time and efforts to learn. All necessary learning material is online and free to all. Google to find answers to your questions and solutions to your problems. Ask experts if known and available. Prove that you are qualified, unique and creative.

There are dozens of millions and up to hundreds of millions of competing pages on many topics. In rare cases even billions of competing pages. Only a very few specialized topics may have only hundred thousands or a few millions of competing web pages. That number of competing pages will increase every single day. Be ready to improve your skills, your expertise and your efforts. Be ready to grow in quality as quantity of competition grows!

Do only what you can do with love

Be motivated, but do only what you can do with love. Do only what you can do from the bottom of your heart and soul. Do what is valuable enough to your heart and soul to give your life. Avoid wasting your life or resources for something unworthy to die for or to give your entire life for. You learn here and now on earth to prepare yourself for eternal life, for eternal love, to be and remain useful all eternity. To be a source of joy, a source of happiness, a source of help or advice to others. True values last beyond physical death. Wallstreet ends latest before death. Hence focus on true and lasting values that are worthy every bit of your time, your efforts, worthy to invest all your savings, all your lifetime. Focus on a work that eases other people's life, heals other people, guides other people toward God and Love.

Love and Bliss

hans