You can increase business by decreasing your subject matter. As I’ve researched and become more familiar with the business of photography (and art sales), it is clear that the idea of “jack of all trades” imagery is going to get you nowhere. You might be better than your competition (odds are against this), but from a marketing perspective you will get lost in the crowd by trying to just take pictures of whatever you happen to fancy at the time. You cannot draw a crowd (be it at a show, venues or on the web) with a variety show of imagery. You must focus your energy and resources on a set target audience and your skills on a set topic.

When shooting images in a city or anywhere with tall straight lines (example buildings, trees, or a road that goes into the distance) you can end up with perspective issue. The buildings seem to converge at the top, or they shoot sideways off the frame, or the are leaning like the Tower of Pissa (no idea how to spell that). Anyway, it’s a common problem with an easy fix. Just open up your Lightroom develop panels and use the Lens Correction Tools. Watch the video for details.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRmDjE7_u-0

There’s a new extension available on Adobe exchange and it’s free!  Everybody likes free right?  The new PIXEL BENDER plugin comes with a full set of pixel bending tools which you can apply to your images.  They range from Twirl to Oil Paint to Fisheye to Hole.    Yes, it makes holes in things.  Basically it’s like getting thirteen new filters for Photoshop. 

So often I find that I’ll have a large string of separate layers which for whatever reason need to be combined.  For instance, maybe you used 12 layers to produce an interesting background, but now you want to add a guasiann blur to that background.  This is an issue because you cannot add “blur” filter to each layer one at a time, that would take forever, destroy your layer pixels and just look bad anyway.  So what do you do?  Most people will then use the turn off all the layers not part of the background and then use the “merge visible” command in the corner drop menu.  This will work, but has some drawbacks.

Isolating a subject you are photographing is a common practice and even more prevalent than ever in today’s “web world” where you often want to easily extract images for use in other media.  I’ve read many breakdowns about how you can do this.  Some go into great details with tons of scientific blah blah blahs while others…

So this questions buzzes around in forums and blogs all the time.  How do I move my lightroom catalog from my laptop to my desktop (and then back again)?  The reality is there are many ways to go about it.  Some are “proper” and others are “jerry rigged”.  But there are some pros and cons to each and some things to watch out for.  Read on to find the best way to avoid fatal mistakes.

Many people try and move their Lightroom catalogs back and forth between computers by actually copying and pasting files.  While this can work, it is prone to many issues and for the most part is more difficult anyway.  So how should we make the transfer?

Created in 2005, the Angkor Photo Festival is the first such event to be organized in South-east Asia.

For the festival’s 2010 program, 110 photographers, including 50 Asian photographers, will present their works photographed around the world. This is consistent with the festival’s mission of highlighting emerging Southeast Asian photographers. These works are curated by two well-known figures in photography, Yumi Goto and Antoine d’Agata, as well as by Françoise Callier (Program Director of the Angkor Photo Festival).

Have you ever wanted a big Parisian Gold frame for your artwork?  Maybe Florentine style framing, the type that looks l like it weighs 200lb (and most likely does)?  Well, that's sort of frame has generally been reserved fro rich people's libraries or museums.  But now you too can make any art piece in your house look like the most important thing in the room (even if it's just a photo of last year's work picnic).  Faux Frames to the rescue with light weight, inexpensive cardboard 3D frames.  Yes, I said cardboard.

It's probably not what you want to hear in the first sentence of this article, but… You cannot protect your images which you have placed online.  That's just a fact.  However  you can make it more difficult to obtain your images, make your images less useful for the thief and even track down the thief and pursue legal actions against them.  This article will explain several basic stops to discourage thieves from taking your images.  Future articles in this series will cover more advanced ways of tracking your stolen images around the globe and how to start legal action once you do find them.

I spent quite a bit of time researching how to get started selling art at all the various art shows around the country.  There was a lot of disjointed information out there, but then someone send me this article below.  It was the most informative and comprehensive source I'd read.   Normally I would just introduce the topic and then link to the author's page; however in this case the article came to me as a .pdf file and I cannot find any reference to the author's name nor website (a great example of why you always need to use bylines on your work).