Joshua Cripps’ Photo Blog

When doing product photography, don’t use a background that is the same color as your products.  D’oh!

Save 50-60% on all custom-sized prints!!

At the print store we are phasing out our custom-sized prints in order to make way for a new inventory containing prints in standard frame sizes.

This represents an amazing opportunity for you to get your hands on low-number limited edition prints for less than the cost of a tank of gas!!

Check out all of the deals, but hurry because these prints won’t last long.

It seems obvious at first: a photographer who wants to earn money from his craft needs to sell his photos.  Well duh.

When I first started selling my stuff, it was at art shows, and I thought there was pretty much only one option: fine art prints.  I didn’t even think about other possible formats.  No, no, I just printed out a bunch of photos, matted them, mounted them on foam-core boards, and popped them into plastic bags.  I framed a couple more for good measure and that was it.

I actually did pretty good at my first show, but looking back on it, I think that was mostly due to the fact that the show was in a swanky neighborhood in LA.  Since then I’ve done a number of shows in leaner markets where I’ve had days where I sell diddly-squat.  That’s really disappointing, but with a bit of analysis, it can actually be a very illuminating experience as well.  It can help you refine everything about the way you sell, from how you talk to people, how you set up your booth, and even what you sell, which is the subject of this particular post.

Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned about what to sell:

• Have a wide price range of products available.  When I first started out, I didn’t have anything cheaper than $45.  Then I did a few weekends out at Venice Beach in LA, where there are 10,000 tourists a day, but they’re all looking for $3 kitschy crap.  My first weekend out, it was obvious that people didn’t want to buy expensive art, so I printed out a bunch of smaller photos and slid them into bags without any matting or mounting and started selling them for 10 bucks.  The next weekend these went like hotcakes and at the high point of the day I was selling about 8 an hour.  I’m sure I would have made a killing, but for the annoying tongue whistler dude next to me driving all my customers away.  God I hate that guy . . .

• Make your products as easy to buy as possible; don’t make your customers expend any more effort than they absolutely have to to have a finished product.  My first prints were 8×12’s and 12×18’s, both of which I matted with a custom-sized 2″ mat with a 1/4″ black inner mat.  They sure looked great, but unless you got a custom frame for the custom-sized mats, they were impossible to frame!  D’oh!  Same story with those unmatted prints I sold for $10 at Venice Beach.  I printed them out at 6×9 inches to preserve the aspect ratio, but for the purposes of framing, I might as well have printed them at 4.73×294.3 inches.  No one could get this stuff easily framed and put up on the wall, so it wasn’t worth the effort for them to buy a print, even if they really really liked it.
  Since then I’ve learned my lesson and have since moved all my fine art prints to standard sizes which use standard size mats.  It’s kind of a pain to have to resize my prints and crop them, but ultimately it’s a change for the better for a couple of reasons:  1) It saves me a ton of money since I no longer have to buy custom-cut mats or custom-sized frames.  2) It also saves my customers time and money because since all of the photos and mats fit standard size frames, the customers can go down to any frame store (or Wal-Mart for that matter) and pick up a cheap frame to fit their photo perfectly.

• Sometimes it helps to have a gimmick.  As much as it pains me to admit it, a mediocre photo can be a best-seller if there’s something cute about the way it’s presented.  It reminds me of a little corporate nugget of wisdom I heard as an engineer awhile back: A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually; a good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.  And that  is certainly applicable to the sales world as well, as I learned at a recent art show:
  I was having slow sales all weekend, which was made even more frustrating by the fact that I kept noticing people walking by with photos from another photographer, who (all false modesty aside) had inferior quality photographs.  However, this photographer had a great gimmick that was working in her favor: she took three rapid-fire, not-great-but-still-cute photos of things like sea otters, or grizzly bears, or coyotes, and arranged them together in one frame in sequence.  And people really ate it up.
  So the point is that sometimes you need a neat little gimmick like this to catch people’s attention.  A novel presentation of your images goes a long way towards making yourself stand out from the crowd and be memorable.
  For myself, at my next show I plan to offer a similar triple-photo type of thing, as well as gallery-wrapped canvas prints, and a very cool new photo-finishing option called a fotoflōt.  I’ll keep this site updated with my findings and how the new novel presentations treat me.

• In tough times, try to make your products have some use other than just decoration.  Over the past few months of our economic downturn, I’ve had people tell me that they’ve lost 40% of the value of their 401k and aren’t buying anything, and then go on and buy a hand-made stone bowl or jar of garlic dip.  So it turns out that people are still buying things, it’s just that they’re things they feel are useful, and not things they feel are frivolous.  And art is slightly frivolous: after all, the purpose that most people see in it is just to hang on a wall and look pretty.
• The good news is that it’s possible to sell your art in a way that is pretty and useful.  At the last show I did, I had another photographer tell me that he typically earns back his entire show entry fee just by selling greeting cards with his photos on them.  Any prints he sells above that are just profit.  Genius!  People always need cards, and I think that extra usefulness helps people break that buying barrier.
  Again, this is an idea I have to try out for myself before I can say that it’s a sure-fire tactic for making money, but providing your customer with some utility in addition to your beautiful prints will really push them closer to making a purchase.
  Ideas I have to try out along these lines are: greeting cards, calendars, and possibly photo coasters.  Will post more once I know how well these ideas work.

Dang, that’s about all I can think of right now.  The bottom line here is that it pays off to give a lot of thought into how you are selling your photos.  Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself if your products are novel, run a wide gamut of prices, and have a great presentation, because these things will really help you start to earn the bucks.

So far, I have sold all of my photography in only two venues: at art shows, and over the internet.  The other day it occured to me however that I have never had a random internet sale.  Despite the thousands of visitors I’ve had on my website and online store, no random visitor has ever bought anything. 

Every single internet sale I’ve ever had has either been from a person who met me at an art show or from a friend or acquaintance.

This was a humongous epiphany for me.  What it means is that in order to sell anything, I need to be out in public as much as possible, getting as many people as possible to meet me and see my work.  It would also seem that all of the effort and hard work I’ve been putting into developing my website could have been better spent on trying to exhibit my work as much as possible.

That means there’s going to be a shift in my focus over the next few weeks, from web development stuff (like search-engine optimization and advertising campaigns), to developing a more physical presence in the art world: displaying stuff at cafes and restaurants, entering exhibits, and going to as many art shows as I possibly can.

This page is currently under construction, but will be updated soon.

Ok, if you’ve found your way here, it means that you’re curious about what the heck the aperture on your camera does when you fiddle with its settings.  In the previous essay, we found out that changing the camera’s aperture will change the depth of field (DOF) of your photos.  This is an incredibly powerful creative tool for us as photographers because it means that we can isolate a single subject in our photographs, or we can choose to have a scene in focus from very close to us all the way out to the horizon.

Now let’s experiment a bit to get a better idea of what that means and find out what settings will give us these kind of effects!

The first thing we need to do is set our cameras to aperture priority mode, which is nearly always designated by an ‘A’ on your camera’s LCD:

Next, grab yourself a subject; it could be yourself or a friend or almost anything at all.  I chose a stuffed cheetah.  Now head on outside on a bright day and find a nice, busy background with lots of detail.  Something like a tree, or some bushes, will work great.  Set your subject up so that it’s about 3-4 feet in front of your background and about 3-4 feet out in front of your camera.  Zoom in far enough that your subject fills most of your frame, but make sure you still can see a good bit of your background.

Now take your camera and dial your aperture down to f/22 or as low as it can go (note that if you’re trying to do this is low light, your shutter speed may get long enough that you’ll require a tripod to get a nice, in-focus shot).  Now focus on your subject and fire off a shot and you’ll get something similar to this:

Hey, it’s a picture of a cheetah!

Note that even though I told the camera to focus only on the cheetah, both the cheetah and the background are sharp (in-focus) because a small aperture like f/22 gives us a deep depth of field.  And that even though you can see the cheetah clearly, the background seems too busy and is a little distracting.  Go ahead then and set your aperture to as small an f-stop as you can, like f/4 or so, focus on your subject, and pop off another frame:

Sweet, another cheetah!

This time because of our large aperture (small f-number), we have created a very shallow DOF, which causes the background to become nicely blurred, which makes the cheetah the only thing in focus, and thus it holds our attention much more easily.  And going back to exposure, you can see how the photos have the same overall brightness even though we used totally different aperture settings, because the camera compensated by changing our shutter speed.

To give you another quick example of the creative power of aperture control, here’s a similar series of shots I did with a subject (a houseplant) that is very similar to my background:

At f/22, the pitcher plant is very difficult to distinguish from the background

At f/4 though, the plant stands out as clear as day

This is very neat and all, but I know you’re just dying to know when you should use these different types of effects.  In other words, in what circumstances should we use a wide-open, or large, aperture versus a stopped-down, or small, aperture?  Hopefully the photos above have given you a hint, and though the truest (and possibly lamest) answer is that it totally depends on your own personal tastes, I can at least give you some general ground rules that can be used as a springboard for your own personal expression:

In general, we use a shallow DOF (small f-number, large aperture) when we want to isolate a single subject in our frame.  In nature photography, this usually happens when we’re shooting wildlife, flowers, or anything else we want to pull out from the background.  For example, in the shot of this desert tortoise in South Africa, I used a wide-open aperture (f/5.6) to draw the viewer’s attention to the turtle by rendering the grass in front and trees in back as smooth, blurry shapes:

Here the tortoise is the only thing in focus, which forces the viewers to concentrate their attention on it

At the other end of the spectrum, we use a very deep depth of field (large f-number, small aperture) when we have multiple points of interest in our photo and we want our viewers eyes to be able to roam freely around the image.  This large f-number aperture control is used almost exclusively in landscape photography, where we may have a foreground, a midground, and a background which are important to the photo:

This photo was shot at f/13, which allowed the flowers in the foreground, the stream in the midground, and the peaks in the background to all be in focus

One last caveat though: your DOF will change if you zoom in or out or change your focal point while keeping your aperture constant.  If you’d like to know why, click here to read the Nature Photograph 201 essay about hyperfocal distance (which is something that it’s very important for nature photographers to understand anyway!).  Don’t worry if you decide to skip that essay for now: it’s not terrible critical to understand why your DOF changes as you zoom or re-focus, you just need to realize that it does, and that you won’t get that same DOF at f/22 if you’re zoomed in to 200 mm and focused on something 10 feet away as you would at f/22, 12 mm, and focused on something 5 feet away.  There are many tools out there on the net that can help you calculate your exact DOF for the settings you choose, but the basic rule of thumb is that the farther you zoom in, the shallower your DOF gets for a given aperture and focal point.  Aside from that, I’ve found that just getting out there and shooting a lot is the best way to develop an instinct for making the right choices.

But to give you a small headstart on developing that instinct, here are some of my own photos in which aperture control was my primary creative concern:

Cheetah cubs in South Africa.  Shot at a large aperture of f/5.6 to focus attention on their faces, blur the background, and de-focus the chain-link fence in between me and them

Chameleon shot at f/8 to allow his head to be sharp but the rest of the frame to become blurred

Shot at f/13, to maintain sharpness throughout the image from the fireweed in the foreground to Banner Peak in the background

That’s it for aperture!  If you’re feeling like you’ve got a pretty good handle on this, head on to the next post to learn more about ISO and what controlling it can do for your photographs.

Next: Getting off Auto Mode, Part 4 of 6: Understanding ISO

Previous: Getting off Auto Mode, Part 3 of 6: Understanding Aperture, part i