Your Quick and Dirty Start-Up Plan

We’ve been getting a lot of emails lately from folks who think they have to travel before they can start to sell their photos.
So let me set the record straight: You don’t have to board an airplane and head across an ocean before you start sharpening your photography skills. You don’t even need fancy equipment.
Here’s the quick and dirty way to get you started…
Start this weekend. Take a half-hour walk through your backyard or your local town. Look up. Look down. Take pictures of everything.
Afterwards, take five minutes to go through your pictures on your computer. Then, flip through travel magazines and stock photo sites like iStockphoto.com. How do yours compare?
If you’re like most people who are just starting out, my guess is you’ll have one of these problems:
** 1. Your pictures are overexposed. Too much light washes out a lot of the color in your image. You’ll find instructions for fixing this in your images in our archives, here.
** 2. Your pictures are underexposed. Not enough light makes your picture dark with deep black shadows. You’ll find tips for fixing this in our archives, here.
** 3. You didn’t get close enough. Or, you got in too close and you chopped off pieces of your subject unintentionally. Read more on cropping your photos here.
These are the problems we see most often in photos taken on the first day of our live photo workshops. And they’re problems that are easy to fix.
— Lori
Lori Allen
Director, Great Escape Publishing
[Editor’s Note: Learn more about how you can turn your pictures into cash in our free online newsletter The Right Way to Travel.  Sign up here today and we’ll send you a new report, Selling Photos for Cash: A Quick-Start Guide, completely FREE.]