Miami Dispatch #1: Lighting Tips and Selling Your Photos to Magazines

It’s Day One of our Ultimate Money-Making Photography Workshop in Miami, Florida, and boy is it sunny…
My name is Annie Cottrell and I’m going to be your Workshop Spy for the next few days reporting back to you about the things we’re seeing and doing at this year’s event so you can “be” here with us.
Outside, palm trees are swaying in the breeze… water is glistening in the sun… people are soaking up the rays… and we’ve got our cameras at hand to capture it all.
While we couldn’t have asked for better workshop weather, the sun can either be your best friend or your worst enemy when it comes to photography.
We’ve all seen the painful sun-in-face-grimace…

Or the dappled mix of bright light and shade that can ruin an otherwise saleable image…

Thanks to Bonnie’s presentation this morning full of lighting tips and tricks, our attendees now know how to work this Miami sunlight to create photographs that will sell in any market.
We talked about creating saleable photos indoors, outside in the shade, outside in full, direct sun and more.  And then selling those photos to online stock agencies and magazines.
Here’s a tip from professional photographer Patrick Stevens when selling your photos to magazines:
Give the editor 4-8 times the number of photos she needs.  If your assignment is for one picture of a skyline in Rome, give her 4-8 to choose from.  If your assignment is for five parks in Paris, send her a minimum of 20 and a maximum of 40.
Not giving her enough choices could make her look elsewhere for photos.  And giving her too many might ruin your chance of a repeat assignment for fear that she may always have to comb through hundreds of images to find your best.  (An editor’s nightmare.)
And here’s something else…
Vary your shots.  Don’t just submit wide landscapes of each of your parks.  Photograph their entrances, people sunning on the grass, a close-up of the flowers, a unique perspective of a park bench… with a variety of different types of pictures, your editors are more likely to find images in tune with what they had in mind and the color layout of the magazine itself.
You’ll find tips like these along with step-by-step advice on how to sell them in our Workshop-at-Home package on sale this week only while the event is still taking place in Miami, here.
Tomorrow we’ll be out shooting.  I’ll send you some photos and a tip on where to sell photos like the ones we’re taking here.  So stay tuned.
[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.]