A Few Bucks On The Side

“You’re getting a shopping cart?” My co-worker asked me as we entered the Goodwill. “You really expect to find that much stuff?”

“You never know.” I said as I looked around like a hunter in search of fresh prey. “You might find a lot of good stuff.”

As it turns out, I didn’t find much that day. Thrift Stores are very much hit or miss. In the old days, the serious Resellers all ignored thrift stores because they were looking for antiques and collectibles. But now, well, now you can make a shocking amount of money reselling shoes and Hawaiian shirts. I’ve had my best luck with random items.

The last good thing I found in a thrift store was a cast iron cake pan in the shape of a dragon. I paid $4 for it and sold it for $75. This is a rare event for me. I tend to find something for $5 and hope to sell it for $20 and if I’m lucky sell it for $10. My closet is overflowing with items that filled me with hope when I found it, and yet, I still have it years later.

Being a Traveling Photographer means that you spend a lot of time on the road. You often have a few minutes to kill here and there. Not enough time to bother with returning to the room. Not enough time to find something to photograph. But often just enough time to rummage around in a thrift store. These are good places to find Props as well as items for Resale. One of my fellow Assembly Line Photographers has plans of opening a junk shop once he retires in a few years.

Being a Photographer, I also like to take pictures while I travel. Here again the idea is that these images might be worth something to me at some point. I tend to take postcard style images and tweak them in Photoshop and Lightroom to give them a more fine art feel. I often make High Dynamic Range images using three to five exposures per image. This is fairly easy to do with modern cameras and software. Some of these images have turned out quite well.

I sell them on Fine Art America. Over the course of a few years I have made around two thousand dollars. This is not retire to the South of France money, but considering I have put very little effort into the business, it isn’t all that bad either. I have added several images to my gallery during the pandemic, but this has not greatly increased my sales. As long time readers will know, I’m not the greatest salesman around.

I’ve never been much of an entrepreneurial type. I thought about starting my own photo business once or twice and even got a bank account and a business name once or twice. But the work proved to be beyond me. I often had dreams of finding someone to partner with me, but that never seems to work out either. To do my kind of work you need three people, someone to get the customers, someone to take the portraits, and someone to sell them. Doing all three was outside my skill sets. A forth person to deal with the actual running of the business just never entered any of our minds.

So I haven’t gone out and taken portraits of people sitting on their porch or waving from a window. I haven’t tried to market myself to rich folk in gated communities. I haven’t volunteered to photograph resume portraits for homeless people. I haven’t taken more than a handful of photos of anything over the past few months. That whole we’re all going to die thing has taken up a lot of my time.

I’ve also been trying to sell stuff on Teespring and Redbubble. I’ve made a whopping $16 on Teespring and right about the same on Redbubble. I don’t think my images and designs are all that terrible. But one key to being successful in these very crowded market places is to have a group of fans willing to support you. Another key is having a bazillion things listed. I’m still surprised to see photographers with tens of thousands of images for sale. It takes me an hour to get an image uploaded and shared on a couple of social media sites. Not that I have ten thousand images ready to list, but I don’t understand the logistics.

During the off months I would usually do a few App Gigs as well. I’ve driven for Uber, Instacart, Lyft, Deliv, Doordash, Grubhub, and Postmates. The best day I ever had was a little over $200, the worse was around $6. It doesn’t take too many $6 days for you toss that particular app. My favorite gigs were UberEats and Deliv. Deliv was the best of the side gigs for me. It was mainly delivering prescription drugs and other small items. I usually made over a hundred dollars for six hours work, which was as good as it got for me and the App Gig Economy. Sadly Deliv recently announced they were going out of business. Well, I haven’t used them in a while anyway, but it’s still a bummer to see them go.

I used to watch a lot of CreativeLive tutorials. Three day photography workshops where someone you likely never heard of tells you how they make ten grand a week doing basically what you do. Some of them were inspiring enough that I tried a few of the techniques. But I fell down when it came time to making contact with potential clients. I also had a lot of serious doubts about some of the instructors. They all appeared to live in a different world, where clients are happy to pay thousands of dollars for a photo of their kid’s feet or a blurry image at the beach. Others just outspent me. There are things you can do with a five thousand dollar camera that I can’t do with my six hundred dollar model.

Of course, I could rent a better camera. I could just ask people if they wanted a portrait. I could run ads of one kind or another and book sessions in a park somewhere. But it’s just so much easier to let someone else do all the hard work of finding clients, collecting the money, and printing the images. And that, gentle reader, is why I will always be an Assembly Line Portrait Photographer.