Shooting More Than Portraits

“Let’s go out and shoot tomorrow.” The Woman I work with said. “We can go downtown or maybe find a park or a cemetery.”

“Sounds good.” I said and finished packing up for the day. “I’ve got a new lens I’ve been wanting to try out.”

“That’s a waste of time.” Another photographer said from nearby. “I never put a camera to my face unless someone is paying me.”

“No one invited you.” I said and smiled.

Over the past twenty-five years or so I’ve traveled from coast to coast, stopping along the way to take hundreds of thousands of portraits and a few thousand captures of places I found interesting. I like taking High Dynamic Range images, a digital process of stacking several images of different exposures to create an image with more depth and clarity than a normal exposure. Some of these images are what I like to call Fine Art. I have a few of them up for sale on Fine Art America.

I sell a print now and then, a few hundred dollars here and there. I don’t sell enough prints to quit my day job, but then, if it weren’t for my day job, I wouldn’t be taking these images at all. My best selling prints have been HDR images of architectural subjects. I like to seek our Frank Lloyd Wright buildings while on the road. I’ve hit all the biggies, Falling Water, Taliesin West, the Robbie House, the Martin House, and the Price Tower as well as a few other odds and ends.

There are a couple of reasons I don’t sell more prints. For one thing I tend to charge a little more for my prints. I’m not at the top end of prices of Fine Art America, but my prints aren’t at the bottom either. I’m not in the same league as big name fine artists who charge thousands for an 8×10, but I do think they’re worth more than a poster from Michaels.

The second reason is that I don’t really do the kind of work that regularly sells on Fine Art America or Red Bubble or the like. The key to being a successful artist is making art that people want to buy, but I’ve never really been good at that. I tried shooting images for Stock one time, but the images I produced didn’t sell. I think it’s the same with Fine Art America, the images I like are not always the kind of images people browsing the site might want to buy.

Or course, it could be something as simple as not doing enough marketing or using the wrong keywords or who knows what. As it is, I find a sale once in a while is a nice surprise. It would be nice to make more, but that brings me to the last likely reason I don’t make a lot of sales, I don’t have thousands of images uploaded to pop up the search results. Even when I do go something place I like to photograph, I don’t take thousands of pictures. I take a few dozen at best. Out of those images, I usually cull them down to two or three that I really like. Out of those two or three, I usually upload one. Maybe none.

Serious fine art photographers plan everything out. They decide where to go, when to go there, get up before dawn and stake out the perfect spot for that panoramic sunrise over the Palouse or the Grand Canyon or that rain soaked street in front of Sun Studios. I don’t do that. I’m a photographer of opportunity. I shoot what shows up in front of me. I still enjoy doing that, but I don’t work as hard about it as I once did. I don’t wander around at night looking for neon or get up in the dark to look for that magic time when the sky glows and the tourists are all still asleep.

I often go out in the blinding midday sun and even during the dark days of Covid, I’m still often surrounded my crowds of tourists. This makes getting a clean image of things like Cloud Gate or the Lincoln Memorial a bit of challenge. I still try and I still like many of the images, even when random people are walking around. One of my brothers liked to call my images postcard photos, he was more a fan of Vivian Maier and liked lots of people cluttering up a photograph. I take portraits for a living, I don’t need to take pictures of people in my spare time.

I’ve thought about trying to be a Travel Photographer from time to time, but the same general rules apply, I don’t have the energy or the desire to do two jobs while I’m on the road. I haven’t taken any interesting photos in the past couple of weeks. One of the problems with this job is the uncertainty. If you never know where you’re going, you can do a lot of research. I end up watching a few YouTube videos and maybe scanning a travel post or two. Time is also an issue, the day job does keep me busy.

Like all Assembly Line Portrait jobs, the people I work for now have this odd idea that I am on to road to take pictures for them and not for myself. They like to keep me busy, so I have to squeeze in the occasional tourist attraction when I can. It’s worked out fine so far.