Great Escape Publishing

Posted April 18th, 2010 by The Photographer's Life & filed under Travel Photography.

Your personal “workshop spy” David Morgan, here. Lori put me in the back of the room here in Nashville at the Ultimate Money-Making Photo Workshop to leak out a few key tips from our pro photographers. I’ll be presenting later, myself, as I’m a freelance photographer and travel writer. But I’m getting a lot of new tips from the other pros here, like magazine photographer Patrick Stevens, who gave us a quirky — yet powerful — secret to shooting better photos. “Take pictures of manhole covers,” he said. “Or doorways… or park benches… or streetlights… or fire hydrants… or flower shops.” His point? You need a “thing.” It’s not that a portfolio full of manhole covers or the like is particularly lucrative. It’s that in seeking out that one thing you always shoot, you begin to notice other things as well. It forces you to pay closer attention to what’s around you and helps you start shooting better photos. And it’s a great way to guarantee you’ll stumble across another story – a hidden gem of a restaurant that’s off the beaten path or a workshop that once made chairs fit for the bottoms of royalty. As Patrick put it, “It’s like searching for your lost car keys. While you’re at it, you find the credit card you lost last month.” That’s just one of the many useful asides he shared during his presentation on selling travel photos to magazines (which also included what he did to pocket $1,250 on his first two assignments). All the intelligence our experts are handing over is designed to nudge new photographers that much closer to taking better shots… and selling them. (Dog photographer Adrian Hitt told us yesterday that she can make up to $1,800 per photo assignment. Today, Efrain Padro told us how he makes up to $2,000 plus expenses for his travel photo assignments.) The key to putting yourself on that path is to just get started. And that’s something you can do from home. So go find yourself a manhole cover… a flower… a park bench… really, any object will do just fine. As long as it’s something that holds some interest for you. And start shooting. You may be surprised at what else you find to snap while you’re at it. Confucius said something along the lines of: There are two best times to plant a tree. One is 20 years ago. The other is right now. My point? Seize the moment. Grab your camera. And go outside. While you do that, I’ll head back in to hear our experts share more insights about how you can quickly and easily launch a career taking and selling photos – even if you’ve never done anything like that before. Look for my next report tomorrow. Your eyes and ears on the ground, — David Morgan [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.]