Great Escape Publishing

Posted September 10th, 2010 by The Photographer's Life & filed under Travel Photography.

In his time off from grad school, Danny Warren takes trips with his wife and friends to hike, camp, and climb in the woods and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. It’s one of his favorite things to do. Plus, it pays for his camera gear. While he’s hiking and camping, Danny takes photos along the way and sells them on the stock photo website iStock.com, making a nice side-income and helping fund his next adventure. Indulging in your favorite hobbies can really pay off — literally — if you take photos along the way and sell the shots as stock. Danny will give us the specifics on exactly how to do that tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s a tip that I picked up from one of our pros last year on how to get off to a great start: Don’t just photograph your hobby. Photograph everything surrounding it. For example, if you love keeping a flower garden, don’t just take pictures of flowers. Flowers are an overdone subject, and to take saleable flower photos, you’ve got to be one of the best. But you can still easily take marketable shots of flower gardening by focusing on everything AROUND the flowers, or by photographing them in a unique way. For example, photograph: A close-up of hands planting a seedling… Flowers during a spring rain… Gardening tools like gloves, flower pots, and trowels… Or maybe golf is your favorite hobby. Take photos of every aspect of the sport, including close- ups of shoes, balls, clubs, and tees. Look for action shots of golfers swinging… riding on golf carts… walking to the next hole… preparing for a final putt. Once you start to think outside the box, the opportunities are infinite. Get creative, and really use your expertise and subject knowledge to think of unique and interesting ways to get new and different photos of your hobby. And have fun. This is what you love to do… let that shine through in your photos. Stay tuned tomorrow to find out how Danny turns his hobby into an income — and more details on how you can, too! — 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.]