When you’re looking to make money doing what you love — whether it’s making pictures, knitting dolls or baking cupcakes — you’re going to need a box full of tools. Not just to make your products but to sell them too. You’ll need a website, of course — that’s essential and a basic platform is simple to create — but what else will you need to turn a love for a hobby into a source of revenue? E...
For publications and designers in need of travel images, these should be glorious days. With a camera in every pocket, a photogenic scene around every exotic corner, and social media sites offering a platform for anyone who snaps a shot of the Eiffel Tower or a Venice canal, there really should be no shortage of images for businesses to use. In practice, it hasn’t turned out that way. Despite the...
When Chad Ingraham completed his photography studies in 2004 he wasn’t entirely certain what he wanted to do. A Canadian from New Brunswick, he knew he wanted to see the world and he knew too that waiting for a photography client to turn up and give him an expense account to cover his air fares would mean waiting in North America for a very long time. “It was either working on a cruise, or...
When photographer Paul Nicklen climbed from his Zodiac into the Antarctic Ocean to take pictures of a massive leopard seal for National Geographic, the former marine biologist from Baffin Island, Canada, had no idea what to expect. A short distance from an enormous marine predator and in freezing waters, he swam up to the seal with a dry mouth and shaking legs. As he began taking pictures, the...
The days when you can learn a trade and stick to it throughout life are long gone. You might not change careers seven times or even five times but you can expect your work to change. Advertising channels rise and fall. Content that worked once loses its effect. Televisions become smart and screens becomes wall-sized, pocket-sized, and foldable. With each of those changes comes opportunities. As...
If people are a company’s most important asset, the most successful firms will be those that are able to generate the largest possible returns from those resources. Increasing productivity is one way to do that but an even more valuable method is to mine team members for ideas. Tap into your team’s thoughts and you might well find that your firm, however small, already has what it takes to zoom...
When Facebook offered Jan Koum $19 billion for WhatsApp, including $3 billion for the company’s founders and staff, observers might have wondered what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking. The rival messaging app was lean and simple where Facebook was large and complex. Facebook at the time was a social media application but it was also a photo-sharing application, an advertising channel, a data...
Photographers attempt to freeze a moment. They capture the beauty of a scene, the character in a portrait, the drama in an event. But would it still be photography if the images were made without a camera, only a monitor, if the landscapes were virtual and the portraits were of people who really are two-dimensional? The technical process might be completely different, demanding coding and hacking...
Corporate communications professionals have good reason to wonder where social media should fit into their strategies. The platforms can advertise but perhaps not as effectively as a television commercial or a billboard ad. They can generate metrics but not necessarily the ROIs or the sales figures the top-level executives want (and if social media can produce those figures, it can’t always...
Recent Comments