As I sit her contemplating my last
five years of selling my photography, I am struck by one thought. It has
never been harder to sell imagery. There is no denying that. Images such as this bear portrait below, might have brought in thousands of dollars every year only 20 years ago.
I think about how lucrative it was in the late 1990s and how much my fellow nature photographers could earn. Those days are long past, but I still want to sell my work. I want others to enjoy what I enjoy, by seeing my vision through my photographs. The options that once worked so well, like writing photo essays, no longer generate much income. The stock agencies of old, no longer exist, but are replaced with shadows of what they once were.
In today's world, we must be more agile as photographers. We must find other media and find other and less expensive ways of doing the same thing. 10,000 dollar lenses and 5,000 cameras are not the answer, but the answer is out there, and I am constantly pursuing it. I don't pursue it to make a huge amount of money, I pursue it because I love what I do.
In my undergraduate work, I was trained in what we called back then, videography. We were called videographers and not photographers as we seem to be called in 2020. So, I have been dabbling in the world I was once in, as a supplementary income. My primary passion is creating still photographs, but I do enjoy creating videos to a large degree. The requirements are different, and the editing can be grueling, but there is creative satisfaction from doing it.
I do not know if I will continue creating videos, but it is something to creatively explore and understand. I encourage you to give it a try and see what you think about it.
Below is a sample of one of my slow motion hummingbird sequences I have been working on.
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Do it out of love and for His glory, and good things will follow without needing to seek them! William
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