From Flash to Cash: making money from photography

Forgot to add, friend and wife were really pleased with the results and their families all wanted copies after seeing them.
I thought they could have been better to be honest.

Oh, I sort of know what I'm setting myself up for, and I'd much rather be guest-with-camera or second-shooter, but I feel I should plunge in at the deep end if I'm ever going to develop this skill. There's also a sense in which I'm a very frustrated candid portrait photographer (i.e. I barely know anyone who likes having their picture taken and I've been a bloody nuisance at social events for a few years now) and this is a chance to completely indulge myself in the craft for a few hours. As long as I don't lose sight of the client's expectations...

I've done one wedding before (unless you count my brother's when I was 16 and I was in charge of his Olympus OM20 + 50/1.8; I don't think I even got through a complete roll of film but the pictures were OK!) - in tandem with a friend. We went from even indoor light to shadowy corridor to overhead strip-light to harsh afternoon sun (and 90F) to moodily-lit basement bar. It was a huge learning curve for both of us and, well, thank goodness it was for good friends of ours. I think it went OK and I was very glad I wasn't on my own. The post-event sort-out (which we tried to conduct via a private Flickr group with tagging) was probably more difficult than it needed to be, so any advice on contact-sheet approval in the digital age is welcome.

More than one person has advised me to politely decline these invitations. There's enough of a gap between wedding #1 and wedding #2 than I could bail on #2 if #1 (which should be more straightforward - far less formal and I'll actually know more than one person there) is a complete confidence-shattering exercise.

Stupid question: how to carry around two bodies? One neck strap, one shoulder?

(DennisHopperApocalypseNow.jpg)

I thought they could have been better to be honest.

you're always your own worst critic, as the saying goes.

anyone ever sell stock photography?

Uploaded a bunch to Crestock about 18 months ago...they were all rejected. Some of the comments (which were clearly just options in a drop-down list, not someone's considered critique) were fair enough, some were just baffling. Rather than think "right, need to take better pictures then", I just looked through their samples and thought "I can't do that" and gave up.

if it makes you feel better - i've never even heard of Crestock!

interesting article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8744817.stm

When I first heard about the Getty/Flickr tie up I went through and changed the licences on all my creative commons photos to add the non-commercial stipulation.
Which I discovered this week hasn't stopped at least one commercial organisation using an image of mine on their website.
The Dundee based Scottish daily newspaper The Courier published this article (at least on the website - no idea if it was in the actual paper) with my image at the head. They attributed the photo to me (my flickr username is the same as here) but at no point have they contacted me to ask if they can use the image in a commercial context. I think they've basically done a creative commons search for a relevant image and haven't actually bothered to see if it allows commercial usage or not.
I should really contact them about it, but if I do I don't expect anything to come out of it.

it's called a lawyer.

sorry - didn't mean to sound so flippant.
how did you find out, btw? do you usually read that paper? (online)

It cropped up in my flickr referrals in my stats.
I'm going to email them at some point, but I'm coming down with a cold right now and I'm not feeling terribly coherent.

In the early days of digital, I thought about putting together CDs of stock images and selling them to designers/businesses, cutting out the stock imagery middlemen - but then online services took off and it just seemed like too much effort for the pay.