Last Updated: February 15th, 2020
This post will be short-and-sweet. Over on our post Beginner’s Guide: How Do Photographers Get Clients? I received this really great question that I wanted to address directly for the rest of Formed From Light’s viewers to read.
The question…
Hi Chris,
I love your texts but in this one I got a question:
I do landscape and long exposure here in Portugal with amazing beaches and cliffs. Who do you think could be the main client for this specific area of photography?
Thank you,
Luis
My answer…
Hi Luis – finding clients for landscape photography tends to be more challenging and scarce when compared with portraits/weddings, but it is doable.
Some options I could think of would be to reach out to corporations + small businesses needing image rights for advertising and similar (think travel companies like Patagonia or a hiking brand). These types of gigs would probably be the best paying. In most cases, you would be working job-to-job or just selling rights to images you have already produced.
I have some experience in this realm as I talked about in this post about my first foray into commercial photography. Basically how it worked is a company commissioned me to take photos of some landmark locations in my area. It took just a couple hours to snap all the photos, put them into an online gallery for the client to select their preferred images for their use, then wrap up the project and on to the next with another client.
You could also get into stock photography to sell digital rights to your images to be used for different purposes – this can be done through big sites like Shutterstock or directly through your own website (you’d make more selling yourself).
Depending on the quality of your work and how you brand yourself, you “might” also be able to sell pieces as fine art to art dealers and collectors.
Last thing – I’ve seen some other landscape photographers find an audience online that would want to buy prints of their work that could be sold through your a website. As an example, I follow a landscape photographer named Mads Pieter Iverson who does just this on his website – selling images directly to people who view his blogs and YouTube channel content.
I hope this helps you to see some possible ways you can translate landscape & long exposure photography into something that can bring in some money for you. I’d say that doing this for extra part-time income is pretty easy, but growing to the point where you can work a full time career as this type of photographer will be very challenging (but not impossible). The latter really takes a good amount of brand recognition as a photographer, building a solid network, and producing consistently high quality and interesting photos that manage to retain commercial appeal.