This idea is related to the previous one about web site photography and could be successfully combined with it.

It stems from the reluctance, for whatever reason, of local business owners to hire a professional photographer or designer to create their publicity material.

A quick look through your local newspapers and telephone directories will tell you that a large number of businesses rely on line art or stock photographs in their advertising. This is usually a sign that they do not have a great deal of their own photographs or they would be using them.

It may also be that the particular ad campaign you are looking at is a one-off that may not have justified the expense of producing special photographs.

Whatever the reason, you can be fairly sure that cost will have figured in there somewhere. If you can manage to do the job for substantially less money than the business owner was expecting, you are sure to find work.

No one really wants to use line art in their advertising if they could find a photograph instead. You just need to get in front of them with your pitch.

A Pleasant Surprise

If you are prepared to get in front of these people, you will probably be pleasantly surprised at the results because one thing that seems to set the commercial photography business apart from most other business to business organisations is that they very rarely try to sell themselves. The vast majority of commercial photographers seem happy to align themselves with marketing and advertising agencies rather than approach live customers themselves.

This has definite advantages for the photographer and the agency, but is a huge disadvantage for the end user. This is because it pushes up prices and puts a third party, the agency, between the client and the photographer. Remove that third party and get yourself in there instead.

Pressure on the Big Guys

The move to digital photography has put pressure on commercial photographers for reasons that were probably not foreseen, but which put a couple of real advantages your way.

One of these is the fact that, if you are really driven to improve your work enough to make money from it, you can practice and experiment at virtually no cost. We all know that practice, whether it be taking photographs, playing a musical instrument or climbing mountains, is the only way to achieve consistently high standards. This was a lengthy and expensive business when we were using film but delay and cost both vanish when using digital cameras.

I keep banging on about this, but pick up your camera, use it, analyse your results and do it again. And again.

Another not so obvious problem for the pro is that everyone knows he now has no expenses for developing and printing his film. He therefor cannot make a profit on this, nor can he take on more work to compensate unless he has the time available, but his studio overheads have not reduced. This can make him look even more expensive, especially on smaller jobs.

This is another gap to be exploited.

Real Opportunities

To sum up, there really are genuine opportunities for the freelance digital photographer today. It is much easier to get your work up to professional standards and new gaps are appearing in the markets for photography.

The move to digital technology has helped this. All you need to add to the mix is the desire to grab yourself a slice.

Some Handy Software

As I mentioned earlier, there are many free and low cost methods available to produce optimised graphic files especially intended for use on a web site.

Most graphics packages like Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks or Photoshop have the necessary facilities built in so if you have one of these you have all the tools you need. If you don't, here are a few sugestions.

Paint Shop Pro

Paint Shop Pro is now part of the Corel empire of graphics software. I've been using this since version 4, it's now on v.10 and is definately one of the best, most cost effective and easy to use graphics packages available.

It contains very easy to use gif, jpg and png conversion tools along with colour reduction, resolution conversion and palette optimisation utilities. A fully working 30-day evaluation is available from the following link.

Corel Paint Shop Pro

Gif Optimizer

If your starting image is less than 200kb, there is a free on-line optimizer here:

Other On-line Optimisers

Click here for another free on-line optimiser, or here for a third. Try searching Google for "on line graphics optimizer" to find more.

The Gimp

The Gimp is a fully functioning graphics package originally developed for th Unix world. It is now available free of charge from the link below. As it came from Unix, the user interface will look a little quirky until you get used to it, but it is well worth putting up with this.

http://www.gimp.org/

More Options

Looking around the popular download sites like Tucows or CNet will provide many more free or low cost graphics applications, but I recommend trying the 30-day trial of Paint Shop Pro.

I should perhaps point out here that I have no affiliation with any of the above, other than that I use their products. They are simply suggestions, from which I do not profit.

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