How many Framed Prints in your Home?

dfoo said:
I'd be interested in hearing more about how you approach sales of your fine art prints.
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Me or Fallis? I sell from my website. Used to have a couple of galleries selling my work but over the years they sold a lot less than i was able to sell online.
 
Both (and anyone else for that matter).

With respect to what you wrote above, I've visited your site and blog, and your work is excellent. How do you promote yourself Chris? Do you mostly rely on word of mouth? How about stock? Your photos don't seem to be typical stock photographs (which, of course, is a good thing!) Do you also rely on your site for selling stock photography? My friend locally has also sold some arial photography stock from his website, but that is a very focused and unique market segment.
 
None. I always feel that the prints that I make from the darkroom are inferior and not worth hanging on the wall. Usually I just show my wife the print and then store it or give it away. My wife thinks that they're great and her office has ~10. I think she is required to like them. LOL
 
dfoo said:
Both (and anyone else for that matter).

With respect to what you wrote above, I've visited your site and blog, and your work is excellent. How do you promote yourself Chris? Do you mostly rely on word of mouth? How about stock? Your photos don't seem to be typical stock photographs (which, of course, is a good thing!) Do you also rely on your site for selling stock photography? My friend locally has also sold some arial photography stock from his website, but that is a very focused and unique market segment.
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I don't do anything to promote myself. Promotion costs money, and I don't have any. That's probably why I sell few prints, you have to promote yourself heavily, exhibit a lot, travel to galleries in big cities that have large art markets to show your work and get them to represent you. I have never had the money to do that.

Stock photos sell well from a website with no promotion because when a company or ad agency needs a photo they often go to Google and use the images search to look for the type of image they need. As long as the website is setup properly so that the images are searchable, the customers can find you. I think the uniqueness of my photos has contributed to the stock sales. I sold a photo 2 weeks ago for enough money that my son and I can live for a month off that one sale. That was nice! Wish I sold to high dollar clients like that every month. The picture is going to be used in a national ad campaign.

I did have to make some big changes to my site to make Google find my photos. When I first setup my site many years ago, I neglected to write ALT Tags for the images. Those are required for the images to be 'seen' by search engines. I added them to all the photos on the site a couple years ago, and it took MONTH of work to do so because there were over 800 photos on the site back then. Now I have over 1000 photos on my site and all are properly tagged.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
... I sold a photo 2 weeks ago for enough money that my son and I can live for a month off that one sale. That was nice! Wish I sold to high dollar clients like that every month. The picture is going to be used in a national ad campaign.
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Congrats on that man! Great advice in that post. Thanks.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
That makes sense, since I'm pretty young. You didn't mention how old you are or how long you've been doing fine art photography professionally, but I assume you've been around a lot longer than I have. If you started out selling mostly to publications (as I do) and are now selling a lot of prints (as I hope to), then hopefully that works out for me too :)
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Well, I'm 54, started doing serious photography in 1978, and started selling art to publications in 1985. Back then it was mostly line art (pen and ink drawings) that I did from photos I took. The photos I was taking back then were mostly based on photos other people had taken, but with harsher lighting, to boost the contrast. After a few years of this though, it slowly dawned on me that the photos I was taking could also be sold. Eventually, someone at a convention offered to buy one of my prints for twenty times what the publishers were paying me for my stuff and so I started selling prints.

Digital cameras back then sucked and Photoshop was very basic to nonexistent on 40mb computers with a blazing hot 2400bps, so I learned it the hard way, using film and a darkroom. It would still be years before digital photography could be taken at all seriously and, having already invested so much time and effort in learning one system, I just never bothered much with the other.

Anyway, after a while, I decided that, for the types of photography I was doing, rangefinders worked better than my SLRs in most situations. I couldn't afford a Leica, so I started using Yashicas. I eventually got pretty good at it, my collection of cameras grew, I learned to repair them, I found out that there was a market for that too, and here I am.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by dfoo
I'd be interested in hearing more about how you approach sales of your fine art prints.

I'm not sure which of us you meant either. I don't have to promote myself much either, although I do occasionally still go to conventions and showings. I did a LOT of publishing work back in the 80s and 90s and I have enough serious publishing creds that I'm known and it kind of feeds on itself, so people seek me out. Those high dollar buyers sure are nice -- and it beats the hell out of what I used to do, sending out hundreds of sample portfolios to publishers, waiting for someone to contact you with an offer, and selling lots of reprints at $50 each.
 
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