John M. Lund

To date one of my biggest disappointments with my whole Internet monetization strategy is my Cafepress shop. The potential seems so enormous that I feel I must not give up on it just yet. In this article I will share some of my experience, thoughts and strategy in regards to cafepress and to print-on-demand opportunities in general.

Not having a system to deal with flash memory cards, especially in the heat of battle, cost me most of my images from this Genghis Khan re-enactment. Having my images on my web site brings in additional revenue.

Increasingly, at least as far as I can see, the micro sites are offering greater choices, and, at least in some cases, better choices as well. It seems logical…hundreds of thousands of shooters contributing photos to an agency as opposed to thousands.

To become a better Photoshop artist, become a better photographer pre-visualizing, planning and preparing for your photo shoot. A great shoot insures a great experience at the computer.

I had rented a theater in Buenos Aires. I was doing a gang shoot with several of my associates that involved over thirty models. We each were doing our own thing rotating from area to area and periodically switching up models.

A photographer friend of mine has been interviewing reps lately. He is one of the many stock shooters who have decided to hedge his bets by going after assignment photography. He is hopeful that a rep will be the answer to his problems…the "magic bullet" if you will.

With the importance of creativity, the question arises: How can we increase and maximize our creative propensity? Is there a way to nurture and grow this all-important quality?

A few nights ago I attended an Adobe presentation about Photoshop CS5. As I sat there watching them demonstrate new technologies that makes painstaking tasks into a snap I first felt a bit of despair that we are taking one more large stride towards making my hard-earned skills less unique.

I did a search on Getty Images today while checking to see the competition that existed for an image idea I am considering creating. Then, just for the heck of it, I did the same search on iStockphoto. It was a bit of a revelation. Not only were there far more images, a couple of thousand rather than a couple of hundred, the iStockphoto images also included ones that were both higher in production value and more creative.

I made a decision that the look of my site was secondary to the optimization of it. It was a difficult decision to make…to create a text-heavy site. I even resisted it for several years. But eventually I came to believe that if someone was looking for an image, for whatever reason, then having them find that image, on my site, was more important than how the site looked.