Earlier this month, I wrote a post asking if many blog readers would be willing to buy prints of some of the photographs I display here. The response wasn't huge but I'm very grateful to all those who took the time to let me know their views.
It seems that I might have a small market for my work if it was presented well in a dedicated gallery with an easy payment method. To that end, I registered with Clikpic.com and have designed a gallery for black and white and colour prints with a PayPal option for those who'd like to buy.
It's not "live" yet because I'm still in the process of working up the photographs. The problem with writing a couple of blogs is that most of my pictures only exist as small jpegs! Before I can offer prints for sale, I've got to work on the raw files, make jpegs for the gallery and ensure that the prints I produce from my HP B9180 printer are a truthful representation of what viewers will see on the gallery. It'll be another few weeks before I'm ready to go - time for everyone who doesn't already have one to open a PayPal account ;-)
With a large dollop of pretentiousness, the print website will be called Gallery Flaneur. It will feature the sort of photographs I most enjoy taking whilst wandering city streets - preferably abroad - with a camera in my hand. At least, the black and white gallery will.
The colour gallery is a different matter. There are millions of web galleries out there for pretty landscape photographs so I don't want to go down that route and - truth be known - I haven't the time anyway to get out into the country when the light's right. I've been thinking about what colour shots I might specialise in and have been trying to build up a folder on my computer at home.
The photograph above is the type of thing I'd like to include. On the basis that people who aren't looking for a black and white photograph will want a colour one, I think images with plenty of strong colours in them will do best. It's all just guesswork at the moment, though, and I wont know what will sell until I'm up and running.
L'Etoile 1903 was taken on my last visit to Paris. I'd been just up the road taking night shots of the Arc de Triomphe with the K10D on a tripod and saw this picture when heading back to the hotel. I think the ISO was 100 so noise is quite well controlled and it's nice and sharp.
I've also started a Gallery Flaneur Flickr group to, hopefully, introduce a few more people to the website. It's at http://www.flickr.com/groups/galleryflaneur/ and I'd be delighted if you stopped by, joined and added some Flaneur-type pics of your own. I've limited the uploads to one a week as I didn't want to end up with hundreds of pics there that just get lost in cyberspace.
If your intention is to sell street photos taken in Paris then I think you have a solid, marketable niche. If, however, the color photos are of a different subject matter than the B&W then there is a good risk of confusing your customers.
ReplyDeleteYou should also give some thought to developing a brief summary of who you are, your modus operandi, what motivates you, how anal you are about print quality, etc. That way the buyer has an interesting story to tell when someone asks about one of your pictures on the wall.
If any of this seems too obvious, forgive me. I'm just thinking out loud.
Thanks for the advice, Gordon. I know what you're saying about a colour gallery maybe being at odds with the general theme of the website. I'll give that a lot of thought. The trouble is that I don't have too many Paris street pics and wont be able to get back there until 2010. I was intending to widen the theme a little to include street pics and photos taken in cities in general. Eventually, I'd love to have galleries for several European capitals but that will take a few years.
ReplyDeleteAs for the personal profile stuff, I'm with you on that one and am trying to figure out a form of words that will tell the world just how great I am but in as modest a way as possible ;-)