While we received a lot of really great entries in this month’s Photo Challenge, not all of them could be deemed saleable travel shots. It’s not always the prettiest pictures that sell the best. Especially when you want to sell your photos to online stock photo agencies. Most often, it’s your average shot of a girl holding a coffee cup, a picture of your friend riding a bike, or your grandparents holding hands that attract buyers. That said, Shelly Perry’s tip below applies to photos taken for stock, magazines, and also as fine art. Scroll down to find out how you can easily take saleable travel shots… — Lori Lori Allen Director, Great Escape Publishing [Editor’s Note: Learn more about how you can turn your pictures into cash in our free online newsletter The Right Way to Travel. Sign up here today and we’ll send you a new report, Selling Photos for Cash: A Quick-Start Guide, completely FREE.] ********************* January 29, 2010 The Right Way to Travel, Weekly Photo Tip *********************
Saleable Travel Shots: The Simplest Key
By Shelly Perry in Portland, OR There are a lot of beautiful pictures in this month’s Photo Challenge. Gorgeous places from all over the world. But there’s one thing that jumped out at me in terms of their saleability — people. While people were included in lots of the photos entered in this month’s Challenge, some really beautiful shots could have been improved by adding a person to the scene. And still others that included a person could have been improved by getting in closer. Here are two examples… 
While each of these photos includes a person, that person doesn’t feel integral to the overall composition. They’re too far away to be significant. My suggestion: Try to have your people be a larger part of the overall space. Here’s a quick and dirty enlargement with a crop that brings each person closer to the camera… 
Obviously, this is just for show and tell. It’s not a fix. These photos are too small and too low in resolution for me to enlarge and crop properly. (AWAI’s system shrinks all the photos when they’re uploaded for the challenge to save space on their server, so I’m not working with the real photo here.) But I hope that you can see how making people an integral part of the composition would make for more saleable travel photos. To achieve this for your actual photos you can… 1. Get physically closer to the person. OR 2. Use a telephoto lens to “bring the person closer” to you. I realize sometimes you don’t have time to change a lens or run down the beach to get into the exact right spot, but this is something to bear in mind when you’re out shooting. ** Watch what is going on around you. ** Try to anticipate where the action is going to happen or what trajectory the person is heading. ** And get there ahead of the action. Happy Shooting! [ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shelly Perry from Portland, Oregon, specializes in people photography. Her photos are spotted all over the globe — on music CD covers, books, magazines, catalogues, web sites, ad campaigns, billboards, and even on TV. Her work has also appeared in several local exhibits and gallery shows.]