You’ve got a great camera, a great eye, and a great sense of timing. You’ve got passion, so how can you turn that into profit? It’s not for everyone, but for the people that have that spark of ingenuity, motivation, and pride it’s the next logical step up. You’ve got the skills, so how do you make them pay the bills? You start a business. But how much does that cost?

Choose the Right Subject

Model photography seems like an easy set-up, right? You post pictures of beautiful ladies (with their permission, obviously) and you get tons of likes and shares, and comments. But are they complimenting your skill, or just what happens to be in the frame? Photographing people can be a dead-end for talent because no one will hire you to take a picture of a gorgeous model. She’s the one doing all the work, you’re just the lens. You need to make the model do more work for you, and how can you do that? By adding in products.

Product Photography

Taking pictures of people is a tricky thing in its own right, but what can you sell by taking pictures of a person? Image rights only go so far. In business, taking pictures of scantily clad ladies isn’t the dream job it sounds like because there’s always going to be one guy (or more) that will do it for free just to do it. You can’t compete with free, so you need to add value to your approach. To do that, you add products. Turn the model into a product poser. Have her hold a Corona, and now it’s a product shoot. Have a male model stand next to a brand new bicycle. Turn the model into an addition to the product. The companies that payout are the ones that want inanimate objects to look as attractive as models.

License To Shoot

Once you have a winning picture of a product, how do you sell it? It’s just one picture, so there’s just one price, right? It could be, but then you’d be living paycheck to paycheck with no guarantees for your business. That’s no way to get ahead. You need to plan for the long term. Sell rights to pictures. You own every photo you take, and you can sell that ownership for a period of time through a license. Write it up in a contract and find people who will use that image for a long duration of time - maybe years - which will pay out on a regular. Long-lasting businesses like apartment complexes use one photo for years to sell their apartments. Airbnbs do the same thing. Take one good photo and “rent” it out to them for as long as the house remains the same.

Best of Both Worlds

Bare naked product photos, the Amazon listing white background images with just the product at two or three angles, are enough to start with. Companies with hundreds of products can pay you $50 or more per license. That’s a few thousand dollars you’re making for the most basic kind of photography. You don’t get paid much for pictures of people, but combining them with products will make you a killing because nothing sells more Coca-Cola or Motor Oil than a photogenic model holding one perfectly in frame to use it.