The smartphone has put the ability to take technically good photographs in the hands of millions of people and increased the competition for careers in photography.
Full-time salaried wildlife photography jobs are few and far between and the majority of professional photographers are freelancers. The focus here is therefore on starting a career selling your wildlife photographs or skills.
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Improve Your Knowledge and Skills
You have to learn about photography, you have to focus on gaining experience by taking many photographs and you have to define what is going to be your focus.
Develop Your Photographic Knowledge
There is an enormous amount of photographic information in books and magazines. There is even more online in the form of blogs, podcasts, reviews, portfolios, and photographic suppliers. There are training courses and formal education, there are workshops and lectures.
Develop Your Wildlife Knowledge
Use wildlife photographers’ online portfolios to see the range of photographers, their approach to animals, and the style of their photographs. Listen to their podcasts to hear stories about all aspects of the business. Always pick up and follow their recommendations and contacts.
Practice & Experiment
Take lots of photographs, experiment a lot, and analyze your work. Study and analyze the work of photographers from their portfolios. Use this to try changes of your subject and especially your style. Use the information given by online sellers (eg Saatchi Art and Fine Art America) to see what people buy.
Develop Your Portfolio
When you embark on your fine art business your portfolio will be far more important than your cv as it’s living proof of what you can deliver. It will also be something that you will develop for the rest of your life.
Your portfolio should show your best work and present your subject and style. It is important to continually develop your portfolio as you develop your skills.
Join a Camera Club
This gets you involved in many activities with a group of people who are there to grow their photography and are doing the kinds of things you are. They are mainly keen to share and don’t have other objectives and are therefore friendly and open.
Haunt Social Media Platforms
The first thing is to set up some social media to start sharing what you are doing. The obvious ones for photography are Instagram and Flikr as they are both focused exclusively on photographs. Reddit is interesting as it has many subreddits where almost every subject under the sun, including photography, is discussed in exchanges between members.
Find many others and the perfect one for you by the famous Web Search “the NN best XXXX sites for 2023”.
Get a Web Presence
A simple web presence is easy to set up and gives you a chance to direct people to your work and contact details. Wix is a powerful free website builder while WordPress is probably the best known.
With both, you can start with a simple free site and grow in the appropriate steps to a full-scale online business where you pay for what you need.
Look for Internships
Find commercial photographers doing what you would like to do and approach them for an internship. Be prepared to do this for free if you are unemployed and aim to learn everything you can and to get into their list of useful contacts.
Offer images to magazines and newspapers
Identify magazines and newspapers that could use your photographs and offer them photographs that they could be looking for. Possibly give an introductory offer that makes it easy for them to start
Have Your Images Critiqued
There are many opportunities to get feedback on your images. This range from those where everyone wants to be nice and the standard is very low to those where you need the sensitivity of a rhino to survive and avoid getting into online battles.
Lightstalking.com offers informative detailed feedback on your photos from members of the Shark Tank which is pretty accurate, Reddit’s photo critique does the same but to a lower standard and more generously and 1X.com offers tough ratings by a panel and members which have to lead to an amazing standard of photographs.
Exhibit and Enter Competitions
Exhibiting your photography whether online or physically and entering competitions gets more people to see your work and also makes sure that you keep up your standards and develop your portfolio.
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Putting Your Images Up For Sale
Looking at the market segments defined and select a couple that matches your portfolio and put a few of your images into each. Then talk about them through your social media
Take jobs on freelance sites
Freelance sites such as Freelancer and Upwork offer thousands of jobs a day with those linked to photography, post-processing, and design making a significant part of the total. Unfortunately, these two are used by freelancers from areas of the world which allows them to work at a very low cost. You need to have outstanding quality and reliability and be prepared to only get a small number of your proposal accepted and even then at a low price.
Don’t forget the Internet search terms like “wildlife photography job” or set an alert on such terms.
There is more than enough you can do to start your career. To improve your chances of succeeding you need to be active and persistent and not get discouraged when the reaction to your efforts is less than you expected. Just about all these actions can be taken without costs although there is normally the opportunity to access a better service at a cost. It’s all a matter of staying flexible and not getting bogged down.