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Photography Websites: How to design a website that image buyers will love website-montage.jpg We're releasing something special today. If you're selling photos online, displaying your portfolio to get more commercial or editorial assignments, or even designing websites for photographers, you'll want to have a look at this. Do you ever wonder, "Is my website doing its job? Am I working hard to get people there, only to have the site itself betray me?" Don't worry, you're not alone (being betrayed by your website is a growing problem). When we launched our photography website templates last fall, we picked up on this very fact - photographers and designers generally build websites based on their artists' intuition, and leave sound business reasoning aside. That's bad, of course, when you want your website to support your primary business goal - selling more of your work.

PhotoPlus Seminar: Making a Good Impression on Clients\n\nIf there was a unifying theme to Mary Virginia Swanon's "First Impressions: Selling Yourself in 20 Minutes" seminar today, it was Do Your Homework. Before you approach a photo buyer, photo editor, or gallery owner, Google him or her. Study the publication or ad agency they work for to figure out what photography they're looking for, and make sure your work is a good match (because clients are never impressed by photographers who waste their time).

there are more than 55,000 artists from all over the world contributing their artwork to iStock. Their images, illustrations, and videos sell in the world's busiest royalty-free market

THEORY - "Boris Mikhailov: A Terrible Beauty" A Terrible Beauty by Sue Hubbard Boris Mikhailov: Case History The Saatchi Gallery 13th September- 25th November Boris Mikhailov is sixty-three, has dyed black hair, a white moustache and a young wife. Born in Kharkov in the Ukraine, he has recently exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, just been awarded the Citibank Photography Prize and is now showing his work, Case History, which consists of over 400 photographs taken in the Ukraine, at The Saatchi Gallery. For anyone with a taste in postmodern irony, there is plenty to be found here. For Mikhailov takes pictures of the bomzhes, the homeless down and outs, victims of the economic and social collapse in the former USSR. But Boris Mikhailov is no Bill Brandt or Don McCullen capturing life's gritty realities with a clear humanist agenda, nor is he an objective eye simply documenting what he sees from behind his lens. Rather he is a director, a creator of mise en scènes, who seeks out the alcoholic, the drug addict, the ill and the dispossessed and then pays them not only to pose for him, but to expose themselves - genitals, scars, menstrual blood and hernias - to his scrutinizing gaze. This is the ultimate market exchange, the sale, for a few kopeks, of these peoples' only resource, their bodies. Like all capitalists and entrepreneurs they sell what they have for the best offer, in this case to a photographer who takes their pictures, which will then be consumed by the international art world. The irony is brought full circle, in a game of signifiers and signs, by the fact that it is Saatchi, the advertising guru who gave us 18 years of Thatcherism, who is playing host to these photos of some of the world's most abject. What, I kept wondering, would these subjects make of the private view, where the likes of Tracy Emin quaff champagne in her latest Agnès B, surrounded by their exposed and blistered penises, black eyes and filthy bodies; and what does it

Welcome to our new look and greatly enlarged gallery space dedicated to exhibiting and selling original art photography.The gallery ethos is one of bringing the best of classic and contemporary fine art photography within the reach of both new and experienced collectors. The gallery, based in Battle, East Sussex, specialises in the work of UK fine art photographers, having exhibited the work ofy Terry O'Neill, Fay Godwin, Sheila Rock, Malcolm Glover, Martyn Colbeck, Bill Brandt, Graham Cornthwaite, John Holloway, Steve Pyke OBE, Michael Birt, Bruce Rae, Samuel Hicks, Richard Dunkley, and holds an archive of their work which can be seen by appointment. (see print room).

For a second answer to the question of how photographers will market their work over the next five to ten years we turned to leading UK-based landscape, documentary and fine art photographer Simon Norfolk. Said Simon: "In the few weeks between being asked to write this piece and me actually sitting down to do it, the international financial system has dissolved and the key banks nationalized. All the money I had squirreled away to pay my future taxes and something for Mr and Mrs Norfolk's old age has disappeared in a bizarre Icelandic banking collapse. So my prognosis about the economy over the next 5-10 years is not very optimistic, I'm afraid. I gave up trying to make a living from editorial a few years ago, instead selling my work as limited edition fine art prints through galleries in London, New York and Los Angeles. I still work for magazines - most of what goes on the gallery wall starts out as a magazine commission - but I see magazine fees as start-up capital.

Philip Jones Griffiths (b. 1936) is a Welsh-born photojournalist known for his coverage of the Vietnam war. Griffiths studied pharmacy but started as a freelance photographer in 1961, traveling to Algeria in 1962. He arrived in Vietnam in 1966, working for the Magnum agency. Magnum found his images difficult to sell to American magazines, as they concentrated on the suffering of the Vietnamese people and reflected Griffiths's view of the war as an episode in the continuing decolonisation of former European possessions. He was able to get a 'scoop' that the American outlets liked, photographs of Jackie Kennedy vacationing with a male friend in Cambodia. The proceeds of these photos enabled him to continue his coverage of Vietnam and to publish Vietnam Inc. in 1971. The book had a major influence on American perceptions of the war, and became a classic of photojournalism. In 2001 the book was reprinted with a foreword by Noam Chomsky.

Is it really possible to make money as a citizen photojournalist? It's a question that must have passed through the mind of every wannabe news photographer. Anyone can now earn money from stock photography. Persuasion, a portfolio and word-of-mouth can bring in occasional event commissions. But photojournalism? That means selling to news editors, and when it comes to buyers, they're perhaps the pickiest bunch of all.

"What's the real lifespan, or "shelf life" of a photographic print? Do ink-jet based prints last longer than prints made with traditional photo chemical-based processes? As a photographer selling prints, should you know the answers to these questions?"

A website has been set up to help the new 'snaparazzis' sell their pictures to mainstream media. Is this ethical journalism, asks Roy Greenslade.

Three startups are trying to help amateur news photographers sell work to media outlets. But will these agencies deliver enough quality photos?

The image was grainy, low quality and shot by a 17-year-old, most likely on a mobile phone. And, according to the London Times, it earned the photographer

Center for Citizen Media Rotating Header Image The Decline (and Maybe Demise) of the Professional Photojournalist Dec 4th, 2006 by Dan Gillmor. The rise of the citizen journalist is not a new phenomenon. People have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. And they've been selling them to traditional news organizations just as long.

"Recently, the "citizen photo agency" Demotix has had reason to celebrate. The site gained fame by selling front-page photos to the New York Times taken by Iranians who captured shots of protests after the disputed presidential election in Iran. Then came another seminal moment when the site got the only shot of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in handcuffs when he was arrested. That photo was featured on CNN, CBS and NBC and in the Washington Post, Boston Globe and other papers, bringing in more than $4,000 for Demotix and the photographer, William B. Carter."

"Now this is going to be fun…. We're excited to announce our first batch of Wordpress + PhotoShelter plugins that allow you to: 1. Integrate your PhotoShelter photos and galleries into your Graph Paper Press themes for Wordpress 2. Allow your visitors to search your PhotoShelter photos from your site's sidebar 3. Pull in your PhotoShelter gallery updates into your site's sidebar If you are a photographer who uses PhotoShelter, these integration plugins will enable you to manage your portfolio, blog, and PhotoShelter photos and galleries all from one site. The combination of Wordpress, PhotoShelter and our themes and plugins will push your web presence into the future, allowing you to connect with clients, promote, sell and license your work all from one place."

'The dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward' Posted: 09/02/09 By: Kyle MacRae email this story | post a comment Profile picture of Kyle Macrae Scoopt, the 'citizen journalism' photo agency I co-founded in 2005 and sold to Getty Images in 2007, is no more. On a personal level, that's a little sad: like losing a child, albeit an errant one that left home long ago. But, as a business decision, I understand Getty's move completely: fundamentally, the Scoopt model doesn't work. That's not to say that people don't want to sell their newsworthy images; many of them do. Nor is to say that the mainstream media has little appetite for such pictures; it most certainly does (note, that's newsworthy pictures we're talking about, not 24,000 snapshots of snow). But it is to say - in my personal but rather battle-weary opinion - that the dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward.

While it's a no-brainer to say (as I did endlessly) that whenever news breaks there's likely to be a punter with a cameraphone on the scene before a pro, the chances of that punter already being a member of your agency, or even having heard of it, are vanishingly small.

List of citizen journalist websites from around the worlkd. Includes the 'independent agency for citizen photojournalists' and AFP's sell/share citpj website.