Making sure you’re appropriately compensated for your time and craft is always important. You might generously agree to volunteer or provide discounts for friends and family on occasion, but once someone demands payment from the person doing them a favor, the only thing they’ll be getting is a harsh reality check.

Below, you’ll find a story that an equestrian recently shared on the Choosing Beggars subreddit, detailing her recent experience with an entitled photographer, as well as some of the replies readers have left her.

This equestrian and her expert trainer agreed to help a photographer learn more about capturing horseback riding shots

Image credits: FoToArtist_1 (not the actual photo)

But once he demanded payment, he was in for a harsh reality check

Image credits: Wavebreakmedia (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Flimsy-Field-8321

Later, the equestrian shared the email that she sent to the photographer in response to his demand

Photographers typically invest huge sums of money into their training and education

Photography, in general, is not an easy field to break into. With seemingly countless different styles of shooting and over 26,000 professional photographers in the United States, it can be challenging to become an expert and book lucrative gigs. So it’s understandable for professionals to want to expand their skill sets and learn about various styles, but this can’t often be done for free. Depending on where photographers decide to study and how comprehensive their education is, courses can cost anywhere between $125-$2,500. And if a photog wants to earn a degree, they might end up paying around $50,000 per year at a private university.

While an expert in the field can earn up to $66,000 a year, equestrian photography can be a particularly difficult niche to break into, because the average person is not very knowledgeable about horses or horseback riding. That’s why it’s best to seek information from the experts, such as Shelley Paulson, professional equine photographer and author of The Quick Start Guide to Equestrian Photography. Paulson’s book includes information about understanding horse behavior, knowing how to work safely around horses, preparing horses and riders for sessions, discovering the best poses, capturing the connection between horses and riders and more. It’s one thing to shoot photos of consenting humans who understand what’s going on, but ensuring that the horses feel as comfortable as possible is a whole other ballgame.

Equestrian photography, in particular, can be a challenging niche to break into

Image credits: Jean van der Meulen (not the actual photo)

Lauren Aubert at The Plaid Horse has also written a Beginner’s Guide to Great Equine Photography, where she details the importance of experimenting with exposure, shutter speed, ISO and aperture. She explains how a fast shutter speed will capture a quick moment of action, such as a horse jumping or galloping, while a slow shutter speed can be better for still shots and dimly lit environments. Aubert also recommends photographers experiment with different locations, angles, disciplines of riding, etc. to find their own niche within equestrian photography. “Perhaps you do not want to photograph action, but would like to specialize in horse and rider photoshoots,” she writes. “In the wide world of equestrian photography, there is a place for everyone!”

According to the experts at Horse Nation, it takes more than just skill to be a great equine photographer. It’s also best to have a passion for horses. This helps photogs relate to their clients, understand how their subjects (the humans and horses) are feeling, and makes the whole experience more enjoyable for all involved. It also takes time to become an expert, so upcoming photogs must understand that patience is involved, especially in the beginning. It can take many hours of practice and experimentation to learn what really makes a great shot. 

And of course, networking and being a lovely person is always helpful. “Connections are everything in the horse world,” Kaylee from Kaylee Wroe Photography told Horse Nation. “They are what open the doors for you. Make friends with the people you want to work with, but be genuine about it. People can sniff out fake from a mile away. And do the right thing for the industry too. Undercutting other photographers won’t make you many friends.”

Clients are often notorious for demanding free services from photographers, rather than the other way around

Image credits: Lina Kivaka (not the actual photo)

When it comes to this particular photographer feeling entitled to payment when an expert equestrian is doing him a favor, it seems like the tables have turned compared to many of the posts that pop up on the Choosing Beggars subreddit. It’s a common theme for influencers, engaged couples and more to demand free or discounted work from professional photographers, so one would think that this man would understand the value of properly compensating artists and experts for their time and effort. If anything, he should be paying the trainer for her time and guidance as an investment in his future as an equine photographer.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this situation in the comments below, pandas. How would you have responded to the photographer if you were in this woman’s shoes? Have you ever experienced something similar in your line of work? Then, if you’d like to read another Bored Panda article featuring shockingly entitled individuals, look no further than right here!

Readers called out the photographer in the post’s replies, and the equestrian chimed in on the conversation

The island (an enchanted one) of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, where the Fondazione Giorgio Cini is located, overlooks the iconic view of the Laguna and Piazza San Marco and is currently hosting an exhibition dedicated to one of the most influential authors not only in Italian photography. The exhibition Ugo Mulas. L’operazione fotografica (Ugo Mulas. The photographic operation) is a project that coincides with the 50th anniversary of the author’s death.

This is an opportunity not to be missed because, with around 300 images, including 30 photos never exhibited before (such as the unpublished portraits of Giorgio De Chirico, Maria Callas and Joan Mirò), documents, books and films, it offers a synthesis that opens up to the different experiences Ugo Mulas faced, allowing a global (and rare) vision of his work. He used to be an eclectic author who worked in many areas of photography and, at the same time, managed to analyse in depth the concept of photography. Indeed, the exhibition itinerary – or rather, the multiple possible paths – in the Sale del Convitto in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, has 14 sections covering all of Mulas’s fields of interest, essential to render the complexity of his work, which ranges from portraits of friends and personalities from literature, cinema and architecture to theatre, industry and fashion.

Mulas’s photographic approach cannot be related to a genre. His work deals with “experiments in critical thoughts” on photography, which he studied and tried to explain. And the title of the exhibition, as well as its idea, is inspired by his most conceptual series, Le Verifiche (The Verifications), notably from the title of the second of them: L’operazione fotografica, dedicated to Lee Friedlander. It’s a mirror shot, in which Mulas photographed himself covered by the camera, appearing unidentifiable and maybe accepting the idea that behind the camera there is a photographer and not just an impartial observer.

His attitude also gave rise to his pictures of landscapes and cities, of the Venice Biennale (which he photographed from 1954 to 1972) with Pop Art artists, including Alexander Calder, Christo and George Segal. In the 1964 edition, U.S. Pop Art was presented to the European public. Thanks to the collaboration of the critic Alan Solomon and the art dealer Leo Castelli, Mulas was introduced to the American art scene during his first trip to the United States, where he portrayed well-known painters at work, including Frank Stella, Johns, Rauschenberg, but also Andy Warhol and John Cage. In 1967, his analysis of working with artists was published in the volume New York: Art and People.

There are also photos of L’Attesa (in which he managed to document Lucio Fontana’s mental intuition of Il Taglio) and of Milan. Mulas made his debut in Milan, with his reportages that pictured suburbs and dormitories, but also the creative world that met at the tables of the Jamaica. «The Jamaica» – as curator Denis Curti observes – «used to be the place for meetings, for close friendships, those with Mario Dondero, Piero Manzoni, Alfa Castaldi, Pietro Consagra, Carlo Bavagnoli and Antonia Bongiorno, who would become his wife. The itinerary includes “the most significant ‘series’ for Mulas himself, those dedicated to Calder and Duchamp and the fundamental The Verifications (1968-1972), which are considered one of the most interesting “experiments in critical thought” on photography”, Curti adds.

The exhibition is an opportunity to see “in real” Le Verifiche, a series of thirteen photographic works through which Mulas questions photography, providing a formal and conceptual analysis of it. Le Verifiche constitute a topical point in the history of photography, a “meta photographic” analysis that has never ceased to prompt questions about the role of the photographic image. It’s a vision that remains a going concern. Indeed, in our time, as the emergence of new technologies is leading to an aesthetic revolution, it is time to reflect on the role of digital photography in changing the way we live and communicate.

Mulas used to publish in magazines such as Rivista Pirelli, Domus and Vogue. He also developed an artistic collaboration with Giorgio Strehler, which resulted in his photo reports L’opera da tre soldi [The Threepenny Opera] (1961) and Schweyck nella seconda guerra mondiale [Schweyck in the Second World War] (1962).

“The photographic work of Ugo Mulas” – Alberto Salvadori, director of the Archivio Mulas and co-curator of the exhibition, says– offers an indispensable perspective on the status of the work of art itself, which prompts us to reflect on the relationship, every time new and particular, between the artist and his workspace, inspiration and the context that expresses it. The retrospective, that inaugurates Le Stanze della Fotografia accounts for this ever-present «actuality» of Mulas’ gaze, also showing less known aspects of it through snapshots and archive documents never exhibited before”

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue published by Marsilio Arte.

New spaces for photography: an island for the image

A few months ago, a new exhibition and research centre, Le Stanze della Fotografia (The Photography Rooms), opened on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice within the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in the Sale del Convitto (with an exhibition space of 1850 square metres). It’s a joint initiative by Marsilio Arte and Fondazione Giorgio Cini, intended to move further along the path begun in 2012 at La Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice.

The association between photography and the island of San Giorgio is a natural one. Indeed, «major attention has always been devoted by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini to photography, both as an art form and as historical-artistic documentation, creating, at the instigation of Vittorio Cini himself, what today is one of the most extensive photo libraries in Italy and Europe», Giovanni Bazoli, president of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini explains. It stores almost a million photographs, freely consultable by appointment or online) and it is specialized within the sphere of historical artistic research, with collections that belonged to art historians, journalists and writers and from the relations existing over decades between Vittorio Cini, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and the Alinari company.

Conceived as an international centre for research and appreciation of photography and the culture of images, Le Stanze della Fotografia will offer, alongside exhibitions, laboratories, meetings, workshops, seminars with national and international photographers.

Research and exhibition activities are coordinated by the technical-scientific committee chaired by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of History of Art of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and composed of Emanuela Bassetti, president of Marsilio Arte, Chiara Casarin, head of cultural development and communication for the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, artistic director Denis Curti and Luca De Michelis, managing director of Marsilio Arte.

Paola Sammartano

Ugo Mulas. The Photographic Operation
29 March – 6 August 2023
Le Stanze della Fotografia
Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
30124 Venice, Italy
www.lestanzedellafotografia.it

Throughout her career, Ana Carolina Fernandes (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1963) has captured compelling images that combine a critical perspective with a distinctive aesthetic. Let’s explore her journey and notable achievements in the field of photojournalism and documental photography.

The daughter of a teacher and a journalist, she receives her first camera from her mother at the age of 13. After school, she visited the newspaper Tribuna da Imprensa, where her father worked, and became fascinated with the enchantment of the photo lab. In the early 1980s, she began her professional career as a photojournalist as an intern at O Globo newspaper. Over 25 years, she also worked at the newsrooms of Jornal do Brasil, Folha de São Paulo, and Estado de São Paulo. She studied photography at the School of Visual Arts on Parque Lage at Rio de Janeiro. From the 2000s onwards, she distanced herself from daily journalism and worked as a freelancer, focusing on personal projects while still remaining in the field of photojournalism. Her photographs simultaneously express a critical bias and a unique aesthetic, as seen in the images captured during the street protests of 2013, which spread around the world and appeared on international newspaper covers. Her major influences include Cartier-Bresson, the Magnum agency, and photographers Maureen Bisilliat and Claudia Andujar at Brazil, who traveled to remote locations and produced large-scale essays. Her exhibitions include “Ana Carolina Fernandes Repórter” (Rio de Janeiro, 2015) and “Mem de Sá, 100” (São Paulo, 2013), which resulted from a project documented between 2011 and 2013 featuring transvestites living in a mansion at the address with the same name in the neighborhood of Lapa. For the collective Covid Latam, which brings together 18 Latin American photographers, she develops a project on life during the pandemic. The collective’s joint essay is one of the highlights of the 13th FotoRio (2021) and receives the FotoEvidence Book World Press Photo award for best online project covering the pandemic, as well as the Picture of the Year Latam award. Some of her notable individual projects include “Cuba” (ongoing essay), “Na Ponta dos Pés” (2018), and the book “Prainha” (2019). She has been honored with two Folha awards (2000 and 2002), received the 11th edition of the Troféu Mulher Imprensa (2016), and was a finalist in the Magnum Photography Awards (2017).

Excerpts

“I went through all the major newspapers in Brazil, O Globo, then Jornal do Brasil, which was a wonderful place, everyone wanted to go there, and… it was like that, the great newspaper at the time. I had an editor named Alberto Ferreira, who was an incredible guy! Jornal do Brasil was… a newspaper that highly valued photography… they would dedicate a whole page, the entire front page, to a photo. Alberto Ferreira was a […] guy who made a big difference. And he highly valued photographers… his word had enormous importance and power within the newspaper…”

“I didn’t know how the work would develop, or what form it would take. But specifically with transvestites, I wanted to give them a body, because of this fascination I had: in the same body, both masculine and feminine at the same time. With my photos, I really wanted to help, even if just a little, with this acceptance, with tolerance.”

Testimony of Ana Carolina Fernandes to websérie No Olhar TV, 2017.

Yara Schreiber Dines
Translation: Yara Schreiber Dines and Milton Dines

Bibliography
https://anacarolinafernandes.com.br/sobre/

ANA CAROLINA Fernandes/ No Olhar #4/ Fotografia Brasileira. YouTube. 6 no. 2017. 567 segundos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Avmo3SXg4&ab_channel=NoOlhar.Tv

CORPOS da Lapa. Piauí, jun. 2013, edição 81.
https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/materia/corpos-da-lapa/.

DINES, Yara Schreiber. The Substance of Images Brazilian Women Photographers. São Paulo: Editora Grifo, 2021.

FOTORIO destaca cobertura fotográfica da pandemia, Diário do Porto, 21 de maio 2021. Disponível em: https://diariodoporto.com.br/cobertura-fotografica-da-pandemia-e-destaque-no- fotorio/

It’s safe to say that Enzo Barracco has found a muse in Mother Nature.

His career as a fashion photographer was turned on its head when he heard the survival story of Irish explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton — a tale so incredible that it inspired Barracco to become an explorer himself.

Now Barracco brings awareness to conservation and sustainability as a nature photographer. He organized an expedition to Antarctica, a journey he documented in his book, “The Noise of Ice: Antarctica.”

His most recent project, “The Skin of Rock Galapagos,” showcases the equilibrium of the oceanic system.

He spent the weekend as a guest speaker for The Explorers Club Hawaiʻi Chapter.

“The Noise of Ice: Antarctica” highlights the effect of a warming climate on icebergs and glaciers. The image on the book cover shows an iceberg turning upside down, revealing a fringe of icicles.

“The photos are very beautiful,” he said, “but actually are evidence of climate change. … When the iceberg melts, it loses the point of balance.”

Barracco knew he was one of the lucky few in the world who would ever see parts of Antarctica and the Galapagos Islands up close. His projects aim to “raise awareness, through my work, through photography, about our natural world.”

“We take so much for granted,” he said.

After growing up in the Mediterranean, Barracco told The Conversation that being in Hawaiʻi is like being back in his element.

Mark Blackburn, chairman of the Explorers Club Hawaiʻi Chapter, took Barracco on a tour around the state during his visit.

Blackburn wants to remind people to appreciate the beauty of the islands.

“Everybody’s crazy busy,” he said. “But if everybody would just take 10 seconds and look around at the atmosphere. Look at the light. Look at the clouds. Look at the horizon lines. … You’re never disappointed.”

Barracco agreed. “This is why my work tries, on a very small scale, to raise awareness about the beauty of our natural world,” he added.

This interview aired on The Conversation on July 24, 2023. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. This interview was adapted for the web by Emily Tom.

Entries are now open for the Beyond the Frame, Youth Photography Competition.

The aim of the competition is to provide a platform for young people to showcase their photography talents and unique perspectives. We hope it will inspire and encourage creativity and promote diversity and positive self-expression of young people in our community.

The 3 themes for the competition are: Connect, Participate and Celebrate.

There are prizes to be won for each theme, and for three age categories: 10-13, 14-18, 19-25 years, with 1st place receiving a $200 voucher and 2nd place receiving a $100 voucher.

The competition is open for young people aged between 10 -25 who live, work, study or have a connection to Knox.

All photographs entered will be projected during Youth Festival at Knox Express Library (Westfield Knox) in September 2023, the launch event will be held at 4pm on Tuesday 19 September.

Submit your photo

Smart phone photography workshops

To support young people in taking photos, three smart phone photography workshops will be held in August. These workshops will help show you how to make the most of your phone’s camera, covering different types of angles, editing techniques and some camera tips and tricks.

• When: Tuesday 1, 8 and 15 August
• Time: 4pm – 5:30pm
• Where: Knox Youth Information Centre, 2 Capital City Boulevard, Wantirna South

For more information and book a place contact Kate on youth@knox.vic.gov.au or phone 9298 8000.

I have the best part of a decade of professional photography under my belt, with some very hard years and some good years during that time. I have learned a lot about the craft, the industry, and most of all, about running a small business. The majority of the lessons that had the most significant impact on my career were not around techniques, post-production, or even equipment; they were about running a business.

There have been many articles on how photographers ought to treat their photography business like a business as a matter of priority. Those paths are well-trodden, so I won’t cover it here, but what I will say is that creative professions can be deceptive. You can be fooled into thinking those who are the most creative, or those who take the best photographs, will get the jobs. I can guarantee you that is not the case nearly as much as you might think. Some of my most loyal and lucrative clients have gone as far as to say that one of the most important reasons for our continued relationship is my unwavering reliability.

I’m not delusional: I know there are other photographers who can do what I do, and there are undoubtedly some who can do it better. However, my reliability, honesty, promptness, and mantra of “under-promise, overdeliver” have served to set me apart in some circumstances. The problem is, all of these positive traits and my mantra are for naught unless you get a paying client. After all, a prospective client can’t tell you’re under-promising or that you won’t miss your deadlines.

Client Acquisition

When I first started my photography business, having been a photographer for several years, I was as motivated as I was overwhelmed. While the number of possibilities seemed infinite, the wide scope made getting my first client daunting. In the first year I got clients in every industry you can think of: I did environmental, pet portraits, architectural, headshots, and a smattering of retouching jobs. I was getting these jobs by virtue of my relentless knocking on doors and asking if they have any need for a photographer, along with word-of-mouth.

At the end of my first year, I was conflicted. On the one hand, I’d managed to find a fair few paying clients, some repeat work, and things were gradually improving. On the other hand, the amount of money I earned for the number of hours I worked was utterly untenable. I was pulling a minimum of 80-hour weeks most weeks, with one touching triple digits. I wasn’t bothered by this — I was naively proud of my hustle — but it wasn’t sustainable, particularly given my low income.

The second year went much like the first, and although I was earning more, the balance was all wrong. I knew I had to aim higher with clients, but the more impressive the client, the less impressive I was to them. I had narrowed down a niche — which in itself was a crucial step — and I was canvassing for clients, but whether I got them or not wasn’t based on my salesmanship (or at least my salesmanship was not a key reason), it was mostly luck. Toward the middle of the second year, I got a client that changed everything, however.

This client was a small brand with some budget behind them and some employees. They gave me a chance based on the images I had created for another brand, and I went all out on the first brief. I wanted to create images that would stop people from scrolling and have people buying. That is the obvious strategy for a product photographer, but until that point, I had just been creating images I thought were good or showed off an element of the product I liked. There wasn’t much thought going into the purpose of the shots until now.

The first brief went well, and I was given more, and it continued to go in that direction for some time. We had a great relationship, and as they kindly informed me, they put some of the brand’s excellent growth down to my imagery being so effective on social media and in adverts. That compliment was lovely to receive, but it also marked a pivotal moment in my career. Like many of us creatives, I overanalyze everything I can, and I began to pick apart why my relationship with this client had gone so well. Eventually, I narrowed it down and nothing was ever the same.

Solving Problems

When you read anything on entrepreneurship, starting a business, or forging a path in the working world, you will inevitably run into a variation of a notion along the lines of “solve problems”. This is the beating heart of most consultancy businesses, but also many successful start-ups; find a problem and solve it. If you’re looking to attain clients, in corporate language, you need to “find their pain points” and then resolve them. Are they hemorrhaging money on import tax? Find them a local supplier. Is their site getting no organic traffic? Overhaul their SEO. Is their office dog distractingly cute? Get an uglier dog.

I was fully aware of how important solving problems for clients was to a successful business, but how did it apply to photography? Photography felt so linear; they needed some photographs, I created some for them. That was solving the problem, wasn’t it? Yes and no — mostly no. If a jeweler asks you to take a picture of their new ring on someone’s hand, a great many photographers could do that for them. The quality of the images plays a role in if you get another job from that client or not, but there’s a better way to differentiate: solve the underlining problem.

With a product, the problem is typically getting people to buy it. This involves getting the product in front of as many people as possible, which might be what your images are for when posted on social media or used as ads. So, drill down into this. What is the product’s demographic? What ads or posts have been successful in the product’s area and why? With my client that changed everything, I had inadvertently been asking these questions. For instance, around Christmas I made their product look like the perfect gift and I shot it in a way that would look great on Instagram as that was the social media platform of choice for the target demographic.

Again, in the moment, I wasn’t aware I was solving these problems, I was merely trying to create shots that would look great for whatever ad campaign I had been given; I was offered free rein with creative direction. After I reflected on a successful partnership for several years, I realized that it was simply the age-old business cliché of finding problems and solving them. From that moment on, I’ve tried to be cognizant of what the true purpose is of every image I take. Don’t merely take a photograph because the client needs a photograph, but rather, find the reasons for the client needing a photograph and research around that — it will set you apart in a way few other actions can.

Lead image by Kyle Loftus via Pexels

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There are many ways to sell prints online. In the last article of this series, we already looked at one of them that was free and easy to set up. But it might not be the right way to sell prints professionally. If branding and customer relations are important to you, a customized online store might be a better solution. In this article, I share how to set one up.

First of all, you must decide which platform to use. With services like Squarespace, Smugmug, Photoshelter, and Shopify, to name just a few, it’s up to you to pick and choose. But not so quickly. Those platforms are not cheap. If you require e-commerce support, Squarespace, for example, will cost you at least $25 per month plus a 3% fee for every sale you make. If you want options like customizable delivery or discounts, you will pay more than $50. With Smugmug and Shopify, you’ll pay between $30 and $50. Photoshelter might look a lot cheaper at first glance, but they charge between 8% and 10% transactional fee for every sale you make. So, based on the sales volume, you might pay even more than when using the other platforms.

Contrast those prices with a typical web hosting solution from services like GoDaddy or Ionos, which I use. For around $6, you get a solid base to self-host your e-commerce homepage, with nothing missing but the website itself. 

If we do the math and compare this to Squarespace, you save $228 per year compared to their basic e-commerce offering. If you don’t plan on changing the look of your homepage every one or two years, which is simple with platforms like Squarespace, this can add up. 

Now, you know your budget for paying somebody to create a homepage for you or buying a WordPress theme plus a few plugins and hooking everything up yourself. It’s certainly not for everyone, and you might value your time much higher than those $228 per year you can save by self-hosting. But again, as soon as you need more features, the $228 can quickly turn into $500 or more. 

Below, I will first go through a general checklist of things you need to create an online print store. This checklist will be relevant for both self-hosted websites and when using the mentioned platforms. 

Afterward, I show you an example of how to self-host an e-commerce website.

E-Commerce Checklist

Before I moved from using Redbubble to a fully customized e-commerce solution, there were some things I had to do.

Privacy Policy

I already had a privacy policy long before starting the transition because I live in the EU. But even if you don’t, if you want to sell your prints to European customers, you better include a privacy policy on your homepage.

To fulfill orders, you must process customer data and most likely pass it on to a print provider unless you print yourself. Such uses must be transparent to your customers. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to add a legal notice and disclaimer to your homepage.

Terms of Service and Cancellation Policy

Those two are required once you turn your homepage into an e-commerce platform. And it’s a pain to create those. You could use one of the many available generators and templates, for example, Shopify’s terms of service template. But those are very generic, and you’ll spend much time adjusting them.

The alternative is to use an external service that provides customized legal documents for your website. Here, you can plan another $10 a month for a subscription.

Consent Form

E-commerce solutions usually store information on the customer’s device in the form of cookies. You should inform a user of your website about it through a cookie consent form. Those are the annoying popups you see on many websites today.

There are many solutions available which you will find via Google. If you fancy integrating one yourself, I have a tutorial on that topic.

Payment Gateway

How are you planning to charge your customers? If you select one of the mentioned platforms, you must understand which integrations they offer and know you will have to get additional accounts for those.

A typical payment gateway is PayPal. By creating a business account, you can not only use it to accept payment via PayPal itself but also via credit card. Other options are Stripe, which I used for several years to offer credit card payments to people buying my tutorials.

Print Provider

Setting up an e-commerce platform is one thing, but getting the goods produced and delivered to your customers is something you must handle separately. If you plan on printing yourself, you only have to figure out the packaging and logistics for shipping. But even if you don’t want to print, there are solutions.

One is to automate the whole process by integrating a service like CreativeHub. They offer integrations for Squarespace, Woocommerce, Shopify, and some others. Printing and drop-shipping are done by thePrintSpace, the company behind CreativeHub. You can even use them to sell limited edition prints, and their free tier allows you to store up to 30 GB of data. If you expect a high sales volume, then such an automated service might be a requirement for you. It’s something to consider when selecting your e-commerce platform because not all allow its integration.

Alternatively, you will have to do some manual order processing. Once an order arrives in your system, you can forward it to the print provider of your choice for fulfillment. It is the option I’ve now chosen for my shop. I use Whitewall for that. If you live in the US, you’d use their US website to order customer prints. If you live in the EU, you can use their EU website.

Tax

An important part of selling your art is to consider tax requirements. The regulations are different based on the location of your business and the types of sales you make. Ask yourself questions like:

• Do you want to sell internationally? If so, which countries do you want to target?
• Do you want to only sell to private customers (B2C) or as well to other businesses (B2B)?
• What volume of sales do you expect over one year?

The answers to those questions will, for example, tell you, if you need a VAT id. Even if you fall under special regulations in your own country and are not required to get one, selling internationally might still require it in some cases. An excellent resource to educate yourself on this topic is Quaderno. In addition to that, you might also want to seek professional counsel.

Setup

Once you selected a platform and went through the checklist, you’re ready to set up your shop. And as I already mentioned, I will go through the self-hosting option, for which I use WooCommerce. If you decide to also do it like this, you should either have some basic knowledge about web development or get help. Otherwise, you can end up with a slow website that might not look or work as you want.

WordPress

Step one is to install WordPress on your server. Download the latest version from here and follow the instructions on how to install WordPress. If this part already bothers you, hire a web developer or use one of the platforms mentioned in the beginning, and don’t self-host.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is open-source and free. It’s available as a plugin for WordPress, and installing it can be done via the WordPress dashboard. It offers a lot of settings, and you should take your time to study and configure each one of them. You would do the same with a platform like Shopify.

Some essential parts of the setup are, linking your legal documents, configuring emails, setting up shipping zones, creating print variations, selecting prices, and adding a payment gateway. For PayPal, you can install another plugin and connect it to your business account.

Test Product

Once the basic setup is complete, test it by creating a first product and making a test purchase to ensure everything works smoothly. To not spend too much on this test product, use a dummy that costs just one dollar. Such a test order should trigger emails to your business and the customer’s mail address and initiate the money transfer.

Theming

To adjust the look of a WordPress homepage, you need custom themes. If you don’t want to develop one yourself or pay a web developer for it, you can buy one online. There are countless photography-specific themes available, starting at around $50 for an e-commerce-enabled theme. The alternative that involves some more work is using a builder like Oxygen. Unfortunately, it will soon move to a subscription-based license, taking away the appeal of using it for a single website.

I did the whole theming myself, and I have to say, it’s a bit painful. If you are not careful and don’t know what you are doing, you can end up with an unmaintainable mess. Even some of the commercial themes look a bit messy.

Print Mockups

If you made it this far, it’s finally time to turn your photos into products. To compete with other stores, you should create mockups of how your photos will look as wall art in different environments. An affordable resource for such mockups is freepik. It’s a subscription-based service through which you can download PSD files for different room settings.

And don’t worry about having to pay a continuous subscription. You get a license file for each download you make during your subscription allowing you to use the images even after you cancel it.

Descriptions

If you spend so much time and effort to set up your storefront, you surely also want people to find it. That’s why you have to think about SEO. This way, you make your store discoverable through Google and other search engines. To do so, add tags and custom descriptions to all your products.

It is where ChatGPT and Grammarly are a great help. Use ChatGPT to create a first description, then bring it to Grammarly and refine it. Avoid using the texts from ChatGPT as is. They usually need some attention, and it also doesn’t hurt to add a personal note, for example, by sharing behind-the-scenes information.

Conclusion

Creating a personalized print shop that you host yourself takes a significant amount of effort. But once you’re finished, the reward is having a storefront over which you have full control. You can even take all your data and head to another provider if new terms or prices are imposed or you are not satisfied with some aspect of the offering. I have done this once in the past.

With platforms like Squarespace, you can’t simply migrate your website. But most likely, you don’t have to. It’s just something to be aware of. And although those platforms offer countless configurations, you can run into limitations if you have special requirements. That’s why the final tip I want to give you here is: write down specific requirements for your website and print shop. Take your time for this task, look at similar offerings by other photographers, and figure out what you need. Those requirements will help you not regret your choice of platform later on.

Photos capture our world without people

Romain Veillon’s photography captures abandoned places overtaken by nature, showcasing what the world would look like without people.