In my experience I have found that successful commercial photography comes down to 30% photography and 70% marketing. In fact, it is my sincere belief that an amateur photographer with the right marketing nous can outgun a professional photographer in certain markets in terms of pictures sold.

One of the most crucial things to get right when selling your digital photos is to make sure that you position your work correctly with your customer.

IT IS ALL ABOUT PERCEIVED VALUE

How do we measure the intrinsic value of something? We cannot: what is valuable to me may not necessarily be valuable to you. The value of a thing cannot be separated from the person who is doing the valuing.

This is a very important concept to take heed of when you go into the marketplace to sell your digital photos.

Now the fact of the matter is that one of your digital photos may have cost you exactly nothing to take. Does that mean it is worth nothing? No. Your humble photo may be the central image on a web page that generates thousands of dollars each month in sales.

You may already have an inkling of this but it is very important not to forget it whilst you are in the midst of the sales process. Specifically, DO NOT go out and underbid your competitors in order to win business. Why? Because you are immediately creating a perception in the mind of your customer that your work is inferior to that of your competitors.

What you need to do is not have the lowest bid but to clearly define exactly why it is that your bid is of value to the customer. You can do this by showing proofs and documentation of previous work and by being professional in the way you go about the bid. Take these steps and you are more than likely to win the job over lower bidders.

Another way to approach this is to adopt the mindset of your potential customer. Would you want to be in a position whereby you accepted the lowest bid and received back shoddy work, thereby forcing you to go back to one of the higher bidders and get the work done again, compromising your deadlines and forcing you to pay more than was originally necessary? I would imagine the answer is no. This is the potential worry that your customer has when looking at bidders. You can put his mind at ease by assuring him that your price is both fair based on market research and a guarantee of quality.

In certain field such as wedding photos and portrait shots it is nearly all about perceived value. After all, everyone knows how to take a photo so why would they pay anyone at all? Because they feel that paying someone else will give them control over the final product and that because that someone else is a professional ,will deliver work to an acceptable standard.

Deliver work that is to standard your customer has in mind and you will have a happy customer who will be a repeat buyer and a referral agent.

1. Start by setting the proper contrast. The contrast is that feature that brightens or darkens the image accordingly to the background. When it is dark outside you should use a lighter contrast, while during the daytime when there’s a lot of light go for a darker one.

2. Position your camera right. There are several methods to choose a good positioning. These include the Lines, the Rule of Thirds and the Portioning. The lines use the natural angles of the things in the picture. If you are photographing a mountain landscape, you can either follow the lines or go against them depending on how you want the picture to look. When using the Rule of Thirds, the picture is divided in nine sections and you balance it accordingly. Portioning refers to placing the subject of the photo to one side to create a more interesting picture. These techniques help you to highly diversify your photos.

3. Focus the image in different areas to get more varied effects. People tend to focus more on sharper, clearer images than on blurred ones. Focusing on different areas will help you achieve a three-dimensional view.

4. Use your zoom function to improve balance. You can either zoom out to include more things in your photo so that the viewer has more to see or zoom in to focus on a certain aspect.

5. Take advantage of the flash function. Although flash is generally used in dark conditions, you can use it in broad daylight to in order to achieve some interesting effects. For example, you can make the background lighter giving the picture a whole different look.

6. Play with colors to express the ideas you want. You can use darker tones for warmer images which have more emotion and lighter hues to express freedom. There are a lot of color coordinations you can experiment with.

7. If you have attachable lenses, use them. They make a lot of difference in the picture. Attachable lenses help you achieve the so-called ‘depth of field’. Although this effect can also be achieved through other methods, it is stronger when you use lenses. There are many different kinds of lenses, such as wide-angle and fish-eye, which help you achieve various effects.

8. Take several pictures of the same object. If you have a digital camera, you no longer have to worry about wasting film. You can take as many photos as you want and then erase those you don’t like. Taking more pictures of the same thing helps you improve your chances of getting at least one that looks just right.

9. Have patience. Good pictures may come hard and you need to be patient enough to wait for the right moment. It won’t turn out the way you want every time, but there will always be other opportunities so don’t despair.

10. If you don’t know how to lead the viewer into the photograph, you can include a foreground. This is a zoomed-in area that can be used as a starting point and leads viewers towards the rest of the photo.