Work Abroad

Having your own site is not only a great way for singles to impress members of the opposite sex, but it’s also the perfect platform for aspiring travel photographers to promote their work and even make some money.

There are plenty of places where you can get free web space but all serious travel photographers should have their own site. It marks you apart as a professional. Yahoo Photos is for tourists.

Your personal website acts as the perfect portfolio for prospective employers, especially if it contains a wide variety of nice images – a section highlighting your photos of landscape and fauna can be used as a reference when contacting a nature magazine, or a section of your site devoted to a news event (for example pictures of a public protest that you encountered) is the way to go when approaching news outlets to sell your photos.

Just as with cameras the amount of cash spent on a website’s design will go a long way in determining its appearance and effectiveness. Photography sites are one of the few occasions where a bit of flashy technology may make the right impression but remember that gimmicks and sound bytes tend to get really annoying after you’ve seen them more than once.

Make your own website http://www.flickr.com/photos/rsdreamphotos/

Another consideration for travel photography sites is file sizes. Pages that take ages to load are pages that will probably never be seen as the impatient surfer moves on. So you may want to investigate ways to show your photos as thumbnails and then expanding to full resolution on a click.

It’s important to remember that a well-rounded site is basically a ‘best of’ and like a professional photo portfolio, each section or aspect should feature only anywhere from a half dozen to a baker’s dozen images. Though you may have countless priceless shots of April in Paris or an African safari, posting them all on your site shows you up for being an amateur who can’t edit his own work.

The traffic your site gets will depend largely on your ability to promote it. The ways to do so are numerous but business cards, posting link on photography forums, contributing articles and picture galleries to travel sites that welcome submissions (e.g. www.roadjunky.com or www.hackwriters.com ) in exchange for a link back, reciprocal links with other travel photographers you like, are all practical ways of getting traffic.

Direct revenue from your site can either be in the shape of Google’s advertising program, adsense, or by selling your images online to people who fall in love with the photos. Sites like www.flickr.com will print out, post and deal with the credit cards for you. If you have a well-advertised site that has dozens of excellent images that go for even just a buck or two each, over a period of months and years it very well may turn out to be a fairly lucrative trade.

On a related note it is a good idea to take measures to protect your online images from being stolen and posted elsewhere. Unfortunately there still does not seem to be a full-proof way of going about this task but the most common tricks include watermarking (stamping a corner of an image with the address of your site) and so-called shrink wrapping which puts a transparent image over the original one, thus coming up as a pure blank when saved. The last common safeguard is activating a feature which prevents those looking at your image from using the right-click ability on their computer to save your picture.

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